Things that flicker, things that fade. The disappearer -- Self-portrait as a drowned man -- Everything is subject to motion, everything is motion's subject -- I'm in love with a German film star -- Violins and pianos are horses -- Arkady who couldn't see and Artem who couldn't hear -- The Neva star -- Sister -- Trouve -- One art -- A brief history of the short story -- Proud woman, pearl necklace, twenty years -- What remains of Claire Blanck -- Henri Bergson writes about time -- St. Augustine checks his twitter feed -- Walter Benjamin stares at the sea -- To Athens -- Things that flicker, things that fade.
Summary:
"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."--Amazon.
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