There are no more paradises than the lost, as John Milton would say. Nor things more valuable than those that you no longer have, nor can you observe. The true wonders of the world then are more those that we end up losing or destroying than those that today would be invented as such, adding a necessary "of the modern world." Because the pyramids, walls, gigantic sculptures or other surviving structures would like to carry that melancholic glow of the disappeared.
It is always good to carry out an inventory of the lost. As in this case Judith Schalansky has done with the masterful intention of enlarging the myth and adding to that official figure of 7, other smaller works but of greater significance when the extent of her legacy between lights and shadows is finally seen ...
The history of humanity is full of things lost, relegated to oblivion at times, or destroyed by man or the erosion of days. Some of these disparate objects, real or imaginary, are collected and inventoried in this book: the enigmatic fragments that have survived from Sappho's poems, the Palace of the Republic in Berlin, the Caspian tiger or the supposed skeleton of a unicorn.
A captivating and unclassifiable work that gives us the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of loss and the role of memory through the evocation of twelve treasures that the world has lost forever, but which, thanks to the trace they left behind yes, in history, literature and imagination, they have a second life.
You can now buy the book «Inventory of some lost things», by Judith Schalansky, here:
