Judith Schalansky

A dazzling book about memory and extinction from the author of Atlas of Remote Islands A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year A Financial Times Best Book of the Year Winner of the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize

An Inventory of Losses

Judith Schlansky

Each disparate object described in this book--a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific--shares a common fate: it no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail. Recalling the works of W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, or Rebecca Solnit, An Inventory of Losses is a beautiful evocation of twelve specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and, taken as a whole, opens mesmerizing new vistas of how we can think about extinction and loss. With meticulous research and a vivid awareness of why we should care about these losses, Judith Schalansky, the acclaimed author of Atlas of Remote Islands, lets these objects speak for themselves: she ventriloquizes the tone of other sources, burrows into the language of contemporaneous accounts, and deeply interrogates the very notion of memory.

taylor miles hopkins

…throughout the ages, the vast majority of alchemists had been botanists first and foremost, and the most prominent alchemists had simultaneously been astrologers and astronomers, like the architect of that compelling theory which posits that every plant has its own heavenly twin in the form of a star.

Every abnormality is rooted in the normal. And every normal state contains a grain of abnormality.

There is, says La Rochefoucauld, only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations. One has to question one's own inclinations.

…the findings of science can help with the heat, while in winter philosophy can help with the cold. 

Some say spiritual beings exist on as yet inhospitable planets.

But everyone has to die. That's a fact. That's a comfort.

We also know that in ancient times the symbol for omissions was the asterisk—the little star that only in medieval times took on the task of linking a place in a text to its associated margin note. As Isidore of Seville writes in the seventh century in his Etymologies: The asterisk is placed next to omissions, so that things which appear to be missing may be clarified through this mark. Nowadays the asterisk is sometimes used as a means of including as many people as possible and their sexual identities. The omission becomes an inclusion, the absence a presence, and the empty place a profusion of meaning.

For a long time, three dots in a row along the writing baseline designated something lost and unknown, then at some point also something unuttered and unutterable; no longer only something omitted or left out, but also something left open. Hence the three dots became a symbol that invites one to think the allusion to its conclusion, imagine that which is missing, a proxy for the inexpressible and the hushed-up, for the offensive and obscene, for the incriminating and speculative, for a particular version of the omitted: the trurh

Almost nothing stokes fear as surely as having won power over an enemy to whom one still feels inferior despite the victory.

This book, like all others, springs from the desire to have something survive, to bring the past into the present, to call to mind the torgotten, to give voice to the silenced, and to mourn the lost. Writing cannot bring anything back, but it can enable everything to be experienced.

By writing, as by reading, one can pick one's own ancestors and establish a second, intellectual hereditary line to rival conventional biological heritage.

In a sense, the world is a sprawling archive of itself…

What we do not know cannot weigh us down, we might think.

Fundamentally, every item is already waste, every building already a ruin, and all creation nothing but destruction, and the true of the work of all those disciplines and institutions that claim to be preserving the legacy of humanity…the archives…are nothing more than managed cemeteries whose stored specimens, as often as not, have been plucked from the life cycle of the present to be filed away, allowed to be forgotten even…

To forget everything is bad, certainly. Worse still is to forget nothing. After all, knowledge can only be gained by forgetting. If everything is stored indiscriminately, as it is in electronic data memories, it loses its meaning and becomes a disorderly mass of useless information.

All manner of strategies are used to keep hold of the past and ward off oblivion…Being alive means experiencing loss.

"It seems to be one of the characteristics of western man that defies rational understanding that he prizes the lost more highly than the existing.”

I really wanted to love this book but it fell a bit short.

The positives: some really beautiful pieces of writing. One of the most engaging Prefaces I’ve ever read, which made me pretty excited for the rest of the book. I like the concept of preservation of what is lost through a book like this. And the piecing stories with these subjects which ties well with the idea of storytelling as an act of conservation, whether the stories are truth or fictional. There was also an impressive amount of research referenced throughout this work which created a really unique type of “fictional” writing. 

I also personally appreciate that this was a book written by a book designer, so some visual decisions were really interesting to see.

Negatives: I often felt like I was being “talked at” rather than feeling immersed in the stories as a reader. The immense amount of research is impressive, but isn’t integrated into the actual storytelling process well, which makes the vast amount of specificities feel gimmicky. Writing is not very approachable, with constant run-on sentences. Sometimes felt like a good writing experiment that doesn’t necessarily have the reader in mind whatsoever. Took forever for me to read because of this—would often only get through a page or two at night without struggling to stay awake/keep track of the story.

Caspian Tiger; Guericke’s Unicorn; The Love Songs of Sappho; Encyclopedia in the Wood

I really wanted to love this book but it fell a bit short.

The positives: some really beautiful pieces of writing. One of the most engaging Prefaces I’ve ever read, which made me pretty excited for the rest of the book. I like the concept of preservation of what is lost through a book like this. And the piecing stories with these subjects which ties well with the idea of storytelling as an act of conservation, whether the stories are truth or fictional. There was also an impressive amount of research referenced throughout this work which created a really unique type of “fictional” writing. 

I also personally appreciate that this was a book written by a book designer, so some visual decisions were really interesting to see.

Negatives: I often felt like I was being “talked at” rather than feeling immersed in the stories as a reader. The immense amount of research is impressive, but isn’t integrated into the actual storytelling process well, which makes the vast amount of specificities feel gimmicky. Writing is not very approachable, with constant run-on sentences. Sometimes felt like a good writing experiment that doesn’t necessarily have the reader in mind whatsoever. Took forever for me to read because of this—would often only get through a page or two at night without struggling to stay awake/keep track of the story.

The most compelling sections to me:

Caspian Tiger; Guericke’s Unicorn; The Love Songs of Sappho; Encyclopedia in the Wood

took me so long to finish because the writing was just too tedious and winding. and that says a lot when the prose that usually draws me in, especially in nonfiction, can be meandering at times. i guess the difference was that i was expecting the chapters to be as rich and dynamic as the introduction; they fell short of evoking in me the same visceral emotions of grief and loss. there was a nature account that just seemed aimless to me, that finishing it didn't feel like there was a payoff and more like i just read for the sake of moving forward to the rest of the chapters. what i do like about 

though is the interplay between fiction and nonfiction, how documentation and storytelling intertwine to depict the humanity of discovery and loss, of remembering and forgetting. i also had to keep it in mind that it's a translated work, so in the process there might have been something 

took me so long to finish because the writing was just too tedious and winding. and that says a lot when the prose that usually draws me in, especially in nonfiction, can be meandering at times. i guess the difference was that i was expecting the chapters to be as rich and dynamic as the introduction; they fell short of evoking in me the same visceral emotions of grief and loss. there was a nature account that just seemed aimless to me, that finishing it didn't feel like there was a payoff and more like i just read for the sake of moving forward to the rest of the chapters. what i do like about an inventory of losses though is the interplay between fiction and nonfiction, how documentation and storytelling intertwine to depict the humanity of discovery and loss, of remembering and forgetting. i also had to keep it in mind that it's a translated work, so in the process there might have been something lost, too. 

An Inventory of Losses

Reviews

Highlights