Join the
Goethe Book Club, hosted by Tanya Kelley, and discuss works from contemporary German-speaking authors. Each selection can be read in its English translation or the original German; discussions will be held in English.
On Tuesday, March 8th, at 6:00 pm CST, we will meet to discuss
An Inventory of Losses (German:
Verzeichnis einiger Verluste), written by Judith Schalansky and translated by Jackie Smith.
About the book:
World history is full of things that have gone astray – willfully destroyed or mislaid over the course of time. In her new book, Judith Schalansky dedicates herself to that which the lost leaves behind: dying echoes and disappearing steps, whispers and legends, apostrophes and phantom pains.
Beginning with objects from nature and art—like an incinerated painting of Caspar David Friedrich’s, an extinct species of tiger, a Roman baroque villa, the holy writings of a vanished religion or a sunken island in the Pacific—she presents an incomplete catalog of the long lost and disappeared, using the power of narrative to fill in where traditional knowledge fails. The protagonists of these short stories are outsiders: a bizarre old man hoarding the knowledge of humankind in his garden in Tessin; a painter of ruins, who creates a past that never was; an aged Greta Garbo, who dreams of appearing on the silver screen as Dorian Gray; and Judith Schalansky’s own father, who left the family before she could even form a memory of him. These texts speak about beginnings and endings, and, at the same time, are an autobiographical trip into spaces that no longer exist: childhood, the GDR of the 1980s.
Judith Schalansky once again blurs the lines between reality and imagination, truth and myth, fact and fiction. The result is a lively evocation of the lost and the remote, which suggests that perhaps the difference between presence and absence is only marginal as long as memory still exists – that, and a literature which reveals just how close preservation and destruction, loss and creation, really are.
About the author:
Born in Greifswald in 1980,
Judith Schalansky studied art history and communication design. Her work, including the internationally successful bestseller
Atlas of Remote Islands and the novel
Der Hals der Giraffe (
The Neck of the Giraffe), has been translated into more than 20 languages and has won numerous awards. She is the editor of
Naturkunden and lives as a designer and freelance writer in Berlin
Summary: Courtesy of Suhrkamp
Please RSVP to access the online event. Simply send an email to
info-kansascity@goethe.de and we will send you the Zoom access code.
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