There’s a word for everything in German – it’s because you can simply describe something and join up all the words. Or, you think about a particular feeling or set of circumstances and attribute it to something tangible to make a word. Examples include Kummerspeck, Frühlingsgefühle, and Geborgenheit.

I mention the interesting words because one of my favourites (as a word and a concept) is Kunstkammer, which translates as a ‘cabinet of curiosities’. These cabinets have a long history, and were essentially collections of ‘curious items from home or abroad’, usually with a nature focus (obviously collecting bits of nature for personal viewing is frowned upon these days!). When I lived in Germany, my host family had a small Kunstkammer in their house, but I didn’t come across another one until I met a woman twenty years ago who had been a vet – her cabinet filled a whole wall and was carefully curated – it was amazing to look at.

This is all a very long introduction to An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky (translated by Jackie Smith). The book is a literary version of a Kunstkammer. Schalansky describes twelve ‘objects’, including a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a silent movie, an encyclopaedia in a forest, and the Palace of Republic in Berlin – that share a common fate: they no longer exist, and all we have to record their existence is a paper trail, or an art work that has a reference to the lost object.

Obviously the central theme is extinction and loss, but the individual stories also prompt thinking about how we value things, the notion of memory, and how history recasts what is important at any one time. Schalansky plays with form – this is essentially a nonfiction book, certainly of the narrative nonfiction variety, however she blurs the line with some chapters where scenes and conversations are almost certainly fictional.

The preamble and preface to An Inventory of Losses is superb – mesmerising, thought-provoking, rich.

…the demise of all life and endeavour is a condition of its existence.

Unfortunately, the individual stories about the objects were uneven, and some I simply wasn’t invested in. But some I loved, especially the essay about Tuanaki, an island that has disappeared from the Southern Cook Islands cluster, and the essay titled The Love Songs of Sappho, which explored the poetry of Greek poet, Sappho, around 600 B.C. As Schalansky reports, it is estimated that only 7% of Sappho’s poetry remains –

Wordless, blind understanding is as much a firm topos of love poetry as is the wordy evocation of unfathomable feeling.

Sappho’s influence, although her remaining words are only fragments, have continued to reverberate, particularly in grammatical conventions –

We know that words and symbols change their meaning. For a long time, three dots in a row along the writing baseline designated something lost and unknown, then at some point also something unuttered and unutterable; no longer only something omitted or left out, but also something left open. Hence the three dots became a symbol that invites one to think the allusion to its conclusion, imagine that which is missing, a proxy for the inexpressible and the hushed-up, for the offensive and obscene, for the incriminating and speculative, for a particular version of the omitted: the truth.

I have a hardcover copy of this book – it’s a beautiful book to hold, and for that reason it will stay on my shelf.

3/5

I love asparagus. Until I lived in Germany in the late-eighties, I had never seen white asparagus – it’s available here now as a seasonal specialty – but interesting that in what was then East Germany, it was the green asparagus that was considered the delicacy.

She laid the asparagus spears one after the other on a dry tea towel.
“Queued up for asparagus, too, did you?” He took his hands out of his pockets, folded his arms and grinned broadly. She couldn’t help laughing. She was not the only one pinching asparagus from the field behind the allotments. Green asparagus. She had never once seen it on sale in the shop. Rumour had it that it all went straight to Berlin, to the Palace of the Republic.