Ian Mond Reviews Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, C. D. Rose (Melville House 978-1-68589-084-1, $19.99, 224pp, tp) January 2024.

I love a lot of books. But I also love a lot of authors. This means that I rarely read more than one book by a writer in any given year. What I certainly don’t do is buy a new (to me) author’s back cata­logue, even if I adored their work. I know it’ll be years before I ever get around to those books, if I ever do. So, colour me surprised when, having finished C. D. Rose’s new collection, I purchased everything he’s written, including two collections and a novel. That’s how much I adored Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea.

Many of the nineteen stories collected in Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea are about objects and people that are either lost, forgotten, or unseen. Undergirding this is an epistemic fascination with time as presented by a single photo or the still images that form a moving picture. The opening piece, “Ognosia” (the title a hat tip to Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, who coined the term), takes place in a hotel bar where a journalist prepares to interview a photographer whose latest book sits before him, unnerved that the final image is of the very bar he’s sitting in, as if “the picture had been taken a few hours earlier.” The story, however, abruptly shifts point of view, jumping into the thoughts of those in the bar, until we circle back to our journalist, who, having observed everything we’ve read, makes sense of that final photo (an example of ognosia, drawing meaning from disparate events). There’s an elegance to the story’s composition (this is true of all of Rose’s work), the seamless baton-passing of perspectives that suggests an eternal present.

“Ognosia” is followed by a trilogy of stories that further cement this connection between photography, cinema, and the nature of time. “The Disappearer”, “Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man”, and “Everything is Subject to Motion, Everything is Motion’s Subject” concern three French pioneers of the still and moving image: Hippolyte Bayard, Etienne-Jules Marey, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince. All three pieces had me running to Google and YouTube to learn more about these unique individuals. Bayard, for example, took the first hoax photo of his own drowned body as part of an ongoing tussle with the physicist François Arago to perfect the process of heliography. Marey invented the photographic gun and developed chronophotography, both used for scientific imaging but ultimately co-opted by cinema. The stories they feature in are glimpses into their lives, into their attempts to capture a single moment of time. But it’s “The Disappearer”, the tale about Le Prince, that got under my skin. In telling us that Le Prince, who technically invented the mo­tion picture, vanished without a trace, Rose ties his disappearance to the Lumiere Brother’s first movie, “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat”. How Rose accomplishes this is both brilliant and unsettling.

These aren’t the only historical figures to appear in the collection. We get a second trilogy of stories featuring great thinkers from the past. Fittingly, the French analytical philosopher Henri Bergson appears in the aptly titled story “Henri Bergson Writes About Time”. Fittingly because one of Bergson’s theories, cleverly evoked in the way time passes in the story with an elderly Bergson fixated on his notes and typewriter, is about how we perceive objective and subjective time. In the amusing “St. Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed”, the famed Bishop of Hippo – who meditated on time’s relationship with the Divine – finds himself wasting time, sucked in by the dopamine hit of Twitter’s algorithm. Then there’s the melancholy but beautiful title story, “Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea”, where the titular German Jewish phi­losopher and literary critic steps out of time into an alternate reality where he escapes Nazi Ger­many for Los Angeles, spending his days a little bit bored but in love with cinema, imagining his life as a private eye. The story carries a punch for those who know that Benjamin, tragically, never reached America. He took his own life before he was deported back to France. Even without that knowledge, it’s still a tremendous, melancholy bit of writing.

The passage of time, its ability to make us remember and forget, is central to stories like “Sister”, a surreal tale of a woman (the sister of the title) lost in the crevices of time – the gaps between then and now. In the darkly funny “The Neva Star”, three mostly forgotten Russian sailors, all named Sergei, spend three years dry-docked on a tanker ship, refusing to disembark until they’re paid the money they’re due. For them, time can only be measured in their dreams and countless chess games, which “Sergei always wins.” The collection’s final tale, “Things That Flicker, Things That Fade”, much like the opening piece, is about the multitude of stories caught in a single image, a frozen moment. All this play with time and space, things seen and unseen, reaches its magnificent apotheosis with “What Remains of Claire Blanck”, a story about form and structure where the narra­tive has been removed, leaving us with white space and footnotes from an eager translator who has annotated the piece.

My favourite story, though, isn’t so much about time or photography or things unseen but rather about the craft of storytelling. Entitled “A Brief History of the Short Story”, Rose delivers a know­ing pastiche of French, Russian, and American fiction of the 19th and 20th Century, deconstruct­ing the form. Like the “Claire Blanck” piece, this story should not work; it does because it’s written with a passion, a love for literary fiction. And it’s this love, infectious in quality, that saw me buy all that Rose has written and why you should get your hands on Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea.

This review and more like it in the February 2024 issue of Locus.

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