‘An Inventory of Losses’ Review: Only a Memory

If you were unaware of these facts, you could, of course, summon them from cyberspace directly to the palm of your hand—for all answers, it seems, now orbit our Earth. And yet, “we know nothing. Not much, at any rate,” the German writer Judith Schalansky reminds us in “An Inventory of Losses,” a wonder-filled book of 12 essays, each of which illuminates the elusive past’s residue in our bewildering present. “Writing cannot bring anything back,” Ms. Schalansky also acknowledges, “but it can enable everything to be experienced . . . [and] the difference between presence and absence is perhaps marginal, as long as there is memory.”

The disparate subjects here, at first glance, seem randomly chosen. For in addition to (or embedded within) the curiosities mentioned above, Ms. Schalansky contemplates ancient Greek poetry; a submerged Pacific atoll; a ruined Italian villa; an erased East German palace; a destroyed silent film; several eccentric scientists and her own childhood in a vividly evoked coastal village. All are connected, however, because all are gone or mostly gone. Any remaining fragment therefore becomes, as Ms. Schalansky puts it, “the infinite promise of Romanticism . . . the blank space that breeds conjecture.” She is referring at that moment to the mysteries surrounding the Greek poet Sappho, but the same exhilarating sense of not knowing—of possible discovery, in other words—pervades all of this writer’s erudite imaginings as she wanders from an astrophysicist’s first detection of dark matter to an imagined glimpse of the earliest humans.

“Here is the land of the beginning,” Ms. Schalansky writes of the Euphrates delta, “the alluvial land of civilization, to which our remote ancestor with his heavy skull and freed-up hands was once drawn, in the process driving his wide-jawed cousin . . . ever further north, where he hid himself away in caves—armed with stone tools and bones gnawed bare—to die the unlamented death of his species.” This is the author at her most magisterial; her stately prose in this case mirroring a river’s unhurried course. (The translation from the German by Jackie Smith, here as throughout, is a triumph of subtle accuracy.) But Ms. Schalansky is also a wry, laconic and occasionally self-mocking explorer who gives the disarming impression of being astonished at times by her own conclusions. “They are animals. Animals like us. Doomed like us,” she writes of two Caspian tigers she imagines fated to die in a Roman amphitheater. (Her richly imagined gladiatorial scene is terrifying.) The inevitable prospect of the Sun’s destruction of the Earth conjures for her “the most appalling thing imaginable: . . . the end of time.” A silent morning in the mountains prompts the fleeting thought “that mankind had perished,” a possibility that, Ms. Schalansky adds, “did not frighten me; on the contrary, it was comforting.”

All of which sounds a little portentous, as though the thunderous chords of Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” had been struck to herald cosmic revelation. And indeed, “An Inventory of Losses” is a more somber work than “Atlas of Remote Islands” (2009), the jewel-like volume that earned Ms. Schalansky international acclaim both as author and book designer. A miniature delight in which each description filled little more than a page, the atlas transported the reader with dreamlike ease across oceans and centuries. “I have invented nothing,” Ms. Schalansky wrote in the introduction, “But I have discovered everything; I have found these stories and made them mine, just as the explorer makes the land he discovers his.”

The same blend of poetic insight and intellectual precision creates a similar, if more diffused, effect of wonder here. “An Inventory of Losses” covers broader terrain, a test of the author’s agility. Yet with only a few missteps, she alights on distant lives, eras, even planets, as nimbly as she did on those forsaken islands. Comparisons with the writings of W.G. Sebald are inescapable. But Ms. Schalansky, in her quirkiness, has just as much in common with the glorious eccentrics of the 18th and 19th centuries she encounters such as Gottfried Adolf Kinau (1814-88), who spent most of his life drawing detailed maps of the moon. Inspired by such genial fanatics, by faded charts, musty documents, a bird’s flight or a spaceship’s voyage, Ms. Schalansky invites us to see—through a telescope one moment, a microscope the next, and above all through the unmatched lens of the imagination—what a moment or a fragment might reveal.

In a German forest, “a gust of wind rustles the treetops, the sky brightens, and for a moment the pale disc of the sun glows through the wall of cloud.” In the Pacific Ocean, “the gray shadow of a giant wave” towers over the doomed atoll of Tuanaki. On “densely inscribed clay tablets covered in dainty symbols like bird tracks in wet sand,” an ancient civilization makes its mark. Aboard the Voyager spacecraft, humanity’s message is ferried beyond our solar system, the ultimate expression of a “poignant desire to draw attention to the existence of an intelligent species . . . unwilling to accept its utter meaninglessness.”

Nothing less than the void, then, is this writer’s preoccupation, and memory perhaps her consolation, for, she concludes, “remembering can be learned, whereas forgetting cannot.” Strewing such riddles along the way, Ms. Schalansky leads the astonished reader on a zigzag course through the labyrinth of human consciousness to excavate what the philosopher Francis Bacon termed those “remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.” If the result is inescapably an elegy of sorts—truly “An Inventory of Losses”—it is a curiously moving and oddly reassuring one.

—Ms. Mundow is a writer in central Massachusetts.