Tag: C. D. Rose

To go with the flow, or not: We Live Here Now by C. D. Rose

In Berlin, a sound artist—or, rather, as she would have it, a silence artist—sits in an Ikea-furnished rental apartment in Berlin. She is waiting to interview for a residency she has never heard of and didn’t apply for, but when an invitation, an advance and address arrived, she decided to follow up on their offer. But what are they really offering? And who are “they”? There are more questions than answers, but even more curious to  Rachel, there was something missing in this space in which she has found herself. An echo.

The sound of her greetings had no echo, as though it had been sucked up into the airlessness of this place, into the rug and the curtains. It should have been bouncing off this floor, these bare walls and the plate glass windows. This place should be all echo but there was none, none at all.

Elsewhere, the MV Atlantic Echo is making its way from the UK to Sri Lanka bearing twelve thousand containers, existing at the intersection of eight different companies and carrying, for the first time since the pandemic, a paying passenger who generally sticks to themself. One night, as the ship is crossing the Mediterranean, the Deputy Positioning Officer, the second in command, experiences an unexplained event during his watch—strange clouds gather, his equipment briefly goes dead, and momentarily the constant  grinding, throbbing, humming and droning of the massive ship falls silent.  It marks the beginning of a series of strange phenomena that will strike the ship and its crew members.

Meanwhile, an artist is commissioned to paint a portrait of an industry leader—though the exact nature of the industry his family has made their name in is shrouded in a complex maze of techno-gibberish—but he is having trouble capturing the essence, in fact any essence of the man. In China, another man sits in a “mid-range hotel of a Tier 3 city” trying to work on his master project, well aware that his identity and his ideas have been stolen and have been replicated into multiple versions of himself, but he is pretty sure he is the original. And, endlessly riding trains on a vast, interconnected web of mostly subterranean rails, a dishevelled man sleeps, dreams, and watches passengers come and go, wondering if he himself actually exists at all.

These are just some of the characters and strange circumstances that you will encounter in C. D. Rose’s surreal take on twenty-first century reality (such as it is), We Live Here Now. This inventive novel opens with an article by a fictional art critic looking back on the work of an elusive conceptual artist named Sigismunda (or Sigi) Conrad, with particular focus on her 2015 installation, We Live Here Now, a radical exploration of space and temporality that sparked controversy when people, a cleaner and several visitors, begin to vanish. The chapters that follow are set post-pandemic, and feature characters somehow connected with her or what is known of her whereabouts since 2015, either directly or indirectly. They read like a series of loosely linked short stories, sometimes intersecting directly, or bouncing off similar themes and motifs. One can find oneself listening for echoes, and tracing the flow, so to speak.

Each chapter adapts its tone, language, and energy to its protagonist(s) and subject matter. Rose’s milieu is the art world, with forays into experimental music and film. He is not only interested in the artist and the precarious nature of their work, but in the network of shippers, dealers, fixers, and those who inhabit the broader realm of intellectual manipulators, systems thinkers, and the beautiful people who want to be wherever something is happening.  There is a sense that, at least until we near the end, each story (again, that is the best way to describe the chapters) is playing out more or less simultaneously, even if a character is recalling events from an indeterminate past. The pandemic is, at least officially, in the rearview mirror and many artists, or those in adjacent businesses, are finding their footing again following a period of disruption that has been productive for some, less so for others. The settings are at once immediate and futuristic. It’s a world, or worlds, of WhatsApp, chat bots, iPads, and AI. It’s also a world where words, especially within certain commercial and intellectual enterprises, say a lot but mean little. When Ryan, the artist commissioned to portray the wealthy business man asks him to explain what it is that he does, the response has a familiar unintelligibility:

‘I direct strategic development and practice management. I work towards high-quality design which brings added value,’ he said. ‘We harness passion, knowledge and expertise to evolve powerful and pragmatic solutions and I inform and direct the ambition and quality of our work.’ He went on, scarcely pausing. ‘I develop strategy, over-seeing legacy, ensuring quality and continuation, while always searching for new possibilities. We are building, developing and ensuring sustainable resilience.’

And yet again it’s a world where objects and recordings go missing, sounds are suddenly either completely absent, or constant and unidentifiable, where light takes on strange distorting qualities, and space defies expectations. Some chapters/stories are more firmly grounded in what we might agree is the “actual” world, while others expand into other dimensions, but most navigate the shifting liminal space between illusion and reality. In other words, they take place where we live now, or will soon.

As a collection of loosely linked short stories that sometimes directly reference one another in unexpected and delightful ways, this book is brilliant fun. Rose is playing with all kinds of ideas about art, commerce, reality, and the banality of modern society. But whether it works as a whole is less certain. The framing of the project, beginning and ending with articles about two major exhibits by the elusive artist who connects all of the intervening stories, though necessary to a point, risks undermining the overall impact which may sound strange to say. What sets itself up as a mystery, offering clues, coincidences, and unlikely connections, is at its best, more a novel ideas, a dynamic map to the myriad interrelationships that connect us in a multi-dimensional universe that exists in theory but eludes us in practice. Or is it? Rose invites us and his extensive cast of characters to traverse a Klein bottle or enter an Escher artwork, but he’s leaving us to find our own way out.

We Live Here Now by C. D. Rose is published by Melville House.

What passes and what remains: Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose

The fictional world of British writer C. D. Rose is one that slips in and out of time, balancing the fantastic and the realistic, peopled with the lonely, the lost, and the brilliant misfits, some drawn from history, others from his expansive imagination. His universe is at once familiar and strange, and as is the case with the best literary fables, it offers a welcome refuge in a troubled world. At least, that was what I found after floundering with attempts to lose myself in prose during a busy, stressful stretch. Rose’s short story collection Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea turned out to be the perfect antidote to a reading slump.

Central to this collection of nineteen tales is the idea and experience of time—tracking its passage, defying its constraints, longing to hold it fast. Rose’s characters often have a most awkward relationship with time. The protagonist of “Everything is Subject to Motion, and Everything is Motion’s Subject,” for example, nineteenth century French physiologist and chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey, in a narrative that flows with the imagery of his two obsessions, circulation and the pursuit of the fine details of movement, feels himself divorced from any perception of time beyond the immediate:

In life, this tangle. His constant passage from Paris to Naples, Naples to Paris. The demands of work, love, money pushing him one way and pulling him the other. A life always in transition, never stopping, always moving. Always in the present tense. Were he to stop and think of the past or the future, what would happen? When and where, he sometimes thinks, will I finally rest? His life like his pictures: tracing a motion back and forth across Europe.

Elsewhere, philosopher Henri Bergson, defender of primacy of immediate experience, finds himself caught a warped time loop of maids and spilled tea in “Henri Bergson Writes About Time.” Or in “Violins and Pianos are Horses,” an unnamed composer fitfully tries to reclaim his past on a visit with his daughter to the town he grew up in. Memories beset him during their stay, but the childhood home he remembers remains elusive, while all his fame and achievements are cold comfort.

Sometimes time takes on a surreal, even ghostly, quality in Rose’s fables. At other times, he leans hard into the absurd. “The Neva Star,” for example features three Russian sailors, all named Sergei, who have stubbornly (or perhaps foolishly) stayed aboard their ship, abandoned by its owners to rust in a port in Naples. In the charming “Arkady Who Couldn’t See and Artem Who Couldn’t Hear,” the narrator passes a long train trip across the snow-covered Russian landscape in the company of an odd pair of twins, one blind, one deaf, who are engaged in the careful construction of a matchstick model of their childhood home—a collaborative effort to remember their birthplace:

They were thin men, curiously built, with long square bodies and short legs, but both moved with a careful grace, their slow, deliberate gestures reminding me of mime artists or expert craftsmen. When I asked how long they had been building their model, they looked at each other and smiled. All our lives, said Arkady, all our lives.

The stories the brothers share about their lives conflict depending on which twin is doing the telling and whether the other is asleep, but it is clear that neither intends to allow their life project to come to completion. As if one can preserve time so it never truly passes. But, of course, time has its own designs.

Rose crafts many of his tales over the biographies of real people—photographers, scientists, writers, philosophers—stretching, reshaping, and imagining them from the inside looking out at a world that moves too quickly, too slow, or too strangely. Other narratives tend to similarly feature protagonists, narrators or characters that connect with temporal reality in idiosyncratic ways. And some seem to defy time and conventional narration altogether, like the experimental “What Remains of Claire Blanck” in which the narrative has all but evaporated leaving only footnotes, their numbers hanging against empty space above a detailed literary analysis of a story that can no longer be read. The nature of storytelling, how or if one can or even should write about a particular subject, also preoccupies certain narrators or protagonists, but again, that is a theme not inseparable from time.

Writing this review on the day that the new pope, an American of the Augustinian order, has been elected and the curious have been scrolling through his twitter account to gather a sense of the man, it’s some strange coincidence that the funniest, most affectionately absurd title in this collection is “St Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed.” In this brief tale the saint struggles with the temptation of social media, fretting about likes and the lack of a blue check mark, as he tries to focus on beginning to write his confessions. This clever little piece works, as do the others in this collection of intelligent, wide ranging fables, because Rose has a keen sense of just how long a story should be based on its level of absurdity and relative complexity. Frequently that is no more than a few pages. His mastery of the form is impressive, bringing to mind writers like Italo Calvino, Magdelena Tulli, and, of course, Borges, and yet his voice is distinct and contemporary and this collection a delight.

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C. D. Rose is published by Melville House.