In Search of Lost Books
The Forgotten Stories of Eight Mythical Volumes
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The gripping and elegiac stories of eight lost books, and the mysterious circumstances behind their disappearances.
They exist as a rumour or a fading memory. They vanished from history leaving scarcely a trace, lost to fire, censorship, theft, war or deliberate destruction, yet those who seek them are convinced they will find them.
This is the story of one man's quest for eight mysterious lost books.
Taking us from Florence to Regency London, the Russian Steppe to British Columbia, Giorgio van Straten unearths stories of infamy and tragedy, glimmers of hope and bitter twists of fate. There are, among others, the rediscovered masterpiece that he read but failed to save from destruction; the Hemingway novel that vanished in a suitcase at the Gare du Lyon; the memoirs of Lord Byron, burnt to avoid a scandal; the Magnum Opus of Bruno Schulz, disappeared along with its author in wartime Poland; the mythical Sylvia Plath novel that may one day become reality.
As gripping as a detective novel, as moving as an elegy, this is the tale of a love affair with the impossible, of the things that slip away from us but which, sometimes, live again in the stories we tell.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Van Straten (My Name, a Living Memory), a novelist and translator, has produced a page-turner about books whose pages will (most likely) never be turned again. Devoted to uncovering traces of lost books, his mission leads him to "chart a journey around the world in eight volumes rather than in 80 days," into Canada, England, France, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Spain. The lost books include Byron's memoirs, deliberately burned; the intended last volumes of Gogol's Dead Souls, lost to the author's "perfectionism and self-sabotage"; Hemingway's first novel, supposedly lost in a suitcase by his first wife; and Romano Bilenchi's unfinished novel, The Avenue, which van Straten was one of the fewer than a half-dozen people to read before it was destroyed by the author's widow. A similar fate, apparently, met Sylvia Plath's novel Double Exposure at the hands of her widower, Ted Hughes. As van Straten takes note, there is the question in some cases of whether the book ever existed at all. No matter, he brings to each unique and intriguing tale of books "that once existed but are no longer here" erudition flavored with elegance, wit, and good humor.
