An Inventory of Losses

What sort of book is this? Schalansky, a German writer and designer (she designed this starkly beautiful book), loves lists, and in part it is just what the title promises, a list of things that are no longer here: an extinct tiger, a destroyed palace (two, actually), a lost film. But each missing item is accompanied by—well, this is where definitions get tricky—a story of some kind, or an essay. Some are fairly literal excavations, some fanciful (one favorite follows grumpy Greta Garbo around for a day), but what they add up to is less a factual reclamation of these lost things than an emotional reckoning with what it means to lose. The last chapter, in which an old rumor that everything lost on Earth ends up on the moon is confirmed, explained the book best to me: this book is the moon.