The Beginning of the End
Review of Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses (US: New Directions, 2020), translated by Jackie Smith
By Eunice Chin
In June this year, Jeanette Winterson burnt copies of her books as an act of defiance against publishers who marketed her as a writer of traditional, domestic, women’s literature. By pigeonholing her in such a manner, they ignored her radical attempts at destabilizing the conventions of genre. Formal innovations by women writers are often not given due credit, or even recognition. This is why the translation of An Inventory of Losses by German author Judith Schalansky is such a signal event. Translated astutely from German into English by Jackie Smith, An Inventory of Losses treads the thin line between fiction and non-fiction in contemplating the notion of loss through objects, paintings, famous figures, and locations. Taken together, its twelve seemingly unrelated pieces prompt us to think about the transience of the world and its relation to the sense of being alive. Following Schalansky’s two international bestsellers (Atlas of Remote Islands and The Giraffe’s Neck), An Inventory of Losses has been longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
Schalansky’s interest in loss is set forth in her book’s preamble and preface. In the preamble, Schalansky lists some of the world’s greatest mysteries and obliterations. Here, she draws attention to the fleeting nature of existence itself, ours or otherwise. Loss is a constant, perhaps even a condition, of our lives. However, she does not despair because loss can be resisted with preservation and rediscovery. It is this potential for temporarily evading oblivion that gives hope; just as we discover in the Cygnus constellation a celestial body in a possibly habitable zone, we too can discover life, “such as we imagine life to be.” Nonetheless, Schalansky also reminds us in the preface that “[a] memory that retained everything would essentially retain nothing.” Although memories are precious, their value derives from their fragmented, selective, nature.
In writing about a sunken island in “Tuanaki” to missing selenographs in “Kinau’s Selenographs,” Schalansky reveals not just the enduring power of memories, but also their impermanence. Among the twelve pieces she presents, one in particular stands out. “Geuricke’s Unicorn” is an ambiguous and meditative story that reads as though it could belong in anyone’s dreamscape. It tracks a narrator’s journey through the Alps as she attempts to write a guide to monsters that, despite being the creations of human imagination, pervade the world like nature. What follows is a series of haunting ruminations about how myths are used to organize our perception of the world. Through her narrator, Schalansky asks:
Might dragons in fact be faded reflections of past experiences, vestiges of ancient times? Why shouldn’t memories push for their own survival, preservation, and propagation in the same way that organisms do? After all, virtually nothing was more formidable, probably, than the power of images, of the once seen (emphasis mine).
In this intertwining of myth and memory, Schalansky laments the homogeneity of myth, how each figure serves an archetypal function. Each apparently new story is based on the same formulae, which reinforce such social constructs as gender roles. The stories we hear as children shape the way we perceive the world, begging the question: how much of our memories are truly our own. Schalansky’s narrator concludes that “real life was considerably more eccentric than fiction,” placing her trust in the current moment. Unlike our memories, our current experiences are characterized by somatic spontaneity. What we see now become etched in our minds as “the once seen.”
Schalansky’s narrator takes this logic a step further by bringing nature back into the picture. As she takes a break from her writing, she basks in nature and finds it “[h]ard to believe that all this had simply come about rather than having been carefully designed. [Nature had] come into being unaided and then been tamed. Although the unpredictability remained, Nature deserved credit for much more than God.” In this juxtaposition of nature and memories, nature is characterised by fluidity whereas memory, described as being “carefully designed” by the myths we have been told, is marked by its constructed quality. Nature joins hands with the present to give us our sense of life’s unpredictable immediacy.
Although we may think that our memories, as an accumulation of our past experiences, together provide a composite understanding of the world, Schalansky tells us that “the demystification of the world was the biggest fairy tale of all.” Indeed, how far can we actually trust our memories? Is the way we perceive an event five years ago the same as how we perceive it now? Are our memories not also amalgamations of our different selves as we progress through time, and thus subjective and mutable? As we grow older, we acquire new systems of analyzing experience (such as statistics and reportage) to supplement lived experience. Although statistics provides us with the ability to quantify and thus ascertain all that we experience, it also underscores the Herculean task of seeing the world as it truly is. Just like nature, the world is meant to be experienced and felt, rather than understood. To this end, Schalansky’s narrator suggests that “[a] child’s magical thinking [is] more powerful than any statistic, any empirical value.” Schalansky’s reference to childhood suggests that to see the world through adult systems actually weakens our memories. Even methods of preserving memory, be they a journal or a book like Schalansky’s, are not permanent; paper decomposes and libraries can be destroyed.
Yet, as Schalansky foregrounds in the preamble, we must not despair because the erosion of knowledge and memory can bring new enjoyment and meaning, for instance, in the reading of a literary work. In “The Love Songs of Sappho,” the narrator states that “[t]he omission becomes an inclusion, the absence a presence, and the empty place a profusion of meaning.” Indeed, absence can lend weight to what remains. It is in this piece that Schalansky’s writing (and Smith’s translation) shines. Much like Greek poet Sappho’s poetic fragments, of which only one complete poem has survived, “The Love Songs of Sappho” comprises short paragraphs and, more interestingly, ellipses that surround the Sappho quotations.
These ellipses create a silence that invites present voices to intertwine themselves with the voice from the past. Sappho’s works, and Schalansky’s writing, expose the importance of absence to our existence. If we obsess over the need to preserve all our memories and organise them, we stop living in the moment. Remembering may give us certainty, but not remembering generates potentiality.
No conversation about loss is complete without a discussion about death, a topic which Schalansky skilfully navigates in “The Von Behr Palace.” As the narrator pieces together childhood memories such as that of playing and hiding in “the cemetery between the mounds overrun with greenery,” she realizes that her life is one she enjoys but also one she expects nothing from. Her childhood is marked by loneliness. As she waited in the cemetery, yearning to be found, no one came: “the miracle, as always, failed to materialize.” Although the imminence of everyone’s end “lay beyond [her] imagination,” the narrator persisted in imagining the end:
Death is an old woman in a flowery house dress. Goddesses of destiny wear a headscarf, walk with a stick and speak in dialect. They talk about stillborn babies, about a right pickle, and rake the graves of their prematurely deceased husbands.
“Goddesses of destiny” do not owe us a warning and come as and when they wish. Unlike the world grasped through human systems of understanding, death is the one thing we will never be able to master. We will never know how it is to die until we are already dead. Yet we feel the need to understand death. This fixation on guaranteeing a future is what each piece in this entire collection engages with. It almost comes across as an avoidance strategy for living in the present and having to experience continuous loss.
Finally, the narrator presents us with intertwining images of birth and death:
Like a snake, the umbilical cord had twined itself around the baby’s neck and first delayed his entry into this world, then complicated it and ultimately so jeopardized it that the live birth of the infant, whose hands and lips had already turned blue, bordered on miraculous.
By escaping death, the child here is seen as a miracle. Schalansky invokes the figure of a child for its symbolic potential. Although death does not actually take place in “The Vohn Behr Palace,” the piece sends a clear message: we must always remember that every loss brings forth a birth.
Reading Schalansky’s collection in the midst of a pandemic could not have been more apt. It highlights how in our attempts to immortalise memories, we lose sight of what is most important—the present. Schalansky tells us that “we can only mourn what is absent or missing if some vestige of it, some whisper, perhaps little more than a rumor, a semiobliterated trace, an echo of an echo has found its way to us.” An Inventory of Losses does not implore us to disregard memories, but to accept the fact that they are impermanent and can be made anew any time. Schalansky’s writing is sensitive, astute and sometimes even hypnagogic. Writing about such an elusive concept with so much flair is an achievement.
Eunice Chin is a current English Literature student at Nanyang Technological University who loves anything related to Absurdism and Samuel Beckett. Her research interests include: Absurdism, Beckett Studies, Bergsonian Philosophy, Death and End-of-Life Narratives, and Posthumanism. She constantly wonders about the chaos that inhabits our minds and its resistance to being understood. When not writing, she can be found in the dance studio or in the theater.
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