In Search of Lost Books by Giorgio van Straten (2016)

I suspect that this may have more clout in the original Italian. It strikes me that there are attempts here to render little bursts of poetic prose into English, alongside a majority which feels in English a bit ordinary. I don't know Italian, but my feeling is that there is perhaps a simple strain in it which retains poetry, but whose terms are not replicable, or not easily anyway. The subject matter is always of interest - the 'lost' novels of major writers, whose manuscripts were left on a train / burnt in a house fire / got rid of by a vicious ex, etc etc. The examples here are largely the obvious ones: Hemingway's juvenilia, Lowry's second novel, Plath's last, and so on. The likelihood is that a couple of them still exist; Bruno Schulz's is probably in old KGB files somewhere, or has been 'moved on' through various owners post the Soviet breakup; Plath's may well be amongst the papers Ted Hughes left to the University of Georgia, which cannot be looked at until 2022. The quality of these essays varies wildly, from a repellently flippant one on Hemingway, and a really silly one on Byron, to the tender one on Schulz, and a revealing stab at Walter Benjamin. On the whole it feels a bit too much on the light side, almost like it's a capitalisation on the books-on-books craze which seems to be current, which appears to have its monuments, but also a lot of dross. Perhaps, if I could read Italian, I would find here much more than this translation advertises.