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Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion The soft clay tablets on which the proto-ancient Greek script known as Linear B were written, detailing the income and expenditure of the Palace of Knossos, were hardened by a fire that destroyed nearly everything else around them, including most of the palace itself If not for the fire, the survival of that early practice of record-keeping by inscription is doubtful Such an irony seems central to Schalansky’s work Her new book is about what we have lost, but also what remains: in her case, not through fire but through imagination   Translated from the German by Jackie Smith, An Inventory of Losses is an attempt to confront what has been destroyed, either by time or human hand How can writing, it asks us, help us remember or mourn the inevitable destruction of things? In this series of prose pieces that mix essay, memoir and fiction, Schalansky describes a variety of objects that have disappeared from the world Her sense of what an object is – maybe ‘thing’ is a better word – is expansive, including animals, films, and buildings Each piece begins with a factual description of the item, and the accompanying text expands on it either by reconstructing the world in which the thing existed or sometimes imagining a scene that somehow resonates with it in a less direct way Whether she is describing a particular breed of extinct tiger, the lost poetry manuscripts of Sappho, or monumental buildings from Schalansky’s own East Berlin childhood, her book is part Wunderkammer, part memento mori   The book calls itself an ‘inventory,’ and although the term is wonderfully evocative, it is somehow limiting to what An Inventory of Losses actually is, the title being another example of Schalansky’s irony According to the Society of American Archives, an inventory is, ‘A list of things, or a finding aid that includes, at a minimum, a list of the series in a collection’ There are other works of literature that resemble this more