Always, the act of living is a struggle against the shrill of death.
In the end, inconceivable as it is, death finds a rag-tag home with us;
it sets up house-keeping, a silent guest at every meal. In small ways,
its mystery becomes ordinary.

We each feel and survive loss in our own way-and, we chronicle that
loss differently, carrying death’s muted chords, and our own desires, in
our bodies, our hearts, our minds. All around us there are “endings, diminishments,”
but when boxed into a corner, we want go on. Like chickens with our heads
cut off, we doggedly strive to relieve our angst-to escape death in its
various guises-in work, diversions, or creative acts: doing chores, building
empires, having sex. We wonder what it is that really lasts. Whether we
have a soul. What it all means.

Ironically, the things we lose are never really lost, for grief
etches them indelibly in our imaginations, ensuring their immortality-alive,
at least, for as long as we are drawing breath. Imagination becomes
the repository, the notebook, of lost things, as well as a view to the
future, a means of transcendence, in the Scrabble^®
of life. Sometimes, when you’re down and out, all you have left is to “shalagog”
it. You use all your letters in a last-ditch, nonsensical, creative effort
to stay in the game-especially when “you want something that you know you
won’t ever have.”

A veteran of loss, author Megan Staffel wasn’t afraid of failure. The
empty part is often the useful part, for it was through the “‘years of
writing and not getting published'” that Staffel not only figured out a
lot about her craft, but also found herself reborn in the bargain (Don
Lee, Postscripts).
Having become “‘thoroughly sick'” of herself as a writer, it was with her
third book, The Notebook of
Lost Things, that Staffel finally lost herself. Dropping
the first-person viewpoint, she discovered “‘the power of imagining other
people’s lives.'”

A fictive chronicling of losses in the small-town lives of five people
in upstate Paris, New York, The
Notebook of Lost Things beautifully captures the quotidian
details, the yearnings and frustrations, of everyday life. It shows with
compassion and striking clarity how commonplace events can spark creative
solutions, how mystery lies at the root of banality, how grief can be transcended
by the hopeful “maybes” of life.

© 2001 Melanie
Mineo

Melanie Mineo lives
on Long Island, NY. She teaches philosophy at Dowling College, and also
works as a consultant and a philosophical counselor.

This review first appeared online Sept 1, 2001

Categories: Fiction