The Remnants by John Hughes

A manuscript written by an Australian art historian is discovered by his son. Claiming to have found a series of lost paintings by Piero Della Francesca in Arezzo, the father's manuscript moves between Renaissance Italy and post-Revolutionary Russia - at its core is the relationship the father has with an ageing Russian emigree who, haunted by the ghost of her murdered son, claims to have nursed the poet Osip Mandelstan in his final days.

The remnants of the father's manuscripts, notebooks and Diaries are brought together through the son's commentary resulting in a deeply philosophical novel about translation between languages, cultures and, ultimately, the translation of the father into the son.

I'd like to think of each of these chapters as inventories, each one a record of something lost, different species, you might say, in this case different species of time, each chapter an inventory of a species of time about to be lost.