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"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"
Following the conventions of a different genre, each of the pieces in Schalansky's Inventory considers something that is irretrievably lost to the world, from the paradisal island of Tuanaki, the Caspian Tiger or the Villa Sacchetti in Rome, to Sappho's love poems, Greta Garbo's fading beauty or a painting by Caspar David Friedrich.
As a child of the former East Germany, it's not surprising that "loss" and its aftermath should haunt Schalansky's writing, but what is extraordinary and exhilarating is the engaging mixture of intellectual curiosity, ironic humour, stylistic elegance, intensity of feeling and grasp of life's pitiless vitality, that combine to make this one of the most original literary works of recent times.
Translated from the German by Jackie Smith
About the author
Judith Schalansky was born in Greifswald in former East Germany in 1980 and studied art history and communication design. Her international best-seller, Atlas of Remote Islands, won the Stiftung Buchkunst (the Art Book Award) for "the most beautifully designed book of the year", while her novel The Giraffe's Neck in the English translation by Shaun Whiteside won a special commendation of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for the best translation from German in 2015. Both books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Schalansky works as a freelance writer and book designer in Berlin, where she is also publisher of a prestigious natural history list at Matthes und Seitz.JACKIE SMITH studied German and French at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and then undertook a post-graduate diploma in translation and interpreting at the University of Bradford. In
2015 she was selected for the New Books in German Emerging Translators Programme and in 2017 won the Austrian Cultural Forum London Translation Prize. An Inventory of Losses is her first
literary translation, for which she is the winner of the 2021 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize.
Summary
Now longlisted for the International Booker Prize, a cabinet of curiosities exploring notions of loss and disappearance by one of Europe's finest and most original voices
Foreword
Now longlisted for the International Booker Prize, a cabinet of curiosities exploring notions of loss and disappearance by one of Europe's finest and most original voices
Additional text
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
Report
A cabinet of curiosities that can be dipped into with pleasure and profit Rupert Christiansen Daily Telegraph
