An Inventory of Losses

By: Judith Schalansky, Jackie Smith - translator

Narrated by: Christina Delaine

Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

A dazzling book about memory and extinction from the author of Atlas of Remote Islands.

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 12 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.

©2018 Judith Schalansky; English translation copyright 2020 by Jackie Smith (P)2021 Tantor

Sometimes Fascinating

This is an odd and interesting book. I expected that it would be more accessible and not quite so esoteric and arcane. I was able to greatly enjoy parts of the book, but I found that more than half of the stories were difficult to get into because they required education that I don’t have. Words that aren’t translated leave me out. The mispronunciation of Lesbos over and over again made me crazy too. There were some great imaginative concepts. It might be worth a re-listen but the voice of the narrator sounded so NPR which I didn’t like. I throw my hands up at this one!