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Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea
“A book that belongs on the same shelf as Italo Calvino’s “ If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, ” Nabokov’s “ Pale Fire ”, and several works by Zoran Zivkovic, Stanislaw Lem and David Markson.” — Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
A collection of entrancing literary fables from an underrated master of the form …
Perfect for the fans of David Mitchell, Julio Cortázar and Steven Barthelme are these 15 dreamlike tales.
Welcome to the fictional universe of C. D. Rose, whose stories seem to be set in some unidentifiable but vaguely Mitteleuropean nation, and likewise have an uncanny sense of timelessness — the time could be some cobblestoned Victorian past era, or the present, or even the future.
In these 19 dreamlike tales, ghosts of the past mingle with the quiddities of modernity in a bewitching stew where lost masterpieces surface with translations in an invisible language, where image and photograph become mystically entwined, and where the very nature of reality takes on a shimmering sense of possibility and illusion.
“Every madness is logical to its owner,” one of Rose’s characters says. And it is that line — between logic and madness — that Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea walks with such assuredness and imagination.
A collection of entrancing literary fables from an underrated master of the form …
Perfect for the fans of David Mitchell, Julio Cortázar and Steven Barthelme are these 15 dreamlike tales.
Welcome to the fictional universe of C. D. Rose, whose stories seem to be set in some unidentifiable but vaguely Mitteleuropean nation, and likewise have an uncanny sense of timelessness — the time could be some cobblestoned Victorian past era, or the present, or even the future.
In these 19 dreamlike tales, ghosts of the past mingle with the quiddities of modernity in a bewitching stew where lost masterpieces surface with translations in an invisible language, where image and photograph become mystically entwined, and where the very nature of reality takes on a shimmering sense of possibility and illusion.
“Every madness is logical to its owner,” one of Rose’s characters says. And it is that line — between logic and madness — that Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea walks with such assuredness and imagination.
224 pages, Paperback
Published January 23, 2024
About the author
C.D. Rose
15 books23 followersC. D. ROSE is a writer of short fiction and novels. He has published three books, The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, Who's Who When Everyone is Someone Else, and The Blind Accordionist. A new collection of stories is coming soon.
His major influences are Calvino, Borges, Georges Perec and Danilo Kis. He is at home anywhere there are dusty second-hand bookshops, quiet libraries, and dark bars.
He is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow in Residence at the University of Manchester, UK.
His major influences are Calvino, Borges, Georges Perec and Danilo Kis. He is at home anywhere there are dusty second-hand bookshops, quiet libraries, and dark bars.
He is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow in Residence at the University of Manchester, UK.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
November 25, 2024
The art of disappearance - meeting the art of finding
Every great story has one line that is its heart, its vital essence concentrated in but a few words, its lambent core. This is the one line that illuminates everything, that lets us feel the story, a story of things that flicker, things that fade.
Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is an amusing, imaginative and playful collection of 19 short stories which revolve around recurrent and connected motives and themes like time, disappearance, vanishing, getting lost and found – the evanescence of things, people and words. In the story What remains of Claire Blanck only the footnotes remain, the actual story they are commenting on has vanished. Nonetheless the footnotes give the impression to reflect on other stories in the collection, the blanked out words on the almost white pages illustrating the leitmotif of disappearance, emphasizing what went missing, was omitted or deleted: All short stories are about loss, but more, perhaps, about the traces things leave behind. All short stories are ghost stories.. A man witnesses how his belongings and furniture are gradually disappearing from his flat (One art). A brother tries to keep an eye on his sister but cannot hold on to her (Sister).
All these books, she said, their pages are empty, perfect blanks until you begin to read.
There is a sense of gentle enchantment to these dreamlike stories, of which some have a fabular quality (The Neva Star, Violons and pianos are horses, with a nod to Nietzsche). A few are inspired by factual material drawn from the history of film and photography, forgotten pioneers like a Hippolyte Bayard who protested against the lack of recognition he faced by staging a picture of himself as a drowned man.
Photography is a way of creating permanence where none exists.
Some stories – in a way perhaps all the stories - thematize the art of storytelling, reflecting on the process of writing, documenting how the aspiring short story writer correlates to the masters of the short story genre – Chekhov inevitably but also French and American and other Russian authors (Gogol, Kharms, Dovlatov, Zoshchenko ) (A brief history on the short story: I wish for a skilled pen, the careful placing of each element, the timing of a slow reveal to a crushing truth. On the moment you might pounce Borges! Carver! Rose steals your thunder and throws the name on the table himself. Rather than simply exaggerating in casual namedropping however, Rose makes it part of the fun, toying with Bergson, Walter Benjamin and St Augustine in an airy and humorous way that reminded me of the short stories of Antonio Tabucchi. Only in one – rather sweet - story I wondered about the need to give away the author of the story that is on the menu of the English class (Proud woman, pearl necklace, twenty years). A story titled by the song I’m in love with a German film star that is entirely constructed from and structured through songs made me smile. There is nothing like music from one’s younger days that can rekindle memories of strong feelings (All cats are grey, Struggle for pleasure, Four hours).
If only life had a shape. If only life had the sense of a story.
The titular story – an exercise in alternate history - and the focus of the art of storytelling reminded me that for a short time I had access to a digital copy of Walter Benjamin’s own fiction The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness that expired before I could read it, which in the light of Rose’s theme strikes me as apt as well as ironic. An adroit, cheerful and charming collection which is well-worth reading, Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea also has the merit to rekindle my curiosity about that collection, if only to experience these acute words of Benjamin on storytelling within the text they belong: The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life to be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story.
Thanks to the author, Melville House Publishing, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.
(Illustrations by Yedai Art)
Every great story has one line that is its heart, its vital essence concentrated in but a few words, its lambent core. This is the one line that illuminates everything, that lets us feel the story, a story of things that flicker, things that fade.
Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is an amusing, imaginative and playful collection of 19 short stories which revolve around recurrent and connected motives and themes like time, disappearance, vanishing, getting lost and found – the evanescence of things, people and words. In the story What remains of Claire Blanck only the footnotes remain, the actual story they are commenting on has vanished. Nonetheless the footnotes give the impression to reflect on other stories in the collection, the blanked out words on the almost white pages illustrating the leitmotif of disappearance, emphasizing what went missing, was omitted or deleted: All short stories are about loss, but more, perhaps, about the traces things leave behind. All short stories are ghost stories.. A man witnesses how his belongings and furniture are gradually disappearing from his flat (One art). A brother tries to keep an eye on his sister but cannot hold on to her (Sister).
All these books, she said, their pages are empty, perfect blanks until you begin to read.
There is a sense of gentle enchantment to these dreamlike stories, of which some have a fabular quality (The Neva Star, Violons and pianos are horses, with a nod to Nietzsche). A few are inspired by factual material drawn from the history of film and photography, forgotten pioneers like a Hippolyte Bayard who protested against the lack of recognition he faced by staging a picture of himself as a drowned man.
Photography is a way of creating permanence where none exists.
Some stories – in a way perhaps all the stories - thematize the art of storytelling, reflecting on the process of writing, documenting how the aspiring short story writer correlates to the masters of the short story genre – Chekhov inevitably but also French and American and other Russian authors (Gogol, Kharms, Dovlatov, Zoshchenko ) (A brief history on the short story: I wish for a skilled pen, the careful placing of each element, the timing of a slow reveal to a crushing truth. On the moment you might pounce Borges! Carver! Rose steals your thunder and throws the name on the table himself. Rather than simply exaggerating in casual namedropping however, Rose makes it part of the fun, toying with Bergson, Walter Benjamin and St Augustine in an airy and humorous way that reminded me of the short stories of Antonio Tabucchi. Only in one – rather sweet - story I wondered about the need to give away the author of the story that is on the menu of the English class (Proud woman, pearl necklace, twenty years). A story titled by the song I’m in love with a German film star that is entirely constructed from and structured through songs made me smile. There is nothing like music from one’s younger days that can rekindle memories of strong feelings (All cats are grey, Struggle for pleasure, Four hours).
If only life had a shape. If only life had the sense of a story.
The titular story – an exercise in alternate history - and the focus of the art of storytelling reminded me that for a short time I had access to a digital copy of Walter Benjamin’s own fiction The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness that expired before I could read it, which in the light of Rose’s theme strikes me as apt as well as ironic. An adroit, cheerful and charming collection which is well-worth reading, Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea also has the merit to rekindle my curiosity about that collection, if only to experience these acute words of Benjamin on storytelling within the text they belong: The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life to be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story.
Thanks to the author, Melville House Publishing, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.
(Illustrations by Yedai Art)
March 18, 2024
All short stories are ghost stories.
Many thanks to Ilse for alerting me to this wonderful collection of possibilities. Some gray mornings I’m like Bergson imagining eternity in a demitasse. Why has it grown so cold? Perhaps I should grow a mustache, then shave it and become a detective—if only to wear a hat.
Most matters here are meta, toying with the architecture of the story while perhaps taunting the reader with footnotes to an absent narrative. I felt eerily at home in junk shops and on halted trains and cargo ships. Perhaps exposition on photography and nascent cinema would fill in the gaps?
St Augustine on Twitter was my favorite episode though each piece elicited marvel and mirth.
Many thanks to Ilse for alerting me to this wonderful collection of possibilities. Some gray mornings I’m like Bergson imagining eternity in a demitasse. Why has it grown so cold? Perhaps I should grow a mustache, then shave it and become a detective—if only to wear a hat.
Most matters here are meta, toying with the architecture of the story while perhaps taunting the reader with footnotes to an absent narrative. I felt eerily at home in junk shops and on halted trains and cargo ships. Perhaps exposition on photography and nascent cinema would fill in the gaps?
St Augustine on Twitter was my favorite episode though each piece elicited marvel and mirth.
November 22, 2024
Shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2024
10. While this passage is stubbornly opaque, we must remember that the short form, inevitably, means a writer has to edit, admit, delete.
11 Such editing, admitting, and deleting means that form and content become indivisible. All short stories are about loss.
Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is a collection of stories by C.D. Rose published by the independent Melville House Publishing, in turns innovative, literary, varied, erudite and magical with underpinning themes of connection and loss.
The cover proudly wears the Wall Street Journal review quote for his The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure "Rose is an appealing crank ...", and a good feel from an author can often be obtained from the writers and the publishers they admire, and from a 2018 interview in Outsideleft
The opening story, Ognosia, which sets the tone for the collection, takes its title from a neologism coined by Olga Tokarczuk in Jennifer Croft's translation in an essay at World Without Borders:
The story itself is set in a pub in the evening, the narrative perspective switching rapidly from one of those there to another, as we (but not they) see the connections between them.
The Dissapearer is based on the story of Louis Le Prince an early pioneer in the art of motion pictures and arguably maker of the first, or at least the oldest surviving, film with his very brief 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene. Le Prince mysteriously disappeared in 1890 and various theories surround this, including that he might have been nobbled by those supporting rival inventors - indeed Edison's work only began after Le Prince's.
A similar theme - early pioneers who work, and particularly any historical credit for that work, is largely lost - continues in the next story, "Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man" which in this case centres on Hippolyte Bayard, a contemporary of Daguerre in the pioneering photography. In 1840 Bayard produces a haunting auto-portrait, a faked photo of his own death by drowning, designed to draw attention to both the possibilities opened up my his invention but also his despair at how his own progress was being ignored by the French government in favour of Daguerre's.
The photo was inscribed on the back:
Le cadavre du monsieur que vous voyez ci-derrière est celui de M. Bayard, l’inventeur du procédé dont vous venez de voir et dont vous allez voir les merveilleux résultats. À ma connaissance, il y a à peu près trois ans que cet ingénieux et infatigable chercheur s’occupait à perfectionner son invention. L’Académie, le Roi, et tous ceux qui ont vu ses dessins, que lui trouvait imparfaits, les ont admirés comme vous les admirez en ce moment. Cela lui a fait beaucoup d’honneur et ne lui a pas valu un liard. Le gouvernement, qui avait beaucoup trop donné à M. Daguerre, a dit ne pouvoir rien faire pour M. Bayard et le malheureux s’est noyé ! Oh ! instabilité des choses humaines ! Les artistes, les savants, les journaux se sont occupés de lui pendant longtemps et aujourd’hui qu’il y a plusieurs jours qu’il est exposé à la Morgue, personne ne l’a encore reconnu ni réclamé ! Messieurs et Dames, passons à d’autres, de crainte que votre odorat ne soit affecté, car la figure du Monsieur et ses mains commencent à pourrir, comme vous pouvez le remarquer. H.B., 18 October 1840.
In Rose's translation:
The corpse that you see before you is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process whose marvellous results you are witnessing. To the best of my knowledge, this ingenious man and indefatigable seeker had been working to perfect his invention for almost three years. The Academy, the King, and all those who have seen his images—which he found imperfect—have admired them as you admire them in this moment. This brought him great honour, and yet he was not worth a quarter of a sou. The government, so generous with M. Daguerre, said it could do nothing for M. Bayard, so the unfortunate man drowned himself Oh, the instability of all that is human! Artists, experts, and newspapers so long occupied themselves with him, yet for several days now he has been lying on show in the morgue, and no one has either recognised or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, pass by for fear your sense of smell should be offended: the man's face and hands are, as you can see, beginning to rot. H.B., 18 October 1840.
Similarly "Everything is Subject to Motion, Everything is Motion's Subject" focuses on the polymath Étienne-Jules Marey whose "work was significant in the development of cardiology, physical instrumentation, aviation, cinematography and the science of laboratory photography" (per Wikipedia).
If those three stories are based on real-life stories of pioneers whose contribution has rather been lost, "I'm In Love With A German Film Star" is that of a ficticious (I think!) actress, also rather obscure and whose ultimate fate is unknown, told through films in which she appeared and songs which evoke her to the narrator, starting with the titular 1981 track from The Passions.
THE PASSIONS—‘I’M IN LOVE WITH A GERMAN FILM STAR’ (POLYDOR 7”, 1981)
Four slow notes of shiver, blush, echoplex, and delay, then a tiny cascade, a shimmer, and a drop. A perfectly distracted rhythm section. A cold glow of voice. Not the first record I ever bought, but the first time I ever heard music.
It's a glamorous world. It hadn't been but now it was.
THE CURE—‘ALL CATS ARE GREY’ (FROM FAITH, FICTION, 1981)
I lay on the threadbare carpet in my room and watched the lights from passing cars throw abstract movies across the walls. I’d put this on and the room became a cathedral of shadow and smoke. It’s the last track on side one and the tone arm on my record player didn’t work properly so the music faded into the hiss and scratch of the runout groove. Even then, I knew that somewhere out there, Magda was listening to this, too.
LA DÜSSELDORF—‘SILVER CLOUD’ (TELDEC 7”, 1976)
I wouldn’t hear this until much later, but when I did I knew that Magda had spent the long summer of 1976 dancing to it with a boy called Andreas or Jürgen or Max who was not worthy of her.
BERNTHØLER—‘MY SUITOR’ (BLANCO Y NEGRO 7”, 1984)
A video shop had opened between the chippy and the florist and as if by accident or magic they had a small section of the titles I only ever saw namechecked in the NME or showing at the Aaben in Hulme. The owner didn’t seem to know what certificate they were and didn’t blink when I checked out Herzen und Knochen. It isn’t her best film, but it was enough.
Magda’s luminous face appears fifteen minutes in. Her first word—zwischen���is a mere preposition that becomes a jouissant epiphany as she says it. All my future lay in those five phonemes.
John Peel played this record around the same time, but I couldn’t get hold of it until it received a UK release nearly a year later. For some reason I became convinced that Magda was the singer, even though I knew it wasn’t her. I could hear her, I thought, singing to me through it. The last scene of the film would have been so much better had this been its soundtrack.
"One Art" continues the theme of loss. A tale of a man who starts to lose things, at first ordinarily (misplaced keys) but later the world arounds his starts to disappear; interspersed with a woman (his former partner?) who hears strange voices in her house. The story takes it's title from Elizabeth Bishop's poem, which begins:
Other stories focus on the art of the short story. "A Brief History of the Short Story" contains three stories, set in different times and places, and told respectively in the style of the French, Russian and American short-story and all connected (the protagonists of the 2nd and 3rd story are reading the previous story). "Proud Woman, Pearl Necklace, Twenty Years" has an English as a Foreign Language teacher using Maupassant's The Necklace (La Parure in the original) as an aid, getting the students to deduce the story from those six words and a series of yes/no questions.
And another, What Remains of Claire Blanck, purports to be a new and annotated translation of a story by (the ficticious) Gregor Nilz - except all we get are the footnotes, with the story itself lost into the whiteness of the page:
And my review only touches on some of the 19 stories in the book.
Recommended.
10. While this passage is stubbornly opaque, we must remember that the short form, inevitably, means a writer has to edit, admit, delete.
11 Such editing, admitting, and deleting means that form and content become indivisible. All short stories are about loss.
Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is a collection of stories by C.D. Rose published by the independent Melville House Publishing, in turns innovative, literary, varied, erudite and magical with underpinning themes of connection and loss.
The cover proudly wears the Wall Street Journal review quote for his The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure "Rose is an appealing crank ...", and a good feel from an author can often be obtained from the writers and the publishers they admire, and from a 2018 interview in Outsideleft
Outsideleft: How do you feel about that debate, you know old school publishers vs. new school indies... Didn't some super famous writer David Cay Johnston, joined the same publisher as you based partly on their engagement with new technology...
CD Rose: I don’t know if it’s an argument about tech or not, but I do see most of the interesting work in new writing coming from independent presses right now. Fitzcarraldo, Galley Beggar, Dostoevsky Wannabe, And Other Stories, Penned in the Margins, Influx, Unthank, Salt, Myriad, Comma, Melville House – that’s only a few. They’re not hampered by massive corporate structures, and all the gate-keeping palaver of agents and marketeers and such.
...
Outsideleft: Other writers you think we should admire?
CD Rose: Machado de Assis, Camilla Grudova, Eley Williams, Ali Smith, Daniil Kharms, Robert Aickman, Lydia Davis, Irenosen Okojie, Isaac Babel, Ann Quin, China Miéville, Petrus Borel…how many do you want? Read the lesser-known works of well-known writers – they’re often the most interesting ones.
The opening story, Ognosia, which sets the tone for the collection, takes its title from a neologism coined by Olga Tokarczuk in Jennifer Croft's translation in an essay at World Without Borders:
Ognosia (French ognosie, Polish ognozja)—a narratively oriented, ultrasynthetic process that, reflecting objects, situations, and phenomena, tries to organize them into a higher interdependent meaning; cf. → plenitude. Colloquially: the ability to approach problems synthetically by looking for order both in narratives themselves and in details, small parts of the whole.
The story itself is set in a pub in the evening, the narrative perspective switching rapidly from one of those there to another, as we (but not they) see the connections between them.
The Dissapearer is based on the story of Louis Le Prince an early pioneer in the art of motion pictures and arguably maker of the first, or at least the oldest surviving, film with his very brief 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene. Le Prince mysteriously disappeared in 1890 and various theories surround this, including that he might have been nobbled by those supporting rival inventors - indeed Edison's work only began after Le Prince's.
A similar theme - early pioneers who work, and particularly any historical credit for that work, is largely lost - continues in the next story, "Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man" which in this case centres on Hippolyte Bayard, a contemporary of Daguerre in the pioneering photography. In 1840 Bayard produces a haunting auto-portrait, a faked photo of his own death by drowning, designed to draw attention to both the possibilities opened up my his invention but also his despair at how his own progress was being ignored by the French government in favour of Daguerre's.
The photo was inscribed on the back:
Le cadavre du monsieur que vous voyez ci-derrière est celui de M. Bayard, l’inventeur du procédé dont vous venez de voir et dont vous allez voir les merveilleux résultats. À ma connaissance, il y a à peu près trois ans que cet ingénieux et infatigable chercheur s’occupait à perfectionner son invention. L’Académie, le Roi, et tous ceux qui ont vu ses dessins, que lui trouvait imparfaits, les ont admirés comme vous les admirez en ce moment. Cela lui a fait beaucoup d’honneur et ne lui a pas valu un liard. Le gouvernement, qui avait beaucoup trop donné à M. Daguerre, a dit ne pouvoir rien faire pour M. Bayard et le malheureux s’est noyé ! Oh ! instabilité des choses humaines ! Les artistes, les savants, les journaux se sont occupés de lui pendant longtemps et aujourd’hui qu’il y a plusieurs jours qu’il est exposé à la Morgue, personne ne l’a encore reconnu ni réclamé ! Messieurs et Dames, passons à d’autres, de crainte que votre odorat ne soit affecté, car la figure du Monsieur et ses mains commencent à pourrir, comme vous pouvez le remarquer. H.B., 18 October 1840.
In Rose's translation:
The corpse that you see before you is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process whose marvellous results you are witnessing. To the best of my knowledge, this ingenious man and indefatigable seeker had been working to perfect his invention for almost three years. The Academy, the King, and all those who have seen his images—which he found imperfect—have admired them as you admire them in this moment. This brought him great honour, and yet he was not worth a quarter of a sou. The government, so generous with M. Daguerre, said it could do nothing for M. Bayard, so the unfortunate man drowned himself Oh, the instability of all that is human! Artists, experts, and newspapers so long occupied themselves with him, yet for several days now he has been lying on show in the morgue, and no one has either recognised or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, pass by for fear your sense of smell should be offended: the man's face and hands are, as you can see, beginning to rot. H.B., 18 October 1840.
Similarly "Everything is Subject to Motion, Everything is Motion's Subject" focuses on the polymath Étienne-Jules Marey whose "work was significant in the development of cardiology, physical instrumentation, aviation, cinematography and the science of laboratory photography" (per Wikipedia).
If those three stories are based on real-life stories of pioneers whose contribution has rather been lost, "I'm In Love With A German Film Star" is that of a ficticious (I think!) actress, also rather obscure and whose ultimate fate is unknown, told through films in which she appeared and songs which evoke her to the narrator, starting with the titular 1981 track from The Passions.
THE PASSIONS—‘I’M IN LOVE WITH A GERMAN FILM STAR’ (POLYDOR 7”, 1981)
Four slow notes of shiver, blush, echoplex, and delay, then a tiny cascade, a shimmer, and a drop. A perfectly distracted rhythm section. A cold glow of voice. Not the first record I ever bought, but the first time I ever heard music.
It's a glamorous world. It hadn't been but now it was.
THE CURE—‘ALL CATS ARE GREY’ (FROM FAITH, FICTION, 1981)
I lay on the threadbare carpet in my room and watched the lights from passing cars throw abstract movies across the walls. I’d put this on and the room became a cathedral of shadow and smoke. It’s the last track on side one and the tone arm on my record player didn’t work properly so the music faded into the hiss and scratch of the runout groove. Even then, I knew that somewhere out there, Magda was listening to this, too.
LA DÜSSELDORF—‘SILVER CLOUD’ (TELDEC 7”, 1976)
I wouldn’t hear this until much later, but when I did I knew that Magda had spent the long summer of 1976 dancing to it with a boy called Andreas or Jürgen or Max who was not worthy of her.
BERNTHØLER—‘MY SUITOR’ (BLANCO Y NEGRO 7”, 1984)
A video shop had opened between the chippy and the florist and as if by accident or magic they had a small section of the titles I only ever saw namechecked in the NME or showing at the Aaben in Hulme. The owner didn’t seem to know what certificate they were and didn’t blink when I checked out Herzen und Knochen. It isn’t her best film, but it was enough.
Magda’s luminous face appears fifteen minutes in. Her first word—zwischen���is a mere preposition that becomes a jouissant epiphany as she says it. All my future lay in those five phonemes.
John Peel played this record around the same time, but I couldn’t get hold of it until it received a UK release nearly a year later. For some reason I became convinced that Magda was the singer, even though I knew it wasn’t her. I could hear her, I thought, singing to me through it. The last scene of the film would have been so much better had this been its soundtrack.
"One Art" continues the theme of loss. A tale of a man who starts to lose things, at first ordinarily (misplaced keys) but later the world arounds his starts to disappear; interspersed with a woman (his former partner?) who hears strange voices in her house. The story takes it's title from Elizabeth Bishop's poem, which begins:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Other stories focus on the art of the short story. "A Brief History of the Short Story" contains three stories, set in different times and places, and told respectively in the style of the French, Russian and American short-story and all connected (the protagonists of the 2nd and 3rd story are reading the previous story). "Proud Woman, Pearl Necklace, Twenty Years" has an English as a Foreign Language teacher using Maupassant's The Necklace (La Parure in the original) as an aid, getting the students to deduce the story from those six words and a series of yes/no questions.
And another, What Remains of Claire Blanck, purports to be a new and annotated translation of a story by (the ficticious) Gregor Nilz - except all we get are the footnotes, with the story itself lost into the whiteness of the page:
And my review only touches on some of the 19 stories in the book.
Recommended.
January 23, 2024
Excellent collection of short stories. I enjoyed the style, themes and writing, there’s mystery, history, real people. Many of the stories are about early photography and film, music, writing and philosophy. My favourite stories were: ‘I’m in love with German film star’ the narrators lifelong obsession with a minor actress told in songs; ‘Sister’ the narrators sister has a strange relationship with time and disappears; ‘A Brief History of the Short Story’ a comparison of the different style of French, Russian and American short stories told in three short stories, very well done!; ‘Proud Woman, Pearl Necklace, Twenty Years’ teacher uses Maupassant’s The Necklace to teach his English language students.
September 20, 2023
An incredible collection of literary short-stories by C.D. Rose. The first half of the book I was unsure what I was reading and was rather irritated with the lack of flow or logic. In time, I came to realize my approach to the book was all wrong. My expectations were ill-fitting: these are explorations in story-telling by a clever and imaginative author. They are introspective thoughts on the subjective experience of time and so much more.
Each story is unique in delivery and tone. Contemplative. Slightly eerie. Seldom confusing. Often intentionally giving plenty of space for interpretation or telling you that’s exactly what they’re doing. This is a book about the art of short-story writing and Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is itself a work of art.
A view of my favorites:
1)History of the Short Story
2)Arkady Who Couldn’t See and Artem Who Couldn’t Hear
3)What remains of Claire Blanck
4)Henri Bergson Writes About Time
Thank you to NetGalley and Melville House Publishing for sharing this title with me.
Each story is unique in delivery and tone. Contemplative. Slightly eerie. Seldom confusing. Often intentionally giving plenty of space for interpretation or telling you that’s exactly what they’re doing. This is a book about the art of short-story writing and Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is itself a work of art.
A view of my favorites:
1)History of the Short Story
2)Arkady Who Couldn’t See and Artem Who Couldn’t Hear
3)What remains of Claire Blanck
4)Henri Bergson Writes About Time
Thank you to NetGalley and Melville House Publishing for sharing this title with me.
Read
July 13, 2024C. D. Rose is so unsubtle in his fanfiction collection it’s distracting. If you are unfamiliar with Barthes or Benjamin’s fable-like musings on art, photography, and history, you won’t be tempted to look for particular passages to draw parallels and therefore might enjoy these mini-essays/stories more than I did.
Read
December 6, 2023Nineteen playful, surreal, unexpected stories dealing with people or objects that have vanished or been forgotten. There’s a story free of words, except for the footnotes that hint at what we might have read. Or the story where St Augustine becomes addicted to Twitter. Or the piece where two brothers on a train (one sight impaired, one hearing impaired) tell their life story through matchstick models. We’ve got several tales of “forgotten” historical figures like Le Prince, who made the first film (the story brilliantly ties Le Prince into the Lumieres’ L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat) and Hippolyte Bayard (cinema and photography is a recurring motif). And we’ve got a vanishing sister, lost in time, that plays into another theme in the collection - how we perceive time and space (hello, Henri Bergson, who’s also in here). You can also expect a bit of Walter Benjamin (the titular tale he features is a melancholy masterpiece). These stories made me very happy. Pure, undiluted catnip. Buy it when it’s published early next year.
October 23, 2023
I understand that this a collection of literary fables, but I could not make heads or tales of it at all. I think often times with these types of books authors cover there lack of articulation through characterization of the book as literary. When I’m reality, it is not asking too much as a reader that a story have some flow and a through line. And in a collection of essays or stories, there ought o me a consistent theme or idea or exploration otherwise what would be the purpose of including a bunch of random disjointed stories together. Your writing is not any better and your not more intellectual because you purposefully write a story in a convoluted way. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the author is trying to say or what I am supposed to glean from any of these almost stream of consciousness stories. Not for me, not a fan.
January 8, 2024
This book was fascinating to me as someone who studied photography, a subject often mentioned, and as someone who’s in love with the act of storytelling itself.
It holds the reader’s attention to subjects that would otherwise be rather boring, such as the concepts of time, memory and visual representation.
I didn’t fall in love with every short stort, but it was an interesting read and i really liked the author’s sense of humor.
Something I believe this is lacking is the presence of some visual support, because it’s a bit frustrating when specific photographs keep getting mentioned in some short stories and you have to stop reading to go look them up.
Ironically, one of the short stories that i least liked was the one that gives the name to the book.
Some of my favorite short stories were: Arkady who couldn’t see and Artem who couldn’t hear; Sister; Trouvé and Proud Woman (...).
It holds the reader’s attention to subjects that would otherwise be rather boring, such as the concepts of time, memory and visual representation.
I didn’t fall in love with every short stort, but it was an interesting read and i really liked the author’s sense of humor.
Something I believe this is lacking is the presence of some visual support, because it’s a bit frustrating when specific photographs keep getting mentioned in some short stories and you have to stop reading to go look them up.
Ironically, one of the short stories that i least liked was the one that gives the name to the book.
Some of my favorite short stories were: Arkady who couldn’t see and Artem who couldn’t hear; Sister; Trouvé and Proud Woman (...).
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December 25, 2024In Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, his fourth book, British author C.D. Rose considers the nature of appearance and, more importantly, disappearance. Rose's primary fascination lies in experimenting with form: in "Ognosia" (the term was invented in 2022 by Olga Tokarczuk to mean "the ability to approach problems synthetically by looking for order both in narratives themselves and in details, small parts of the whole"), for instance, the narrative perspective passes from character to character like a baton in a relay race.
In "Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man," Rose tells the real-life story of Hippolyte Bayard, a French pioneer in the world of photograph, who notoriously produced a fake photograph of himself as if he had drowned. "Things missing," writes Rose. "That is what his body would record: his photograph, his absence. His earliest pictures are fading now, and will soon disappear altogether, leaving nothing but faintly stained paper" (38).
Perhaps Rose's most extraordinary experiment is "What Remains of Claire Blanck," which purports to be a "new and annotated translation" of a story by the fictional author Gregor Nilz. The "story," however, consists of several blank pages punctuated only by footnotes, in which the "translator" remarks on the "nuances" of the story and speculates about what it all means.
Rose's work is challenging in the best modernist, experimental tradition, and so while it is not always easy to read, its playful approach to the short story form is quite brilliant.
In "Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man," Rose tells the real-life story of Hippolyte Bayard, a French pioneer in the world of photograph, who notoriously produced a fake photograph of himself as if he had drowned. "Things missing," writes Rose. "That is what his body would record: his photograph, his absence. His earliest pictures are fading now, and will soon disappear altogether, leaving nothing but faintly stained paper" (38).
Perhaps Rose's most extraordinary experiment is "What Remains of Claire Blanck," which purports to be a "new and annotated translation" of a story by the fictional author Gregor Nilz. The "story," however, consists of several blank pages punctuated only by footnotes, in which the "translator" remarks on the "nuances" of the story and speculates about what it all means.
Rose's work is challenging in the best modernist, experimental tradition, and so while it is not always easy to read, its playful approach to the short story form is quite brilliant.
November 7, 2024
i really dug the first few short stories and was thinking "oh cool is this gonna be a sort of sebald-y kind of collection about image and light with some metafiction-y exercises in between? that sounds neat." but then, to my regret, the author, the stories, or perhaps myself, began to succumb slowly but inexorably to what i can only term "MFA disease"
June 14, 2024
if you like this review i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com
240503: do not know about the claims to Jorge Luis Borges, but I can see Zivkovic Zoran etc. literary gameship at its best. ranging from Franz Kafka mitteleuropean to contemporary American post- and postpostmodern and everything in between, these short stories are written out ideas you may have thought of, treated in the best Italo Calvino ways: lightness, clarity etc... reason it is on Henri Bergson shelf: fun story that plays around with/encapsulates/his ideas in 'Henri Bergson thinks of Time'....
240503: do not know about the claims to Jorge Luis Borges, but I can see Zivkovic Zoran etc. literary gameship at its best. ranging from Franz Kafka mitteleuropean to contemporary American post- and postpostmodern and everything in between, these short stories are written out ideas you may have thought of, treated in the best Italo Calvino ways: lightness, clarity etc... reason it is on Henri Bergson shelf: fun story that plays around with/encapsulates/his ideas in 'Henri Bergson thinks of Time'....
July 18, 2024
Some of these stories had entertaining turns and characters. Others had interesting ideas embedded within them. Many were about writers and the process of writing, either explicitly or metaphorically. In all, I wasn’t blown away by the prose. While some of the commentary about loneliness, loss, and storytelling was clever, it never felt truly revelatory. Maybe if I was more familiar with Barthes or Benjamin or Borges I would have picked up better on the author’s intentions in these dreamy stories.
February 5, 2024
I truly enjoyed this collection of literary short stories.
I love a good short story, and there were so many on this collection that got me the second they started.
Some of my favorites were
Saint Augustine Checks his Twitter Feed
Sister
The Neva Star
Arkady who couldnt see and Artem who couldn’t hear
Are they a bit random? Yes. Is that what I love about short story collections? Yes.
Thank you NetGalley and Melville House Publishing for this ARC.
I love a good short story, and there were so many on this collection that got me the second they started.
Some of my favorites were
Saint Augustine Checks his Twitter Feed
Sister
The Neva Star
Arkady who couldnt see and Artem who couldn’t hear
Are they a bit random? Yes. Is that what I love about short story collections? Yes.
Thank you NetGalley and Melville House Publishing for this ARC.
February 21, 2024
I was sold on this story collection by the quirky title and the description of the stories held within. Ultimately, I was a bit disappointed, though there were some highlights.
I'd divide the stories up into two groups: some are modern-day fairy tales, with quirky scenarios and characters; the other take real-life people (primarily scientists) and look at a glimpse of their (real or imagined life). These are not hard and fast categories. For example, many of the real-life stories have more fantastical elements; think St. Augustine browsing a Twitter feed. These are the stories that ultimately lost me. They were simply too odd for me.
However, there were some highlights. I enjoyed the story "The Disappearer", of a man who invented cinema but then disappeared. I also really liked "Arkady who couldn't see and Artem who couldn't hear", a story of two twins, one blind and one deaf, who are building a matchstick model of their childhood town. Our narrator describes their different ways of remembering their past. Their process of building replicates the process of building history or a memory, which I found fascinating.
In general, I struggle a bit with shorter short stories that just tackle a single idea and then end. Many of the stories in this collection fall into that category. I wanted fewer stories that dove more into the characters and scenario. But that is more a personal preference.
Thanks to the publisher for a review copy!
I'd divide the stories up into two groups: some are modern-day fairy tales, with quirky scenarios and characters; the other take real-life people (primarily scientists) and look at a glimpse of their (real or imagined life). These are not hard and fast categories. For example, many of the real-life stories have more fantastical elements; think St. Augustine browsing a Twitter feed. These are the stories that ultimately lost me. They were simply too odd for me.
However, there were some highlights. I enjoyed the story "The Disappearer", of a man who invented cinema but then disappeared. I also really liked "Arkady who couldn't see and Artem who couldn't hear", a story of two twins, one blind and one deaf, who are building a matchstick model of their childhood town. Our narrator describes their different ways of remembering their past. Their process of building replicates the process of building history or a memory, which I found fascinating.
In general, I struggle a bit with shorter short stories that just tackle a single idea and then end. Many of the stories in this collection fall into that category. I wanted fewer stories that dove more into the characters and scenario. But that is more a personal preference.
Thanks to the publisher for a review copy!
December 12, 2023
When I first began reading these short stories, I thought that they were going to be slightly inaccessible to me. This is because the first few stories seem to be referencing very specific cultural times in specific types of media. I was not sure if this collection would just completely go over my head.
Towards the middle, I started to enjoy the stories more but still felt a lingering feeling of being left out. I am not sure why, though. I read books and stories set in Europe all of the time. I am not European, but I don't usually have this feeling of being left out. This was maybe the middle few stories, as I was taking a train from London to Edinburgh, after travelling some 6 hours from Newark, New Jersey.
On the return flight home, I began to really enjoy Rose's prose and the originality and experimental aspect of the stories (I don't know if you can get more meta than writing a short story about short stories). Overall, though, this collection felt a bit disjointed for me. I loved the stories set in "times before" that did truly feel like the fables. When we were dabbling in the modern era, it threw me off a bit.
I would definitely try something from C.D. Rose in the future! An expansion on the sailors or the Russian brothers, perhaps?
My Bookstagram :)
Towards the middle, I started to enjoy the stories more but still felt a lingering feeling of being left out. I am not sure why, though. I read books and stories set in Europe all of the time. I am not European, but I don't usually have this feeling of being left out. This was maybe the middle few stories, as I was taking a train from London to Edinburgh, after travelling some 6 hours from Newark, New Jersey.
On the return flight home, I began to really enjoy Rose's prose and the originality and experimental aspect of the stories (I don't know if you can get more meta than writing a short story about short stories). Overall, though, this collection felt a bit disjointed for me. I loved the stories set in "times before" that did truly feel like the fables. When we were dabbling in the modern era, it threw me off a bit.
I would definitely try something from C.D. Rose in the future! An expansion on the sailors or the Russian brothers, perhaps?
My Bookstagram :)
November 10, 2023
My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Melville House Publishing for an advance copy of this collection of short stories that have the sense and sensibility of old Europe, new thoughts on old philosophies, the magic and mystery of photos and cinema, and the wispy feeling of memories that never happened, or happened to others but have become a part of the public conscious.
As a reader, and this might be a problem unique to me, I have a strange relationship with short stories. I enjoy them, and number quite a few as some of the best things I have every read. However in many cases, I am a greedy reader and I would like to know more. Genre stories I understand why they have to end. The mystery is solved, the aliens have been found, the vampire has killed all the cast. And yet I still want to know more. What happens next? Where does this go? Does this character remember what his friends look like while waiting for them to arrive at the train station? That was the only problem I had with this collection of stories by C. D. Rose Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea. They ended and I wanted to know more, and at the end of the collection I wanted more stories by this very talented writer.
The stories share a lot of similar themes. Trains, photography, cinema, art, memory and the tricks that memory plays on people. They take place in a part of the world that seems like the middle of Europe, though they range in time from between the wars, to before the wars that might come in this century. The first story Ognosia, is one of my favorites and sets the mood. A man arrives by train to interview a photographer for an article at a bar, that he realizes is pictured in the book. As he looks around, other voices take over, showing the rich series of events that could be and might be all around them, until returning to the interviewer, and the possible muse that set this up. Another story that is my favorite is about a train trip through Russia with two men, telling their lives with matchstick models, sharing their difficult youth as they build buildings from the past, and taking them down at night. A ship has been abandoned with only three crew members left, stateless and alone, sharing the food that remains on the boat as the years past. A woman finds a photo of herself in a antiques store, while waiting with her boyfriend to meet friends he hasn't seen for awhile, and doesn't remember well. Memory, the past the future, dreams photos, real people all float through this stories, sometimes leaving a trace, other times not.
A wonderful collection of stories. There are things I want to type and talk about, but I don't want to ruin people's first experience with these stories. I loved the feeling, the writing, the characters and the way Rose describes the world his character's live in. Almost a parallel universe where Europe still retains its coolness and artiness. Even with similar themes the stories are all different feeling. The mix of real people, the strange death of the possible creator of motion pictures, a philosopher watching people trade luggage while thinking of his eventual fate. These stories stayed with me. Even now I think of how much I want to take a train trip, just to see what happens, even a subway ride. Well-crafted stories that really grab readers and even when the book is finished will stay with a reader.
Recommended for those who enjoy not just good short stories, but great writing. There is a strong sense of purpose and atmosphere in these stories, like Wes Anderson movies. I have not read anything by C.D. Rose before after reading this I am a fan and can't wait for more.
As a reader, and this might be a problem unique to me, I have a strange relationship with short stories. I enjoy them, and number quite a few as some of the best things I have every read. However in many cases, I am a greedy reader and I would like to know more. Genre stories I understand why they have to end. The mystery is solved, the aliens have been found, the vampire has killed all the cast. And yet I still want to know more. What happens next? Where does this go? Does this character remember what his friends look like while waiting for them to arrive at the train station? That was the only problem I had with this collection of stories by C. D. Rose Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea. They ended and I wanted to know more, and at the end of the collection I wanted more stories by this very talented writer.
The stories share a lot of similar themes. Trains, photography, cinema, art, memory and the tricks that memory plays on people. They take place in a part of the world that seems like the middle of Europe, though they range in time from between the wars, to before the wars that might come in this century. The first story Ognosia, is one of my favorites and sets the mood. A man arrives by train to interview a photographer for an article at a bar, that he realizes is pictured in the book. As he looks around, other voices take over, showing the rich series of events that could be and might be all around them, until returning to the interviewer, and the possible muse that set this up. Another story that is my favorite is about a train trip through Russia with two men, telling their lives with matchstick models, sharing their difficult youth as they build buildings from the past, and taking them down at night. A ship has been abandoned with only three crew members left, stateless and alone, sharing the food that remains on the boat as the years past. A woman finds a photo of herself in a antiques store, while waiting with her boyfriend to meet friends he hasn't seen for awhile, and doesn't remember well. Memory, the past the future, dreams photos, real people all float through this stories, sometimes leaving a trace, other times not.
A wonderful collection of stories. There are things I want to type and talk about, but I don't want to ruin people's first experience with these stories. I loved the feeling, the writing, the characters and the way Rose describes the world his character's live in. Almost a parallel universe where Europe still retains its coolness and artiness. Even with similar themes the stories are all different feeling. The mix of real people, the strange death of the possible creator of motion pictures, a philosopher watching people trade luggage while thinking of his eventual fate. These stories stayed with me. Even now I think of how much I want to take a train trip, just to see what happens, even a subway ride. Well-crafted stories that really grab readers and even when the book is finished will stay with a reader.
Recommended for those who enjoy not just good short stories, but great writing. There is a strong sense of purpose and atmosphere in these stories, like Wes Anderson movies. I have not read anything by C.D. Rose before after reading this I am a fan and can't wait for more.
March 20, 2024
Thank you to Netgallet for the eARC of this book, all opinions are my own.
I had a great time reading this book. I love short stories and these were very thought provoking stories. I found myself putting the book down after each story to reflect on what I thought it meant and what the moral of the story was. Although the stories didn't make a lot of sense to me, I loved reading them and almost following the inner monologue of the author as they wrote about their daydreams. I found myself having to go back and reread to remember who the characters were as there were a lot of characters and many had similar names.
I had a great time reading this book. I love short stories and these were very thought provoking stories. I found myself putting the book down after each story to reflect on what I thought it meant and what the moral of the story was. Although the stories didn't make a lot of sense to me, I loved reading them and almost following the inner monologue of the author as they wrote about their daydreams. I found myself having to go back and reread to remember who the characters were as there were a lot of characters and many had similar names.
December 11, 2023
A really very fun collection of stories which often tend towards the Borgesian, despite their obvious and open inspiration being found in the writings of early C20th Mitteleuropa, that of Zweig and Roth and the titular Benjamin. The short story told in footnotes was excellent fun; the ghost ship full of quarantined sailors with the same names was fab; loved the twin brothers who were respectively deaf and blind. And the final story of the friends was lovely. Enjoyed! Hope this does well when it’s released
August 23, 2024
Even before Rose name drops Waiting for Godot and Italo Calvino, there is a sideways floatiness to these stories that calls the play and the author to mind. The narrative flair is such that there is little to grab onto, by design it is clear, to mimic the ephemerality of memory and the ways we try to preserve it through photography, film, and story. The pieces in this collection are mostly flash-fiction length and Rose makes the most of the available space. If you're looking to just vibe, this is the collection for you.
NetGalley provided me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
NetGalley provided me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
January 12, 2024
A book of short stories that I found each unique and interesting. In my opinion, none of them made any kind of sense to put together. But reading and taking each one in individually, made the difference for me. My favorite of them all was the one by the actual title of the book. Short stories aren’t usually something I enjoy. They tend to leave me wanting more, but I really enjoyed this.
November 3, 2023
I enjoyed this overall. The author has a vivid imagination, and writes well. I description was so good that my expectations may have been too high. Nonetheless, many scifi short story fans will enjoy this.
I really appreciate the free copy for review!!
I really appreciate the free copy for review!!
December 30, 2023
I enjoyed these heady short stories that revere European intellectuals, particularly Chekhov. I think I liked the first story the best, although the matchstick brothers was also memorable. Some of the more formalistic attempts were less successful to me.
January 10, 2024
literary, weird sets of tales. one of my favorites is the one that only hints at what's going on, as it's only told through the footnotes of a tale. another favorite are the two siblings, one who can't see and one whocan't hear. thanks for the arc.
November 12, 2024
Edgehill Short Story Prize longlisted Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea contains a series of oblique existential mysteries. A sister disappears. 3 sailors inhabit a ship stuck in port. Two brothers endlessly create their childhood home from matchsticks.
Loved it⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Loved it⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
January 30, 2024
Strange, otherworldly and yet familiar. I read this out loud. And loved it.
February 24, 2024
This is a pretty good book to read if you've run out of your books by Steven Millhauser or Benjamin Labatut.
March 26, 2024
A couple of alright stories in here, particularly the one about the brothers on the train, but mostly not really my cup of tea.
October 5, 2024
Book about short stories that has examples of different ways to write, experimenting with structure and forms of short stories and even sometimes fucking with the reader. I really liked this book.
January 1, 2025
is this too metaphorical for me or is the writing just terrible
(the writing is just terrible)
(the writing is just terrible)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews