Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea

by C.D. Rose

Genres: General Fiction; Absurdist Fiction; Magical Realism; Short Stories

Synopsis

“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.

• A journalist’s interview with an artist turns into a dizzying roundelay of memory and image.
• Two Russian brothers, one blind and one deaf, build an intricate model town during an interminable train ride across the steppe.
• An annotated discography for the works of a long-lost silent film star turns into a mysterious document of obsession.
• Three Russian sailors must find ways to pass the time on a freighter orphaned in a foreign port.
• A forgotten composer enters a nostalgic dream-world while marking time in a decaying Romanian seaport.

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.

Release date: January 23, 2024

Publisher: Melville House

Print pages: 224

Sample

Ognosia

Leidner’s train pulled in around four, too early and too late to do anything useful, so he walked the couple of miles across town to the hotel and by late afternoon was happily sitting in the back bar, a place he found familiar even though he’d never been there before. All alcoves and corners, worn seats at wide tables, narrow windows onto a side street, and dark stairwells: such places were where he belonged.

He made sure he had his back to the wall so he could see who was coming or going, set his notebook on the table, checked the battery in his phone (if the interviewee was a talker he’d need the voice recorder), then flicked through the book they’d couriered to him. It wasn’t his beat, but their regular hack was double-booked. The money would be handy, too.

‘Have a look at the pictures, ask some questions, two thousand words by next Monday,’ his editor had said. ‘You’ll recognise her when she walks in.’

Leidner was still getting over the train ride, which had been marked by an uncomfortable misrecognition. A man across the aisle had been reading a book and Leidner had squinted to see what it was, an old habit, but he couldn’t make out the title, then looked up to see the man looking back at him. For a tenth of a second they shared a glance as though they might know each other, but they didn’t. The person Leidner was thinking of lived a thousand miles away and, besides, was also dead.

This book was heavy, 120 pages of 200 gsm paper, the size of an LP. There were a couple of introductory essays, which he ignored, then the pictures. Each one (colour, full page) showed a scene set but not yet occupied. An anonymous motorway sliproad at dawn, or maybe dusk; a provincial railway station, a goods yard to its side, the tracks cutting through the frame; banked rows of plush red-velvet theatre seats, then the reverse angle—an empty stage. Each photo was a place waiting for something to happen. A small study or office centred on a desk piled with books, spines illegible; a blustery seascape; more empty streets. There were no people. Leidner found them cold, pointless. Great composition, great light, but what else? What were these pictures supposed to mean? Then the last one: It was this place. The hotel bar he was sitting in now. His seat by the window empty. All of it empty. As though the picture had been taken but a few hours earlier. 

He looked up to see if he could work out the exact angle or spot the photo had been taken from, and as he was scanning the room he again saw someone, not the same guy from the train, he thought he remembered but could not place. It was today’s thing, obviously. Leidner took a deep breath, looked away, wanting to avoid the jitters, the worries, the anxieties that came with the thought that everything might be connecting in a way he wouldn’t like at all, then looked back to find the man was still looking directly at him, though actually he wasn’t looking at Leidner at all but merely staring into the middle distance, rapt at a memory of the point in his life when he had been happiest. This had been some time ago, in the late ’90s or early noughties maybe, sitting on a beach, alone. Das had been working as a teacher and had taken a group of Spanish students on a day trip to the seaside then managed to give them all the slip, leaving them in an amusement arcade while he wandered off with the vague idea of getting a beer and sitting in the sun. He’d ended up on the beach instead with a cheese sandwich, some loose change, and nothing much else. He listened to the crunch of the pebbles under the weight of the tide, watched the light bouncing off the waves, and thought that his heart might burst for no reason other than that he was there, and alive, and when he had realised that he might never be happier this fact made him sad, as though the wave had crested.

The moment had never left him, and today he had gone back there, to the very place where it had happened, in an attempt to find it again. His old mate Griff was getting married for the third time and there was a stag. Das hadn’t wanted to go even though they’d promised it would be a quiet one, but when he saw it was there, in that place where he’d been so happy all that time ago and had never been back, he thought again. He’d get there early, go down to the beach, find the exact spot, and have his moment again. Only it hadn’t worked that way: he hadn’t been able to find the place, or even anything like it. The beach wasn’t the same one he remembered at all—not the long expanse of sand-coloured pebbles and blue water but a narrow strip of grubby sand hemmed in by an industrial port. Das wondered if he’d got the place wrong, if it hadn’t been here but somewhere else, and if his memory had been faulty or blurred all these years, if it had overlapped with one or two or more other incidents, if his perfect moment of stillness had never, in fact, happened at all.

He checked his phone again to see if any of the others were on their way yet as much as to avoid the gaze of the guy sitting by the window, now staring at him in a way that was almost creepy, then set it to ring in an hour’s time, then two hours, then three. He’d never be able to put up with the group of honking bores any gathering of more than three men inevitably became, especially if booze was involved. The phone trick was simple: a faked incoming call that he’d get up to answer, then go outside, then drift off and disappear completely. That lot would be bladdered within the hour, grown both bullish and maudlin. They’d not notice him gone for ages, if at all.

Das saw himself walking into the cooler night air, cadging a cigarette off a stranger, striking up a conversation, going on somewhere else entirely, a club, maybe, where they’d be playing thumping techno and he’d get talking to someone glamorous dressed in black and he’d get close to them and go back to theirs, that was how it would happen, then he’d wake up the next morning in a strange place, in an unfamiliar bed that would be too comfortable, ashamed, or maybe not, maybe in love again, and he’d have to explain to everyone how he’d met this person who’d come into his life like this, he’d tell the story of how he’d been on a stag do then wandered off, but it wouldn’t last because—

‘Sir, are you okay? Sir?’

‘What?’

‘Sir, are you okay?’ Lena had only just started her shift and really couldn’t be doing with crying drunks this early on a long night, especially when she was going out later and had a big one planned.

‘You didn’t look very well. Is everything all right?’

‘Sorry, no. Sorry. I’m okay, thanks. Fine. Sorry.’

Turned out the guy wasn’t drunk after all, just lost. It happened. Lena felt as though she’d intruded and backed off, leaving the man to dab his tears with a paper napkin. It’d be at least an hour before she could sneak out for a smoke.

There were two groups booked in later, but for the while it was quiet. Lena hoped Zan would turn up soon, as she was on her own at the moment and wouldn’t be able to cope with the rush. The tips never made it worthwhile unless you flirted, and there was no way she was doing that again. Lena was utterly uncut out to do this job. She liked watching, but hated participating. Zan had told her that she never got involved, that it was her default to avoid conflict, and therefore people, because people were conflict, and that she couldn’t build a personality, a life, on conflict avoidance, so when Lena had seen this rather forlorn man sitting there alone gently sobbing she’d thought she ought to do something, get involved, communicate, conflict-avoid. Besides, he looked a little bit like her brother, who she hadn’t seen in years.

She reached for the sketchbook in the pocket of her apron. It was kind of a habit, nothing more than doodles, really, perhaps more of a compulsion than a habit, this need to recreate faces, to note them, or record them, to put down something solid from the shifting mass. Zan had told her she should try selling her pictures, or showing them somewhere, but Lena didn’t really get that, it wasn’t why she did it. Zan had all sorts of ideas, like the scam, which had come to nothing because no one used cash anymore, not enough to make it worthwhile, anyhow, though now she had something involving phones that Lena was equally unsure about. Lena had only ever had one job that she’d considered ‘proper,’ and that had turned wrong after the boss had insisted on looking at her sketchbook, which, of course, had a fairly unflattering picture of him in it. The boss said it was funny, and that she was certainly talented, but Lena was fairly sure that was why, three months later, her contract hadn’t been renewed.

She hoped it wouldn’t get too busy before Zan turned up. Zan was always late. She hoped Zan would at least show before Rasputin did, anyhow. Rasputin came in every night and ordered one negroni with double Campari, which he nursed until closing. He had a disturbing stare and an exaggerated interest in Lena’s tattoos. ‘Which one of those do you regret?’ he’d asked her. What sort of a fucking question was that? Zan would have had a smart answer; Lena’s was ‘None of them.’

Lena hadn’t even managed to get the sketchbook out before someone else was calling her.

‘Excuse me, have you seen my phone?’

‘I’m sorry, I haven’t. If anything’s lost it gets handed in to the bar. I can go and ask if you like.’ 

Lena was worried that this was something to do with Zan’s scam and hoped it wasn’t. Karsh, on the other hand, was more worried about how they’d get in touch with Ginny if Ginny didn’t show soon as this was Film Club, after all, the one night each month they’d get together as they had been doing for the last ten years to go and see a film, and now Karsh had lost their phone and there was no sign of the usually punctual Ginny.

‘Can you tell me what it’s like?’ asked the waiter, but Karsh couldn’t remember anything more about the phone than it being black and shiny and phone-shaped and phone-sized, and right now was more taken by the fact that this waiter, shaved head apart, looked exactly like the actor in the film they were supposed to be going to see whose name they couldn’t remember, nor what the film was called. It had been Ginny’s turn to choose and as usual she’d chosen something art-house weirdy-beardy, not Karsh’s thing at all, but that was how Film Club worked.