A catalog of lost items
14.99 €
Out of stock
A catalog of lost items
14.99 €
World history is full of things that have been lost - unintentionally destroyed or lost in the course of time. In her book Judith Szalanski tries to capture what the lost leave behind: echoes and erased traces, rumors and legends, signs of oblivion and phantom pains. A painting by Caspar David Friedrich, a sighting of a tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific - this by definition incomplete catalog of the lost and disappeared becomes the ark for twelve stories that reveal their narrative power where conventional tradition fails. The protagonists of these stories are people or their spirits struggling with transience: an old man who preserves the knowledge of humanity in his garden in Ticino, a painter of ruins who creates the past as it never was, an aged Greta Garbo who wanders around Manhattan wondering when exactly she might have died, and the writer Judith Schalansky who traces traces the history of the GDR in the empty spaces of her own childhood.
This book, winner of the Wilhelm Raabe Prize and finalist for the International Booker Prize, has been praised by many critics around the world, for it shows that the difference between presence and absence can be negligible as long as memory and literature exist to make us feel how close preservation and destruction, loss and creation are to each other.
This book, winner of the Wilhelm Raabe Prize and finalist for the International Booker Prize, has been praised by many critics around the world, for it shows that the difference between presence and absence can be negligible as long as memory and literature exist to make us feel how close preservation and destruction, loss and creation are to each other.
See also:
- All books by the publisher
- All books by the author