Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea

November 1, 2023
After the enthrallingly silly mock-Gothic tales of The Blind Accordionist (2021), supposedly the short stories sought by a C. D. Rose in his earlier Who's Who When Everyone Is Someone Else (2018), Rose's latest collection breaks from that self-created world. The opener, "The Disappearer," is an essay-like tale expounding on the origins of cinema, particularly Louis Le Prince, the creator of a motion picture camera, seemingly captured in the few seconds of the Lumi�re brothers' first film. How video and photography frame and distort memory is a persistent theme, particularly in ""Self-Portrait of a Drowned Man," "In Love with a German Film Star," and the haunting "Trouv�," in which the narrator finds a portrait of themself in a curious Paris shop. Rose's fiction perhaps shines the brightest when his stories demonstrate the possibilities of the form, such as "What Remains of Claire Blanck," in which the reader must piece together a narrative from Nabokovian footnotes. Taut, serene prose draws the reader into the labyrinthine world of these obliquely connected stories. Released from his self-imposed constraints, Rose presents his finest works yet.

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November 27, 2023
Rose (The Blind Accordionist) ruminates in this erudite collection on literature, photography, and philosophy. In “Ognosia,” a man waits in a bar to interview a photographer, whose enigmatic photos devoid of people suggest that the spaces depicted are waiting for people to arrive. While the writer kills time, he considers the work’s theme while watching other patrons wait for those on the way to meet them. “Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man” takes its title from an image by 19th-century French photographer Hippolyte Bayard in which he documents his simulated suicide in response to being overlooked in favor of the famous Louis Daguerre. In “Proud Woman, Pearl Necklace, Twenty Years,” a teacher of English as a second language fancies himself a storyteller in the oral tradition as he attempts to bridge his students’ disparate cultural and linguistic origins by summarizing from memory an unnamed literary classic with allusions to de Maupassant and Gogol. The lightest story on offer is the hilariously anachronistic “St. Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed,” in which the theologian stresses about his “brand” and negatively compares himself to Sts. Jerome and Ambrose. This well-rounded assemblage manages to be both entertaining and thought-provoking.