C. D. Rose - 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

 

C. D. Rose, Walter Benjamin Stares at the

Sea, Melville House, 2024

Excerpt

Excerpt

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.

“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

“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.

C. D. Rose’s Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is a collection of short stories about how storytelling can help to face the terrors of the passage of time.

Scenes of creative inspiration mingle with violence, tension, and grief: “The Disappearer” compares the mysterious vanishing of an inventor to a revolutionary film, “Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man” explores the morbid last piece a photographer leaves behind, and “Everything Is Subject to Motion, and Everything Is Motion’s Subject” features a camera shaped like a gun. Even characters who do not make art use it to orient themselves, as with the narrator of “I’m in Love with a German Film Star” tracking a relationship through a lifetime’s worth of songs.

The writing is dark and dreamlike, filled with philosophical tangents, evocative metaphors, black comedy, and sly metatextual references (in “A Brief History of the Short Story,” characters from different literary traditions read about and react to each other). Locations and time periods are seldom established; there is a surrealism reminiscent of fairy tales (“The Neva Star” features three marooned sailors all named Sergei).

Ambiguity and anxiety abound as characters experience existential dread, suffer grave lapses in communication, and are alienated by sudden, senseless loss. Experimental forms heighten the uncanniness, emphasizing disorientation and ineffability: “Ognosia” whips through different points of view midparagraph, “To Athens” alternates between a series of eclectic anecdotes and a run-on sentence, and “What Remains of Claire Blanck” is told through annotations of an unseen text. But there are glimpses of hopefulness amid the bleakness too: emboldened by the works they create or consume, characters yearn for more fulfilling futures.

The stories in Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea position art as an antidote to the ravages of time, with a subtle sense of imagination suggesting that, even through the grimmest moods, nothing is impossible. - Jenna Lefkowitz

https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/walter-benjamin-stares-at-the-sea/

Reading C. D. Rose’s new collection of stories made me think of Walter Benjamin’s dream of composing a book solely out of citations of other writing. This is hardly surprising, and it’s quite likely something Rose expected me to think of—it’s that sort of book. But while there are citations galore to be had in Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, Rose’s Benjamin, in the title story, sits on a bench on a Los Angeles beach in an imagined continuation seven years after the man himself took his life at the edge of a different body of water in Portbou, Spain.

Given an extension of his time on Earth, Rose’s Benjamin imagines writing a different book about Los Angeles. Instead, he decides to go to the cinema, where he contemplates reporting himself missing and starting a new life as Ben Walter, a private detective. There is a lot of wishing and hoping, but no one else gets much writing done in these stories either, not Augustine, improbably stuck on Twitter, or Henri Bergson, improbably unstuck in time, or the unnamed MFA writer in Tucson, Arizona, very predictably writing about not being able to write.

An awful lot of stories in Benjamin Stares at the Sea are told out of this familiar stasis, floating somewhere between the postmodernist vacuity of Rose’s earlier years and the decidedly unplayful autofiction of today’s literary landscape. These stories should not work as well as they do, but the wit, range, and sheer absurdity of Rose’s story world somehow pull together just enough to not get locked into the cul-de-sac of either form. They resist adding up to anything, but the sum stubbornly remains greater than the disparate parts.

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is Rose’s fourth collection in ten years and the first since completing what his online biography terms “a loose parafictional trilogy about lost books and forgotten writers, about who is forgotten and who remembered, and how, and why.” These stories, too, are populated by the lost and forgotten, intertwined with many who are neither. Readers will (sometimes quite explicitly) be reminded of usual suspects like the Oulipian constructs of Italo Calvino, the “games with time and infinity” characteristic of Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 ur-paratextual fiction Pale Fire.

They will also encounter a loosely connected sequence devoted to the stories of obscure figures in the history of photography and motion pictures, the filmography of a (presumably) imagined German starlet named Magda, a recurring retelling of Guy de Maupassant’s hoary 1884 classic “The Necklace”, and a respectively blind and deaf pair of brothers constructing and deconstructing a memory palace out of matchsticks on a train somewhere that really should be but is never actually named as the Transiberian Express. Despite the unrelenting self-referentiality, it’s better than it sounds, partly because Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea‘s stories or fables or whatever they are are often extremely funny and partly because every once in a while, they’re also quite affecting.

Like many collections and novels where the formal conceits dominate the storytelling, the sum total can be tiring or enervating, and all the more so because Rose both carefully controls meaning and connection and also because he refuses either to settle into them or to constrain the resulting ambiguities satisfactorily. So, yes—Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea remains postmodernist in its emotional withholding.

At the same time, unlike, say, 1980s Paul Auster, who is everywhere and nowhere in these pages, Rose ranges more globally and, at key moments, touches on the rich formal lode that makes contemporaries such as Benjamin Labatut, Valeria Luiselli, and Teju Cole so powerfully exceed the limited stakes of so much of today’s autofiction and fictionalized nonfiction. At these moments, staring at the sea evokes not only coldly rolling waves of nearly identical lives passing and ungraspable temporality but something warmer, more finely grained, and more relevant to the lives we live, without losing sight of the absurdity of that desire or the impossibility of maintaining or even attaining it.

It’s not as if Rose is unaware of the pitfalls of his approach; indeed, the collection is both compelling and exhausting in its ceaseless circumnavigation of those pitfalls. The opening story is a lively round-robin of indirect free style set in a hotel bar. Its myriad of characters both exemplifies and questions the portentous title. “Ognosia”, the Acknowledgments inform us, is Jennifer Croft’s translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s coining.

The Internet tells us agnosia is the ability to perceive the world as meaningful and connected; a footnote to the story “What Remains of Claire Blanck” implies that it’s quite similar to “apophenia … the mental condition in which the sufferer sees everything as being connected.” That is, if you’re the kind of reader that either seeks “agnosia” or suffers from a surfeit of “apophany”, you’ll find abundant grist for your mill in Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea. And if you have perspective on your condition, you’ll probably decide like I did that the gap, or perhaps the overlap, between an ability and a mental condition seems a reasonable description of what Rose seems to be getting at.

I certainly enjoyed the Borgesian biographies of dimly remembered French inventors and the refusal to take Bergson, Augustine, or Benjamin as seriously as they are usually taken without thereby losing sight of an iota of the complexity of their ideas. “St. Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed” is as laugh-out-loud funny and as effortlessly erudite as a classic Monty Python sketch. I was less persuaded by the more Austerian paradoxes of stories like “One Art”, in which one man’s world progressively vanishes only to accumulate in a woman’s drawers, or “Sisters”, in which one of a non-identical pair of identical twins similarly fades into nothingness. I was irritated by the intentionally emptied story “What Remains of Claire Blanck”, not because I didn’t enjoy the cleverness of taking Pale Fire one step further into notes without a text (get the name?), but because it’s in those notes that Rose unfolds with one hand and deauthorizes with the other the closest the collection gets to a raison d’être. When postmodernism doesn’t have the courage of its own convictions, I, like Benjamin, lose interest.

On the other hand, the two stories that precede “What Remains” are good enough not to be so easily undermined by their complex armature of form. “A Brief History of the Short Story” is a virtuoso variation on Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style, in conversation with numerous threads elsewhere in the collection, and with each variation on the short story formula spiraling around the previous one. It’s followed by “Proud Woman, Pearl Necklace, Twenty Years”, which appears intended as Rose’s own contribution to the prior French, Russian, and American models, and which echoes the multiple opening voices of “Agnosia”, except that here it’s an ESL classroom somewhere in Europe and a teacher is retelling the tale of “The Necklace” as a teaching device seamed with the varied experiences of a multilingual and multi-everything-else classroom. And not even my awareness that Rose writes it as a honeyed sop to the gatekeepers of today’s literary tastes keeps me from falling for its charms.

It’s moments like this, which escape knowing winks, ironic nods, and formal pyrotechnics, that make reading Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea feel like more than just another of those unremarkable afternoons that so many of its characters spend their days living through and trying to write about. - David Pike

https://www.popmatters.com/walter-benjamin-stares-cd-rose

The title of the story "St. Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed" tells readers a good deal of what they need to know about the English writer C.D. Rose's collection Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea. The 19 concise stories in this volume feature surrealist, metafictional and fabulist elements, and although not all succeed, there's much here that will appeal to readers who prefer short fiction of a less traditional variety.

Rose (The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure; Who's Who When Everyone Is Someone Else) gives a foretaste of much of what is to come in "Ognosia," the book's opener, which defies the short story convention of unity in point of view as it moves effortlessly among the perspectives of a group of characters in a hotel in an unnamed city. In "To Athens," Rose threads a lengthy sentence through a story whose paragraphs all begin with the phrase, "I have a friend" to fashion an entrancing counterpoint, while "A Brief History of the Short Story" engagingly examines the form in its French, Russian, and American iterations through a smartly linked narrative.

The St. Augustine story is a wry commentary on the allure of social media, as the cleric muses about writing what will become his Confessions and "oh, you know, the nature of suffering, evil, free will, time, the apocalypse, eternity, that kind of thing," while thinking about "changing his handle to @StAugustine_original," or wondering "why he hadn't gotten a blue checkmark."

In the titular story, the famed European intellectual Walter Benjamin has escaped to Los Angeles, where he "stares peacefully at the Pacific Ocean," acknowledging his boredom while unable to "settle for the time needed to concentrate on even the idea of a book and thinks he should try instead to finish the many things he has started." But in a story like "Henri Bergson Writes About Time," depicting the French philosopher at his desk reflecting on how "the past gets bigger, the future, like the dwindling spool, worryingly smaller" as he recalls an encounter with Albert Einstein, Rose shows he can write with emotional resonance.

He's heir to the tradition of short story writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, and shares some of the sensibility of their contemporary counterparts like Steven Millhauser, Jim Shepard, and Aimee Bender. Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea isn't necessarily tailored to appeal to a wide audience, but appreciative readers will find ample enjoyment here. --Harvey Freedenberg

https://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=4610#m61961

C. D. Rose, The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure. Melville House, 2014

A darkly comic, satirical reference book about writers who never made it into the literary canon

A signal event of literary scholarship, The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure compiles the biographies of history’s most notable cases of a complete lack of literary success. As such, it is the world’s leading authority on the subject.

Compiled in one volume by C. D. Rose, a well-educated person universally acknowledged in parts of England as the world’s pre-eminent expert on inexpert writers, the book culls its information from lost or otherwise ignored archives scattered around the globe, as well as the occasional dustbin.

The dictionary amounts to a monumental accomplishment: the definitive appreciation of history’s least accomplished writers. Thus immortalized beyond deserving and rescued from hard-earned obscurity, the authors presented in this historic volume comprise a who’s who of the talentless and deluded, their stories timeless litanies of abject psychosis, misapplication, and delinquency.

It is, in short, a treasure.

“Rose writes with wit, playfulness and an impressive knowledge... An author to reckon with, one whom Borges and Max Beerbohm would have admired... We haven’t heard the last of C.D. Rose.”—Washington Post

“Nuanced... Though the vignettes are fictional, most are entertaining and all could serve as warnings to anyone thinking of taking up the literary life."—Wall Street Journal

“An anthology that cleverly calls out the ways in which we dramatize—and idolize—the lives of authors, successful and not."—Huffington Post

“This selection may appear to break the rules, but this hilarious 'dictionary' of literary may not be as non-fictional as you think. It helped inspire my new favorite life-negating maxim: fail worse and go out on bottom."—Flavorwire, 50 Best Independent Fiction and Poetry Books of 2014

“Spend an hour with it...for a bracing, mordant reminder of why almost nothing is really worth bothering with."—Paris Review, Staff Picks

“A mesmerizing and hilarious little book." —Flavorwire

“Wonderful... A must read." —PopMatters

“This gloriously delicious testament to efforts of the wordy kind that seem to have gone off the rails offers the literary shenanigans of some rather suspect authors."—BookTrib

“[A] delightful compendium... The BDLF is a clever put-on, a brisk stroll...guided by Rose’s fastidious prose and copious literary references, but it is also a clarion for the infinite possibilities of literature."—Failure Magazine

“A delightful account... Genius."—Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, VA)

“This lovely brown book presents insights into 52 literary failures…collected by C D Rose and retold with both care and wit. Every single one made me laugh, and I don’t just mean with schadenfreude or a dry resigned croak at the common fate of so many writers. As unlikely as it sounds, I found this book immensely cheering.”—Mind and Language

“A glorious alphabetical compendium of those who never achieved greatness.”—Stuart Kelly, Books of the Year, The Scotsman (UK)

“More a short story collection than a dictionary, this book is an homage to the many ways writers can fail... Failure. Of the most spectacular kind."—LitReactor

“Offers us a shadow history of literature... Whether the subject is Icarus-like or more of a Walter Mitty, Rose’s writing is unfailingly sympathetic and inventive."—Workshy Fop

“A series of clever (and occasionally hilarious) literary vignettes… Rose makes highly literate and arcane references to a vast number of authors and literary theoreticians, and it’s great fun for the reader to become part of the game.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Taking long-form comedy to brave new heights… Rose well utilizes that trick good writers have of including readers and making them feel smart."—Library Journal

“Tongue is definitely in cheek here… Each [writer] fail[s] better than the one before.”—Booklist

"A page turner of the best sort of slow motion, train wreck sort of way... Give this petite compendium a read!"—Susan Mulder, Rejection Chronicles

"A wonderful book. At long last someone has invented these failures and given them their due. We owe C. D. Rose an incalculable debt."—Steve Hely, author of How I Became A Famous Novelist

"A funny look at literary legends who, for one reason or another, managed to fall into oblivion (or fail to get noticed in the first place). From authors leaving masterpieces on trains, to those who compulsively--and literally--eat their words, this book will get you thinking about losses to literature that we'll never get to hear about. Just don't eat this book, please. Or, if you must, buy another copy afterwards... and restrain yourself from eating that one, too."—Jen Campbell

C. D. Rose, The Blind Accordionist. Melville

House, 2021

A supposedly long lost collection of fable-like stories supposedly written by the little-known middle European writer Maxim Guyavitch ... with a helpful intro and afterword making it hilariously clear that the keyword is "supposedly."

In the novel WHO'S WHO WHEN EVERYONE IS SOMEONE ELSE, the character "C.D. Rose" (not to be confused with the author C.D. Rose) searches an unnamed middle-European city for the long-lost manuscript of a little-known writer named Maxim Guyavitch. That search was fruitless, but in THE BLIND ACCORDIONIST, "C.D. Rose" has found the manuscript--nine sparkling, fable-like short stories--and he presents them here with an (hilarious) introduction explaining the discovery, and an afterword providing (hilarious) critical commentary on the stories, and what they might reveal about the mysterious Guyavitch.

THE BLIND ACCORDIONIST is another masterful book of world-making by the real C.D. Rose, absorbing in its mix of intelligence and light-heartedness, and its ultimate celebration of literature itself. It is the third novel in the series about "C.D. Rose," although the reader does not need to have read the previous two books. (The first in the series was THE BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF LITERARY FAILURE, containing portraits of dunsuccessful writers; the second was WHO'S WHO WHEN EVERYONE IS SOMEONE ELSE, in which the author of the DICTIONARY, "C.D. Rose," searches for the manuscript of his favorite dead writer, Maxim Guyavitch, while on a book tour for the DICTIONARY.)

Like those books, THE BLIND ACCORDIONIST can be read both as a simple but wonderful collection of quirky stories, and as comedy--or as a beautiful and moving elegy on the nobility of writers wanting to be read.

”The Blind Accordionist is a collection full of mischief and artistry. It is playful and serious in all the right places, though not necessarily the places the reader might expect. C.D. Rose is a storyteller of real brio and originality.” — Ronan Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul

"In The Blind Accordionist, C.D. Rose shows once more what readers of the previous books in this unique series will already know: that here is one of the most talented writers of his generation, doing what he does best. Playful, wry, witty, understated but packing a real emotional punch, The Blind Accordionist is also great fun. Frankly, about as much fun as it is possible to have with the imagined long-lost manuscript of the equally long-lost Maxim Guyavitch." - Rodge Glass, author of Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs

“Rose writes with wit, playfulness and an impressive knowledge… Rose himself is an author to reckon with, one whom Borges and Max Beerbohm would have admired… We haven’t heard the last of C.D. Rose.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“Mr. Rose is an appealing crank.”—The Wall Street Journal

C. D. Rose, Who's Who When Everyone is

Someone Else. Melville House, 2018

A hilariously charming novel about a heartbroken man trying to redeem himself by championing forgotten books

Fleeing heartbreak, an unnamed author goes to an unnamed city to give a series of lectures at an unnamed university about forgotten books ... only to find himself involved in a mystery when the professor who invited him is no where to be found, and no one seems quite sure why he's there....

So begins this Wes Anderson-like novel hilariously spoofing modernist literature even as it tells a stirring -- and eerily suspenseful -- story about someone desperate to prove the redeeming power of reading -- and writing -- books.

And as the narrator gives his lectures, attends vague functions where no one speaks English, never quite meets his host professor and wonders the city looking for the grave of his literary hero, the reader begins to suspect this man's relentless faith in literature may be the only thing getting him through the mystery enveloping him.

"This ingenious, uproarious novel deserves to sit on any bibliophile's shelf."—Times Literary Supplement

"A riotous, triumphant rattlebag of a novel. C.D.Rose has created an intricate exploration of literary intrigue, suspense and levity — lose yourself in this book at once, and savour every moment"—Eley Williams, author of Attrib. & Other Stories

“Anyone who’s been looking for the same hit to the cerebral cortex produced when they first encountered Calvino and Borges will read this extraordinary novel, as I did, with a grateful sense of urgency. It quenches a thirst you almost forgot you had: endlessly inventive, wickedly intelligent, funny and melancholic. I don’t remember the last time I read something this clever, puzzling and intricate which simultaneously packs so much soul. Who’s Who When Everyone is Someone Else is so much more than a sequence of bravura exercises in style; the passages between the lectures have the tone and elegance of a forgotten masterpiece themselves. It puts us outside ourselves, beside ourselves, as readers, as critics, as writers: a total perspective vortex which reminds us, even as it upends our expectations, why we fell in love with reading in the first place.” —Luke Kennard, author of The Transition

excerpt:

Who’s Who When Everyone is Someone Else

IT WAS A burning morning in late summer when I took my leave of Clara, the sky distant and receding as if in sympathy, the few wisps of cloud that had graced the dawn and reminded me of her hair now scorched away by the sun, already so hot at this hour, at this time of the year. I stood outside the Café Terminus and watched her pass, knowing I would never see her again, knowing our worlds had finally, definitively, utterly separated, and all that would be left of us were improbable names scratched in hotel registers, a bundle of letters bound by a ribbon hidden in the drawer to the left of her bed, and a few bitter tears, long evaporated, leaving only their salty trace on a handkerchief that may, for all I knew, have gone with her. Memories, I should say, memories would last, but I knew she no longer had any, and the few I possessed were treacherous, deceitful, liars to themselves as well as to me.

I sipped the last of my coffee, now little more than a sad black meniscus lining the bottom of the cup as her handsome wooden box passed by, pulled, as her father had insisted, by four fine black horses along the corso then out of town onto the cart track as far as the cemetery which lay a good few kilometres from any living habitation, its own walled and silent kingdom. As she slowly faded from view, I knew I was now, finally, free. Free to take the opposite direction, to turn away from her, from this town, from their whole world.

It was time to take the train.

The station was a tawdry, flyblown little place, scarcely worthy of the name, one platform and a bucket in a shed claiming to be a restroom. Yet it mattered little, as the locomotive appeared on time, entering the town just as Clara would have been leaving it to the other side. While I have to admit that there was a certain grace and pomp in the manner of her departure, train travel, too, has its own romance. The hiss of steam, the burn of coal and grit, the immense breath of the engine as it heaves itself into motion, slowly building to the mighty speed that even such an old chugger as this one could muster. As we passed into open country I listened to the sound of the iron wheels on the steel rails, felt the slow rock of the carriages, watched the land speed by as if I were watching a film. The history of all this, I thought, the knowledge that the rails I travelled on had been forged by honest steelworkers and laid by burly immigrants, that the rock gorge I was now passing through had been hewn by brave engineers laying dynamite with their bare hands. How many had died in the construction of this marvel? The land fell away beneath me, the sound suddenly expanding as we passed over a bridge fashioned from a Roman aqueduct.

But finest of all was the anonymity. Here, I could be anyone I liked. Stepping aboard a train is stepping into a new world. The random strangers. The potential for chance encounter. Once the door is locked and the whistle blown, the departure is total. No one knew me; I knew no one. I could begin again.

I LET THE book drop onto my lap and felt its pages slap shut. I closed my eyes and wished for sleep, but none came. I’d hoped Enrico Cavaletti’s Train to the End of the Night would be the perfect thing to accompany me on a long rail journey and at first the rhythms of the prose dutifully matched the rocking of the train I was on, but soon the long sentences merely bored me and I had to go over them time and again, unable to focus, not for the first time disappointed by the gaping juncture between a book and reality.

I’d turned to Cavaletti on the advice of a friend whose name I was now trying to recall so that I could ignore any future advice from him. “It’s a fine example of train literature,” I remember an indistinct voice telling me, and scribbled Cavaletti’s name in my notebook for future reference only to forget it again until I was embarking on a long rail journey myself. I’d thought of including it on the reading list I was drawing up, too, but on the evidence of its opening passage it seemed little more than a piece of early-twentieth-century schlock, its fancy prose giving away far too much right from the first page. It could go on the reserve list, I supposed.

Sadly, I had nothing else to hand, my only other books stuffed into one of the suitcases now stashed on a dangerously narrow overhead luggage rack. To get it down and open it up would have meant disturbing my fellow passengers, none of whom seemed the types to be disturbed without annoyance. I stared out of the window instead, and thought about how it wasn’t the gap between the book and reality that had disappointed me, but rather my failure to allow what I had been reading to change the world I was in.

The world I was in at that point was a packed train now three hours late due to an unexplained and interminable stop in the middle of flat empty fields somewhere just over the border between two countries, neither of which I knew the first thing about. I was squashed into a back-aching seat next to a man who had the air of a distracted philosophy professor, and seemed to be sleeping off a heavy lunch. Across from me, another man was attempting to engage the other members of our compartment in conversation, but the two young women were content to whisper to each other and ignore him, while the final occupant, a nun of some order unknown to me, only nodded whenever he spoke to her and said not a word. Fortunately, as long as I read or pretended to read, I maintained the force field of the book-absorbed foreigner, one which no one attempted to break.

After what felt like several hours—but I concede may have been fewer—the train began again, slowly enough to let a few grey storage hangars emerge from the fog but rising to a steady trundle through a cluster of unimpressive tower blocks, which in turn gave way to spreading leafy suburbs before sinking into a tunnel of near-Stygian gloom, its brick and cement walls seeming remarkably free of graffiti. The tunnel then opened out into a glass-domed space, all light and iron tracery, pigeons swooping around the crosswork beams. A platform hove up alongside us as the train slowed, the film finishing. An ornate fin-de-siècle sign announced the name of our city, and the word “Terminus.” The end.

AND SO I had arrived, a man in a battered hat with a bulky suitcase in each hand, suffering under an overcoat too heavy for the weather. I could have been that eternal migrant, the one slowly fleeing from some domestic turmoil, the man who’d shifted from city to city for years, ever seeking a point or purpose in each one. I could have been an autodidact peasant, now come to the city to show off his learning, pronounce a great theory of everything or a new path to spiritual enlightenment to rapt crowds in packed halls. Had I been younger, I could have been the eager naïf at the beginning of a cheap musical, ready to put his cases on the pavement, stand up, stretch his back, whistle through his teeth and sigh, So, big city—whaddya got in store for me?

I was, in truth, none of these things, yet also a little part of each of them.

But perhaps I should explain.