Rick Gekoski is an art collector, constantly on the lookout for rare or missing works. His passion for collecting has led him to ponder the nature of absence. He longs to be the finder of James Joyce's poem Et Tu, Healy, which Joyce wrote when he was nine years old; only four lines are known. This ghostly fragment contrasts with the voluminous memoirs of Lord Byron and diaries of Philip Larkin. The Byron memoirs were burned by his executors; Gekoski finds this reprehensible. Larkin's diaries were destroyed at his own request; Gekoski is more ambivalent. The book has 15 such subjects, each described in fascinating detail and attractively limpid prose. Were the thefts of the Mona Lisa and a Maori mural justified? Certainly not the looting of artworks by the Nazis, nor the British sacking of the lost kingdom of Benin. Gekoski concludes, with typical subtlety, that "art, like life, is inevitably lost" and that we must "celebrate loss so that presence has meaning".
