Ilse's Reviews > Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea

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)