A Calculus of Loss and Gain

On Amina Gautier's The Loss of All Lost Things

In her short story collection, The Loss of All Lost Things, Amina Gautier exposes small scenes of misunderstanding and shares with us moments of connection. In these stories Gautier probes the inner lives of characters lost and searching, characters attempting to forge bonds, seeking redemption, and looking for answers.

In "Navigator of Culture," we witness daughters and mothers, girls and women, as they work to understand each other in a world where fathers and men are absent. In "Most Honest," we watch as a recently divorced man yearns for the family he's lost even as he fails to understand or accept his own part in his losses. In "A Cup of My Time," we enter the world of a pregnant woman who has been told she might lose a child. This is a short, spare story whose most memorable character seems to be a mere bit player—the pregnant woman's landlord and neighbor, Mrs. Majumdar, who comes over to borrow this and that and whose impact on the narrator, as well as the reader, is profound in surprising ways. In the title story, "The Loss of All Lost Things," we are presented with a catalogue of what seems to be loss without end, loss that defines who we are and what we do. While the parents in this story are coming to terms with the fact that their young son is missing, they initiate a grief-inflected meditation on loss in general, offering up a mental calculation of sorts that, while seemingly infinite in scope, can never account for the despair of each individual loss:

They are not the first to suffer loss. They try to keep it all in perspective, to think of the myriad things that have been lost. Such as:

The Ark of the Covenant. The city of Atlantis. The Dead Sea Scrolls. El Dorado. The Holy Grail. Amelia Earhart, somewhere over the Pacific. Pompeii, buried beneath volcanic ash. The RMS Titanic, at the bottom of the sea.

Other lost things are lost slowly, over time, rather than in one fell swoop. Such as:

Loss of feeling, of limb and life. Loss of blood. Loss of memory. Loss of looks, of faith and time. Loss of sanity. Teeth lost under the pillow. Long-lost relatives—ignored, forgotten, and pretended away.

They make these lists to humble themselves, remembering the way their parents attempted to cure picky eating habits with reminders of children starving in Africa, but the shaming tactic doesn't work. Try as they might to think of others who have it worse, all that they can think of is themselves.

These parents invoke a limitless loss to in some way reckon their own monumental loss, which of course they can never do. Gautier's prose here is almost prosody. She manages to step back from the particulars of this one story to offer a lyrical listing that speaks to each of us.

As with any good fiction, these stories are more than the sum of their parts. We witness characters lose what they love or question their long-held attachments, but at the same time these stories touch us in ways that can't be summed up or paraphrased.

In this collection what's left unsaid is often incredibly evocative, but there are a few times when the stories say too much, when Gautier could offer more nuance, more telling moments rather than spelling things out for us. Some of the stories are uneven, moving from lyrical and layered moments to more pedestrian prose that drops us out of the story's spell. In "Navigator of Culture" we read, "Holding a can of pear halves, she eyes me with pity and condescension. 'For your own self-respect, Hazel, please tell me you're not here to fulfill some sort of nostalgic wish to get your hair done like you used to when you were a little girl.'" It doesn't seem natural that a young woman would, in an otherwise fairly restrained conversation, suddenly offer such trenchant psychologizing. This moment would have...