In Search of Lost Books

August 6, 2018
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.