Available:*
Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | FIC/SCHALANSKY | 31480011426555 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Lawrence Public Library | FIC SCH | 31549004817945 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Littleton - Reuben Hoar Library | 833.92 SCH | 39965002309069 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | FIC SCHALANSKY | 31481005569129 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | FIC SCHLANSKY J | 32128003887586 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... West Newbury - G.A.R. Memorial Library | 833.92 SCH | 32135001508767 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | 833.92 SCH | 31990004946237 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
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.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Schalansky's inspired latest (after Atlas of Remote Islands) melds history, memoir, and fiction into something new and extraordinary: a museum of the extinct, the missing, and the forgotten. Chronicled in 12 short pieces, each based on a "lost" object--among them an early-20th-century film, fragments of Sappho's poetry, destroyed Italian villas, demolished East German government buildings--the narratives are distinct, memorable, and, at their best, spellbinding. Some are highly researched, meticulously reconstructing historical places such as the the Villa Sacchetti at Castelfusano in Rome and figures such as 18th-century British explorer James Cook, who, in search of a then-mythical southern continent, "had ploughed the southern seas in huge, sweeping zigzags and discovered nothing but mountains of ice." Other tales take on the flavor of impressionistic, contemporary memoirs, rooted in the narrative of a Schalansky-like writer-researcher as she explores the topic at hand. Still others have the feel of speculative fiction, so detailed in their histories that they feel like memories. In one, wild animals are brought to fight one another before the massive audiences of Rome; another follows the moments, both dramatic and mundane, of a day in the life of an East German couple. With this collection of illuminating meditations on fact and fiction, Schalansky cements her reputation as a peerless chronicler of the fabulous, the faraway, and the forgotten. (Aug.)
Guardian Review
What, asks this book, is "more terrifying: the notion that everything comes to an end, or the thought that it may not"? Such issues - impermanence, the fringes of things, the border between here and there - are catnip to the German writer Judith Schalansky. Her first book to appear in English, Atlas of Remote Islands, was a coffee table beauty that read as good as it looked, reporting on isolated places including the coral atoll of Takuu, slowly disappearing beneath the tide of climate breakdown, and Easter Island, whose "self-destruction" by its own inhabitants likened it to "a lemming marooned in the calm of the ocean". Her next book, the novel The Giraffe's Neck, was less successful but equally concerned with the inevitability of decay, the flip side of Darwinian evolution: how "everything eventually was finished". An Inventory of Losses seems at first no more optimistic than the earlier books: our desire for human creations to endure, as evidenced by the etched copper discs of cultural markers attached to the Voyager space probes, is "a kind of magical thinking ¿ a means of self-reassurance for a species unable to accept its own utter meaninglessness". But for Schalansky it's the failure to last that gives our efforts not just pathos but also power, and her book is a philosophical embrace of loss. It's a fine example of everyone's favourite genre: the genre-defying book, inspired by history, filtered through imagination and finished with a jeweller's eye for detail. The neat structure - 12 sections, each exactly 16 pages in length - hides the experimentation within: Schalansky makes stories, memories and collages out of people, places, animals, art and knowledge lost to us. In the first piece, the "phantom island" of Tuanaki was lost when an earthquake sank it around 1843, though it persisted as a ghostly presence on maps for another 30 years. Shortly before it disappeared a missionary landed on the island, his captain having sent him ashore armed with a sword to guard against violent natives. The local chief was mystified by the missionary's fear: "We don't know how to fight," he said. "We only know how to dance." Losses are not always accidental. A Swiss clerk, Armand Schulthess, who left his job in 1951 to live in the woods and decorated the trees there with a thousand metal plates on which he inscribed a chronicle of human knowledge, had this life's work destroyed by his family after his death. Schalansky's interpretation, a creepy narrative imagining his obsession with luring women to his forest hideout, seems exploitative until we read that the knowledge his family destroyed also included 70 handmade books "on the theme of sexuality". They burned most of them, and throughout An Inventory of Losses we see that fire is the method of choice for a complete and cathartic destruction: the tacked-together but imposing Von Behr palace in Germany; the Glass Palace in Munich where 3,000 paintings were destroyed in 1931; and the Caspian tiger that was lost twice, first when hunted to extinction, and once more - Schalansky reports, not entirely dolefully - when one of the remaining stuffed cadavers was destroyed in a museum fire in the 1960s. (To paraphrase the Roman poet Lucan, even the ruins were ruined.) Schalansky switches the style of each section to fit the material, and Jackie Smith's translation follows the form with admirable fluidity. Writing about Sappho's lost poetry - so fragmented that we have only a few stranded words from most verses, and only one complete poem has survived - it's apt, if predictable, to describe it in short spaced paragraphs. More interesting is the use of the gaps in Sappho's fragments as an analogue for the silence around and erasure of lesbian relationships through history. Furthermore, her poetry is the embodiment of how central absence is to human understanding: knowing things completes them; not knowing sustains us. Indeed, "intact, Sappho's poems would be as alien to us as the once gaudily painted classical sculptures". Every loss is also a gain. When writing about FW Murnau's 1919 film The Boy in Blue, of which only a handful of frames survive, Schalansky takes a sideways step and creates a story in the voice of cinema's greatest self-inflicted loss, Greta Garbo, who turned away from the busy world and retired in 1941 at the age of 36. ("As early as I can remember, I have wanted to be alone.") It's an impressive piece of voice fiction that sees Garbo walking the streets of New York in 1952, simultaneously celebrating and fretting. "This goddamn face of hers! That was her true enemy. They were so hell-bent on finding out what was behind it. Nothing was behind it. Nothing!" For Caspar David Friedrich's destroyed painting of Greifswald Harbour, Schalansky visits the location and produces a meticulous account of its flora and fauna: if a painting can represent the essence of its subject, she asks, can the subject in turn evoke the artwork? Are a thousand words worth a picture? Some of the pieces that drift furthest from the facts and make the most of the unknown are the most satisfying. The book ends with a Gottfried Adolf Kinau's drawings of the moon (lost to fire again), from which Schalansky creates a fantasy about a man whose obsession with the moon leads him ultimately to live there, abandoning his wife and children: "Each one of us must leave everything behind, as if he were crossing the final threshold." It makes for a captivating conclusion, more serene in tone than elegiac: loss must be accepted. And this is not generally, it should be said, a sombre book. There's a playful quality even in the paradoxical title, and also in the preface. We learn that in the 17th century "the British parliament seriously discussed burning the Tower of London archives to extinguish all memory of the past and start life over again." That is, Schalansky writes, "at least according to Jorge Luis Borges, in a passage I have been unable to locate".
Kirkus Review
Objects, animals, and places that no longer exist, except in our collective imagination. Schalansky's fifth book is a collection of beautifully constructed stories about objects that have not survived the test of time. "Being alive means experiencing loss," Schalansky writes, and the world has experienced much loss. Animals, people, and places that once existed are now only memories due to inevitable decay, colonialism, the cleansing of records, and natural disasters. While in Schalansky's previous book, Atlas of Remote Islands (2010), she wrote of remote havens that remain difficult to reach even with modern travel, here she depicts the animals, people, and places that are only known through what details have been recorded or remembered. From fragments of Sappho's poems to a submerged South Pacific island, from the extinct Caspian tiger to the lost films of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Schalansky brings us to the fantastical worlds of gladiator rings in ancient Rome, the ruins of a 19th-century German palace, and the surface of the moon. Tying the stories together are Schalansky's evocative, precise descriptions and the sense of wonder in confronting the sheer immensity of what has been lost. "The world...only grieves for what it knows," she writes. Schalansky documents her chosen objects with utmost care while relying on myth as she moves beyond what we know for fact to what we might imagine. "For myth is the highest of all realities and...the library the true theater of world events." Schalansky's meticulously researched stories are poignant reminders of the extent of our impact on the natural world and a call to honor the animals, objects, and places that, due to our own negligence, have ceased to exist. An exploration of extinct animals and objects told through dazzling stories that question the bounds of memory and myth. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Twelve fictional essays comprise this stunning work depicting animals, places, objects, and buildings that are lost forever. In one chapter, the extinct Caspian tiger is imagined as both predator and victim in a fight to the death in the Roman Colosseum. Another chapter relates the story of the cobbled-together skeleton of a unicorn "discovered" by Otto von Guericke in a gypsum quarry. Elsewhere, marital infidelity is key to a remembrance of the East German Palace of the Republic. In this smooth and expert translation, internationally best-selling author Schalansky (The Giraffe's Neck) illuminates these "lost" inventoried gems with thorough research and details, making us ponder their transitory quality. Her descriptive writing of nature and botanical subjects is particularly accomplished. Indexes of persons, images, and sources are included. VERDICT In her quest to find meaning for herself, Schalansky examines life and death in a work that will inspire many hours of talk for book discussion groups. Not to be read quickly but savored and contemplated.--Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH