I pick this because C. D. is my current literary hero, with his expanding galaxy of books about books about photos of writers who write about reading books about typewriters… I like the way that he uses the form of the short story (and the lecture, the compilation, the bibliography,) to build up one large, hilarious oeuvre which basically expands upon the idea of “we love to read.” With Tintin jokes.
In this story, a blankly desolate man meets a visitor: “sometimes I am startled into feeling: this morning, for example, a young girl came to me and asked me a question at which I marvelled.” So says the narrator, who is, as he repeatedly states, a Warder at the Gallery of National Art. We don’t know the question, let alone the answer, as he’s unable to reply to her, then or years later. Time bundles and tangles in the gallery and in the Warder’s mind, as it does right through this collection, and through Rose’s other books.
The ‘A Brief Note on the Translation’ that precedes this collection of stories includes the useful observation that “I once knew someone (who was an idiot) who claimed they would never read a work in translation, as it was not authentic. But there is no authentic text, no original.”
In The Blind Accordionist, Melville House, 2021
A Personal Anthology 