Elizabeth Bishop said that the art of losing is not difficult to achieve. That you have to lose one thing every day, that you have to know how to let go of what was lost, which in any case was born broken in the attempt. In his new book, The Art of Losing, Pedro Ángel Palou contributes to a delightful career in literary essays. The double play of this proposal could not be more suggestive: the diaries of authors about the writing of their novels—particularly André Gide and John Steinbeck—are reviewed to unravel with the reader the impossibility of writing a novel about forgetting and dementia. This never-written novel—which seems far removed from Mecedonio Fernández—is complemented in the second part of the volume with an exploration of the novel as trauma and of the narrator as text, which is further broken down into brilliant chapters composed exclusively of aphorisms. Given his reluctance to engage in theory, Palou here proposes a poetics of the contemporary novel full of provocations and illuminations.