An Inventory of Losses: LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2021

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Synopsis
"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" JOHN SELF, Guardian"As we deal with the consequences, emotional and material, of a pandemic, it is hard to imagine a better guide to the resources of hope than Schalansky's deeply engaging inventory" MICHAEL CRONIN, Irish Times"Weaving fiction, autobiography and history, this sumptuous collection of texts offers meditations on the diverse phenomena of decomposition and destruction" Financial Times "Books of the Year""Pure gold storytelling" SJONJudith Schalansky's strange and wonderful new book, recalling writers as different as W.G. Sebald and Christa Wolf, Joan Didion and Rebecca Solnit, sees her return to the territory she explored so successfully with her best-selling Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will, which Robert MacFarlane called "utterly exquisite" (Guardian) and about which Time Out's reviewer said "Rarely has armchair travel been so farflung and romantic".Judith Schalansky is a wholly original writer whose books articulate perfectly what she wishes to say. Each of the pieces, following the conventions of a different genre, considers something that is irretrievably lost to the world, including the paradisal pacific island of Tuanaki, the Caspian Tiger, the Villa Sacchetti in Rome, Sappho's love poems, Greta Garbo's fading beauty, a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, and the former East Germany's Palace of the Republic. As a child of the former East Germany, it's not surprising that the dominant emotion in Schalansky's work should be "loss" and its aftermath, but what is extraordinary is the thoroughly engaging mixture of intellectual curiosity, down-to-earth grasp of life's pitiless vitality, ironic humour, stylistic elegance and intensity of feeling that combine to make this book a masterpiece and one of the most original and beautifully designed books to be published in 2020.Translated from the German by Jackie Smith
Copyright:
2020

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
224 Pages
ISBN-13:
9781529400779
Related ISBNs:
9781529400793
Publisher:
Quercus
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
History, Nonfiction, Travel, Literature and Fiction
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.
Translator:
Jackie Smith

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