"8 Disappearing Books" was suddenly attracted by the cover of the book, a yellowed page, is being swallowed up by fire, and when you see it, you will have a sense of powerlessness to watch something precious gradually disappear, and at the same time there is a desire to explore the disappearing things. Books are an indispensable carrier of human culture, the inheritance of culture, must be recorded through the bamboo and books and other carriers, it carries the wisdom of generations of human ancestors, is a rare and valuable wealth for future generations.
However, it is a pity that many famous classics and culture and art have been gradually lost in the wars and man-made disasters of the times. For example, the Book Burning Pit Confucianism of the Qin Dynasty destroyed countless classics and even many texts that did not know the names, and there was no trace of them in later generations. There are also many books that have disappeared in the history of the world, such as Homer's Magizz, the Lost Dossier of the Bible, Jane Austen's Sandyton, Hermon Mayville's Cross Island, the first draft of Robert Louis Stevenson's Doctor Incarnate, Ernest Hemingway's novel about World War I, and so on.
If these fading books are still there, they must have an important role in some field. Later, people seemed to have always had a desire to learn and explore lost books. For example, how Byron's autobiographical Memoirs was annihilated, what Hemingway's early manuscripts wrote; why Did Gogol destroy the second volume of Dead Souls; the legend of Schultz and the Messiah; whether Plas's Double Exposure had the possibility of seeing the light of day... For all readers who love literature and books, these are like mysteries that attract us to explore and understand.
8 Lost Books is like a treasure hunt, from London and Moscow in the 19th century to Paris and Poland in the 20th century, to Florence in the 21st century, it takes you to explore the story behind the disappearance and find the reasons for the loss. Don't let go of a little clue, just for the faint glimmer of hope.
For example, Hemingway was sad because of the loss of the manuscript, and divorced his wife.
It is understood that Hemingway was married four times, and the first lady was Hedley Hemingway. In 1922, Headley put manuscripts of several short stories and some novels written by her husband in a suitcase. She left Paris by train for Lausanne, Switzerland, to reunite with her husband. However, during the trip, the wife put down the box to buy water because of thirst, and in the blink of an eye, the box was gone, and everyone agreed that it had been stolen.
Hemingway had been grieving this loss. He once said that if the operation could forget about it, he would be willing to take a stab. According to Stuart Kelly, author of Lost Books, many people who know hemingway after drinking a glass or two of alcohol usually mention it, saying that it eventually led to his divorce from Hedley.
He never intended to rewrite the lost works, including the novel, which is said to have been based on his personal experiences in World War I. But, Kelly says, "If he's been trying to perfect the immature graffiti for the next decade, we'll never see what kind of work he can write." ”
Each vanishing book has its own story. In 8 Vanishing Books you will learn that Byron wrote an autobiographical memoir with many secrets, which contained memories of his homosexual tendencies, which was a very sensitive thing at the time, and disappeared into the editor's fireplace because of censorship; Romano Bilanche's manuscript was burned down for fear of being rumored to have affected his reputation because it recorded some love story about his extramarital affair; Hemingway lost all his manuscripts before he became famous, and almost collapsed Gogol burned the much-anticipated second volume of Dead Souls; Bruno Schultz's lost work is as legendary as his own; after the death of Sylvia Plas, "Double Exposure" disappeared...
The author of the book, Giorgio van Straten, director of the Institute of Italian Culture in New York and one of the editors of the literary review Nuovi Argomenti. He is the author of several novels, such as Generation, Dance for a Living, My Name: A Living Memory, Truth is Useless, Wartime Love, and two short story collections, The Wrong Forest, and The Promise of Disappearing. In addition, he has translated works by renowned writers such as Radiad Kipling, Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson.