Positive4ColumnsThe first page forms a kind of prose poem. On one side, a list of things destroyed or disappeared during the making of the book, from a space probe swallowed up by Saturn’s atmosphere to the last mosaic-tailed rat. Overleaf is another list, of discoveries made in the same period ... That loss might be generative is embodied in the book’s structure: twelve chapters that are not elegies but exercises in style. There are essays of wry wisdom, an internal monologue in the voice of Greta Garbo, the suicide note of a botanist on the moon.
