The Catalog of Lost Things

World history is full of things that have been lost - inadvertently destroyed or lost over time. In her book, Judith Schalansky attempts to capture what the lost leaves behind: echoes and erased traces, rumors and legends, signs of oblivion and phantom pains. The painting by Caspar David Friedrich, the sight of a tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific Ocean - this, by definition, incomplete catalog of the lost and disappeared becomes an ark for twelve stories, revealing their narrative power where ordinary tradition cannot cope. The main characters of these stories are people or their spirits, struggling with transience: an old man preserving the knowledge of humanity in his garden in Ticino, an artist of ruins creating the past as it never was, an aging Greta Garbo wandering through Manhattan, wondering when exactly she could have died, and writer Judith Schalansky tracing the traces of the history of the GDR in the empty places of her own childhood.

This book, winner of the Wilhelm Raabe Prize, finalist of the International Booker, has been noted by many critics around the world, as it testifies that the difference between presence and absence can be insignificant as long as memory and literature exist, allowing one to feel how close preservation and destruction, loss and creation are to each other.