Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea: Stories

Rose (The Blind Accordionist) ruminates in this erudite collection on literature, photography, and philosophy. In “Ognosia,” a man waits in a bar to interview a photographer, whose enigmatic photos devoid of people suggest that the spaces depicted are waiting for people to arrive. While the writer kills time, he considers the work’s theme while watching other patrons wait for those on the way to meet them. “Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man” takes its title from an image by 19th-century French photographer Hippolyte Bayard in which he documents his simulated suicide in response to being overlooked in favor of the famous Louis Daguerre. In “Proud Woman, Pearl Necklace, Twenty Years,” a teacher of English as a second language fancies himself a storyteller in the oral tradition as he attempts to bridge his students’ disparate cultural and linguistic origins by summarizing from memory an unnamed literary classic with allusions to de Maupassant and Gogol. The lightest story on offer is the hilariously anachronistic “St. Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed,” in which the theologian stresses about his “brand” and negatively compares himself to Sts. Jerome and Ambrose. This well-rounded assemblage manages to be both entertaining and thought-provoking. (Jan.)