There follows a fascinating disquisition on how the ampersand symbol began to fall out of fashion as the final letter of the English alphabet early in the 19th century, which provides Schulz with an opportunity to expound on the paradoxical nature of life: “In short, we know that, as Philip Roth once put it, ‘Life is and.’ He meant that we do not live, for the most part, in a world of either/or. This begins with a description of a meteor hitting Earth during the Eocene period and ends, 35m years later, on a “beautiful May afternoon” with Kathryn’s marriage to C. When she comes to describe meeting C (after 30 pages of philosophising and psychologising on the subject of “finding”) she writes beautifully about falling in love: “Everything that wasn’t her – the house around us, the rest of the world, the passage of time, the past and the future – retreated from awareness.”īut Schulz’s unusual method – part‑essay, part-memoir – comes into its own in the book’s final third. Here, her tendency to digress might be seen as a defence against cloying sentimentality. The book’s second section describes Schulz’s surprise at finding a life partner after years of cherishing a bookish kind of solitude. By 1954, visas for the two of them had been secured for the US. Her son was born there, and at a certain point she received news that almost everybody back home had died. Her father’s mother was the youngest of 11 children living in a shtetl outside Łódź in the late 1930s, and, since her family was too large and too poor to survive the war together, “by a private calculus unimaginable to me”, writes Schulz, she was designated as the only one to be sent away to safety, to Tel Aviv.

She sees his incurable habit of losing things as “the comic-opera version of the series of losses that shaped his childhood … one that was defined by an extraordinary degree by loss”. Schulz’s prose almost rises to the level of Nietzsche at his most wise and humaneīut the narrative truly comes alive when she contemplates her father’s story. After establishing the fact of her father’s death in the book’s opening, Schulz takes the reader on a series of long, impersonal digressions on the subject of loss in general: “Phone chargers, umbrellas, earrings, scarves, passports, headphones, musical instruments, Christmas ornaments, the permission slip for your daughter’s field trip … the range and quantity of things we lose is staggering.” She is such a good writer of nonfiction that she is never less than shrewd and entertaining company, dispensing maxims such as “In the microdrama of loss, we are nearly always both villain and victim,” and providing thoughtful readings of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem One Art, in which the narrator contemplates “the art of losing”.

The book of lost and found review