Peter Mathews's Reviews > Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea

In 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.