Margaryta's Reviews > An Inventory of Losses

As some of the other reviews have stated, this isn't what I thought it would be. I suspected these might be stories rather than informal essays (which makes the comparison to Rebecca Solnit in the inside cover feel misleading) but even then this did not turn out at all how I'd hoped. The Preface was by far the best part of "An Inventory of Losses" as it combined personal essay with elements of non-fiction and philosophical musings. The stories themselves were rather dry and short, beginning and ending seemingly out of nowhere, with no real weight or consequence. Some of them were more literal interpretations of the prompt, like "The Seven Books of Mani" and "Kinau's Selenographs," while others were building around the prompt and trying to write a story about something tangentially related, like the film industry and Greta Garbo in "The Boy in Blue" or a romantic falling-out foregrounded in an economic collapse in "Palace of the Republic." Meanwhile others felt like they were somehow completely out of left field, especially "Tuanaki," "Guericke's Unicorn," and "The Von Behr Palace." The only ones I enjoyed and read without skimming were "Caspian Tiger" and "The Love Songs of Sappho," which are very different stylistically from each other but were the only places where Schalansky's prosaic contemplation actually landed. "An Inventory of Losses" is an otherwise rather dry book, a good premise and beautiful design that failed to deliver the satisfaction and thoughtfulness I'd hoped for.