What do you think?
Rate this book
Posthumous Stories
David Rose, author of "Vault", is best known as a short story writer. In this long-awaited collection, written over the past twenty-five years, Rose explores an extraordinary range of lives: from a road crew installing speed humps, a divorced man living rough, and a childless children's entertainer, to the son of a famous artist, the dedicatee of a violin concerto, and an honorary member of the Beatles.
- GenresShort Stories
210 pages, Paperback
First published November 15, 2013
1 person is currently reading
53 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 11, 2014
I’m not alone in having looked forward to this collection ever since its jacket image first reared its headless cagoule online last year. David Rose is an unsung hero of contemporary short fiction, so the publication of Posthumous Stories gives us the opportunity to have a singsong.
Rose’s stories always malinger in the imagination, raising more questions than they answer, an effect I first encountered after I’d read Clean from 1998’s Neon Lit collection. Who is this character working for? Who is speaking at the end? Who says, ‘What sort of stupid tosser would kill himself over a dog?’ One reason why Posthumous Stories is an event is because until now Rose’s twenty-five years’ worth of published fiction was dispersed across a plethora of small press publications, many of them defunct or difficult to track down (the acknowledgements page in Posthumous Stories - with its Zemblas and Black Biles, its Iron and Rue Bellas - reads like an atlas of the small-press/short-story archipelago).
I’ve lost my copy of Neon Lit Vol. II, so finding Clean again here was – another – thrill. Again: the grip of the storytelling. I don’t remember (m)any of the stories I read in 1998, let alone where I was when I read them (the house with the mannequin, a street off the Unthank Road, early morning: a workman was using a whirring-blade machine to grind down part of the kerb. The horrible noise shuddered me awake. It was only when it started to rain torrentially that he packed it in, allowing me to read for a while, read Clean). I remembered the story, but not the author’s name, not even when I came across David Rose again by way of his metafictional wonder Vault: An Anti-Novel. There are, though, two previously unpublished stories here, The Fall and The Castle, both of which seem stages on the way to Vault.
Rose’s precise and vocal prose is often remarked upon and is certainly a draw, but there’s much more to these stories than style and language games (Rose favours OuLiPian linguistic strategies and formal tourniquets in the structuring of his stories; for instance, each section of his The Castle uses the same sentences as the chapter openers in Kafka’s). After reading the stories collected here and others, I have difficulty defining exactly the leitmotifs of Rose’s work, though I always know one when I see one. As John Peel once said of The Fall (the gruppe, not the Camus novel or the David Rose story) they’re ‘always different, always the same.’ The stories are always cunning and vocal, full of pathos and absurdity and frequently feature a personality in thrall to some mysterious, maybe damning obsession.
Also, the stories are often unexpectedly funny. Rose can be partial to what Martin Amis, writing about Anthony Burgess, called the ‘garlicky pun’. In Rectilinear, in which an architect strives to create the perfect modernist home, the narrator describes his eventual wife as ‘Viennese, liberated, a thoroughly Loos woman.’ In Home, a recent arrival explains how Londoners often ask if he makes wigs when he says he’s a rugmaker (he works in the carpet trade). I don’t know why this makes me laugh but it does. It’s certainly the reaction our rugmaker would get in Sutton. Incidentally, it’s refreshing to say the least that the stories are often set in outer London and the Home Counties, ground I consider under-explored.
Another hallmark is formal adventure. Rose seems incapable of writing a story straight and splices the traditional short story with the formats of other documents. The first story here, Dedication starts midsentence, midway through a radio interview. It’s as if we’ve just switched on the set as a certain Stevie is being asked about his reaction to the first performance of a dead composer’s concerto that was dedicated to him. It then goes on to provide a compelling description of the memory-spurring effects of music, the writing seamlessly moving from a catechism to stream-of-consciousness. The interview as a structure is also used in Home. Viyborg – A Novel is written as a synopsis of a novel. Tragos imagines the death of Raoul Moat from the point of view of townspeople used like a Greek chorus. The charming The Fifth Beatles is told monologue fashion by a cleaning lady who witnessed the Abbey Road photo-shoot but is shot-through by a second poetic narrative strand that recounts the same event from an entirely different, oblique perspective. Nothing is solid in these stories, however much the characters may wish for permanence and clarity. These devices never seem gimmicky. They open up new spaces for the short form, which can seem too in thrall to Carver’s minimalism or Angela Carter’s fabulation (in my experience as student and teacher).
Like many a committed short-story writer, Rose is able to encapsulate or imply an entire life story in a few pages. However, what’s most prevalent here is the articulation of the inner life. Many of these characters are obsessives, driven either by a bizarre personal quest (to correct the imperfections perceived in the work of the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, for example, or gain entrance to Royal society in The Castle), or by the order of some undisclosed subversive organization (The Fall, Clean). Rose’s characters nearly always speak directly to the reader, and are often unnamed. This has the sometimes-unnerving effect of offering a confidence we may not wish to accept. What is the narrator of Flora (one of the most memorable stories here) after when he invites a botanical artist to share his space and his books? Who is he? Who is she? Who exploits whom here? How does he live? What else has happened in his life? Who is throwing stones through the narrator’s window in In Evening Soft Light? And why? Why does he have no inkling as to why they might hate him? Why is he so passive? Who is the elderly gent in Shuffle, cataloguing his attempts to read the literary canon in the same way he catalogues his visits to east European prostitutes? The shearing away of biographical context makes these characters ineffably strange yet unsettlingly human, ‘distorted, shrinking, looming as they move,’ as the asphalt layers in A Nice Bucket are described at the end of that story. Far from Posthumous, these are stories that live on, daring us to dwell on the mystery of personality and the stories and versions we tell ourselves, that we cling to, that, unlike the characters assembled here, we lack the composure to tell. Rose is a master mason of form and a virtuoso composer of voices. I can’t think of a more able commentator upon who we are and how we live now.
Posthumous Stories isn't the complete David Rose. I'd also recommend Sere in Still (Negative Press); Puck (Nightjar Press); Brontesaurus in Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontes, edited by AJ Ashworth (Unthank Books); Eleanor: The End Notes and Terra Cotta in Unthology 3 (Unthank Books) and Vault: An Anti-Novel (Salt).
Rose’s stories always malinger in the imagination, raising more questions than they answer, an effect I first encountered after I’d read Clean from 1998’s Neon Lit collection. Who is this character working for? Who is speaking at the end? Who says, ‘What sort of stupid tosser would kill himself over a dog?’ One reason why Posthumous Stories is an event is because until now Rose’s twenty-five years’ worth of published fiction was dispersed across a plethora of small press publications, many of them defunct or difficult to track down (the acknowledgements page in Posthumous Stories - with its Zemblas and Black Biles, its Iron and Rue Bellas - reads like an atlas of the small-press/short-story archipelago).
I’ve lost my copy of Neon Lit Vol. II, so finding Clean again here was – another – thrill. Again: the grip of the storytelling. I don’t remember (m)any of the stories I read in 1998, let alone where I was when I read them (the house with the mannequin, a street off the Unthank Road, early morning: a workman was using a whirring-blade machine to grind down part of the kerb. The horrible noise shuddered me awake. It was only when it started to rain torrentially that he packed it in, allowing me to read for a while, read Clean). I remembered the story, but not the author’s name, not even when I came across David Rose again by way of his metafictional wonder Vault: An Anti-Novel. There are, though, two previously unpublished stories here, The Fall and The Castle, both of which seem stages on the way to Vault.
Rose’s precise and vocal prose is often remarked upon and is certainly a draw, but there’s much more to these stories than style and language games (Rose favours OuLiPian linguistic strategies and formal tourniquets in the structuring of his stories; for instance, each section of his The Castle uses the same sentences as the chapter openers in Kafka’s). After reading the stories collected here and others, I have difficulty defining exactly the leitmotifs of Rose’s work, though I always know one when I see one. As John Peel once said of The Fall (the gruppe, not the Camus novel or the David Rose story) they’re ‘always different, always the same.’ The stories are always cunning and vocal, full of pathos and absurdity and frequently feature a personality in thrall to some mysterious, maybe damning obsession.
Also, the stories are often unexpectedly funny. Rose can be partial to what Martin Amis, writing about Anthony Burgess, called the ‘garlicky pun’. In Rectilinear, in which an architect strives to create the perfect modernist home, the narrator describes his eventual wife as ‘Viennese, liberated, a thoroughly Loos woman.’ In Home, a recent arrival explains how Londoners often ask if he makes wigs when he says he’s a rugmaker (he works in the carpet trade). I don’t know why this makes me laugh but it does. It’s certainly the reaction our rugmaker would get in Sutton. Incidentally, it’s refreshing to say the least that the stories are often set in outer London and the Home Counties, ground I consider under-explored.
Another hallmark is formal adventure. Rose seems incapable of writing a story straight and splices the traditional short story with the formats of other documents. The first story here, Dedication starts midsentence, midway through a radio interview. It’s as if we’ve just switched on the set as a certain Stevie is being asked about his reaction to the first performance of a dead composer’s concerto that was dedicated to him. It then goes on to provide a compelling description of the memory-spurring effects of music, the writing seamlessly moving from a catechism to stream-of-consciousness. The interview as a structure is also used in Home. Viyborg – A Novel is written as a synopsis of a novel. Tragos imagines the death of Raoul Moat from the point of view of townspeople used like a Greek chorus. The charming The Fifth Beatles is told monologue fashion by a cleaning lady who witnessed the Abbey Road photo-shoot but is shot-through by a second poetic narrative strand that recounts the same event from an entirely different, oblique perspective. Nothing is solid in these stories, however much the characters may wish for permanence and clarity. These devices never seem gimmicky. They open up new spaces for the short form, which can seem too in thrall to Carver’s minimalism or Angela Carter’s fabulation (in my experience as student and teacher).
Like many a committed short-story writer, Rose is able to encapsulate or imply an entire life story in a few pages. However, what’s most prevalent here is the articulation of the inner life. Many of these characters are obsessives, driven either by a bizarre personal quest (to correct the imperfections perceived in the work of the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, for example, or gain entrance to Royal society in The Castle), or by the order of some undisclosed subversive organization (The Fall, Clean). Rose’s characters nearly always speak directly to the reader, and are often unnamed. This has the sometimes-unnerving effect of offering a confidence we may not wish to accept. What is the narrator of Flora (one of the most memorable stories here) after when he invites a botanical artist to share his space and his books? Who is he? Who is she? Who exploits whom here? How does he live? What else has happened in his life? Who is throwing stones through the narrator’s window in In Evening Soft Light? And why? Why does he have no inkling as to why they might hate him? Why is he so passive? Who is the elderly gent in Shuffle, cataloguing his attempts to read the literary canon in the same way he catalogues his visits to east European prostitutes? The shearing away of biographical context makes these characters ineffably strange yet unsettlingly human, ‘distorted, shrinking, looming as they move,’ as the asphalt layers in A Nice Bucket are described at the end of that story. Far from Posthumous, these are stories that live on, daring us to dwell on the mystery of personality and the stories and versions we tell ourselves, that we cling to, that, unlike the characters assembled here, we lack the composure to tell. Rose is a master mason of form and a virtuoso composer of voices. I can’t think of a more able commentator upon who we are and how we live now.
Posthumous Stories isn't the complete David Rose. I'd also recommend Sere in Still (Negative Press); Puck (Nightjar Press); Brontesaurus in Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontes, edited by AJ Ashworth (Unthank Books); Eleanor: The End Notes and Terra Cotta in Unthology 3 (Unthank Books) and Vault: An Anti-Novel (Salt).
July 1, 2017
I don’t think there’s a better way to approach a review of this collection than by considering two quotations from it. The first is from Clean, a story first published in 1998:
‘As I crossed Vauxhall Bridge I realised that above me there’s a mile of blue and beyond that an eternity of black, a furnace of ice.’
This is a fine example of Rose’s aesthetic sensibility. He has the hard-earned gift of being able to communicate complex thought processes and emotions through prose that is as elegant as it is simple. But this is only half the story. What sets his writing apart is the service to which he puts this sensibility, the use to which he puts his sentences.
The most obvious of his preoccupations in this regard might be described as ‘the role of art’ – the often subliminal ways in which both art itself and the ideas that inform its creation interact with the personal, the everyday. He is also concerned with the structures of different artforms and how they relate to each other, a la Goethe’s famous dictum ‘Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music’: the result is writing that – in its references and allusions – yields more with each reading.
The following quotation is from Viyborg – a novel first published in 2009:
‘God, to think back to the great days. Heroic Abstraction. We more than held our own with the Americans then. Now it’s all installations, and videos a la bloody Bill Viola, fucking pansy. But ultimately it’s that square of canvas, can’t get away from it. It’s like boxing. That’s the arena. That’s where the fight is. Fucking kids, they’ve funked it.’
Rose’s arena is the page, and he’s funking nothing…
‘As I crossed Vauxhall Bridge I realised that above me there’s a mile of blue and beyond that an eternity of black, a furnace of ice.’
This is a fine example of Rose’s aesthetic sensibility. He has the hard-earned gift of being able to communicate complex thought processes and emotions through prose that is as elegant as it is simple. But this is only half the story. What sets his writing apart is the service to which he puts this sensibility, the use to which he puts his sentences.
The most obvious of his preoccupations in this regard might be described as ‘the role of art’ – the often subliminal ways in which both art itself and the ideas that inform its creation interact with the personal, the everyday. He is also concerned with the structures of different artforms and how they relate to each other, a la Goethe’s famous dictum ‘Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music’: the result is writing that – in its references and allusions – yields more with each reading.
The following quotation is from Viyborg – a novel first published in 2009:
‘God, to think back to the great days. Heroic Abstraction. We more than held our own with the Americans then. Now it’s all installations, and videos a la bloody Bill Viola, fucking pansy. But ultimately it’s that square of canvas, can’t get away from it. It’s like boxing. That’s the arena. That’s where the fight is. Fucking kids, they’ve funked it.’
Rose’s arena is the page, and he’s funking nothing…
January 19, 2016
He's been published in the Literary Review, London Magazine, Warwick review, etc. His note on p.xiii about the composition of 2 of the stories is useful. Don't be alarmed by his mention of Oulipo practises - it's Oulipo-lite.
In "Dedication" a BBC R3-ish interviewer intellectualizes many of the answers of the interviewee (a person with little music ability whose parents befriended a composer who dedicated a work to her when she was a child). Then there's a stream-of-consciousness section. "A Nice Bucket" describes the day of a team of workers who are creating speed-bumps, one of whom (3rd-person privileged) is somewhat detached. It ends "And he finds himself wondering what difference the loss of two toes would make. Not to his balance but just in general. To life, like". In "Private view" a non-artistic son of a late artist is asked to comment on a retrospective which includes a replica of the studio. In "Flora" a restrained man is kind to a female art student, though he knows little about Art. She leaves a hidden message.
I like all the stories so far.
"The Fall" is 40 pages long. A member of a religious sect creates situationist pieces with the sleath of secret service missions. He's promoted to an inner sect which does more GreenPeacey things. But he's an aesthete. And his girl has abandoned him. There's a fall from aesthetics (music and poetry) to eco-politics to the fragmentary language at the end, when he's fled the city.
"The Fifth Beatle" wasn't as good; as with "Dedication" its non-linearity seems contrived. To enjoy "Viyborg - A Novel" you may need to like (or be amused by) art-crit and maybe lit-crit too. The piece is an essay about a novel, with extended quotes - e.g. "The chapter ends with him sitting reflectively, then making notes on the back of a letter. Are we to infer from this that he is no longer in the room? Or that he is, but has no notebooks or tape recorder? Clarification would have been welcome"
"Clean" is more mysterious - a person under cover can sometimes see the future? "Rectilinear" comprises memories of a childhood with a violin-playing father ("He struggled hardest over the Second Partita, with its arduously long Chaconne ... Chaconne à son goût") and Slade-trained mother. This time the prevailing subject's Architecture - Loos in particular. A couple design their house to out-Loos Loos. At the end, after the divorce, the text becomes centred. "Evening in soft light" does nothing for me, nor "Shuffle" (about a book-lover) that includes "this is the sort of pretentious drivel only theorists would bother with, only Borges could make interesting". The main character in "Lector" does public speaking for a job in a world where orators are paid. He freelances in the park. For 5 pounds he'll read out 30 pages of a thriller, 8 pages of Henry James, or 1 of Pinter - "You're paying for the pauses". Interest in the technique of reading eventually interferes with his professionalism. Typo on p.124 - "beating time with with his slippered foot".
I wasn't keen on "Tragos" where a cornered, armed man is talking on a mobile to a negotiator. He gives himself up. "Zimmerman" is another account of a novel - "The story begins with a man - we assume him to be Zimmerman - loading an accordian onto a cart ... There is a lyrical description of the effect of the sunlight on the snow-covered pines, the scent of wet needles in the still-sharp air from where the snow has shrunk and the earth is discovered". In the end I wasn't convinced. "House" has non-PC jokes with an edge, and a hint that purposely inadequate language may have benefits.
"The Castle" is a novella, beginning with an allusion to Beckett to overlay Kafka. Then Rilke's Elegies take over. Like the other pieces, this one contains passages that in themselves make the journey worthwhile - "Behind me the warm walls of the Castle bulked up black against the dark, the lights from the slot windows like a virgin's wink"; "Etymology is an odd business. Like lifting a paving stone to reveal a dead frog"; "My fingers ran over the Braille of the granite and along the scars on my wrists. My mind wandered over the valleys of memory, grazing on the years since. Those years, gentle slopes of monotony, featureless. Borrowed time. But then, most of my life feels borrowed; that feeling of living another's life, of being in the wrong novel". At the end I expected the "smallish men" from the start to re-appear, for the main character to be a sleeper, a royal assassinator.
On the back cover the prose is described as elegant, 'sinewy and spare', 'crisp, succinct and finely wrought'. I know what they mean. That control permeates the content too - undercover ops, assignations - and the characters who are mostly male, reticent, Pure O. And there's lots of interpreted culture, of non-artists in an artistic setting.
In "Dedication" a BBC R3-ish interviewer intellectualizes many of the answers of the interviewee (a person with little music ability whose parents befriended a composer who dedicated a work to her when she was a child). Then there's a stream-of-consciousness section. "A Nice Bucket" describes the day of a team of workers who are creating speed-bumps, one of whom (3rd-person privileged) is somewhat detached. It ends "And he finds himself wondering what difference the loss of two toes would make. Not to his balance but just in general. To life, like". In "Private view" a non-artistic son of a late artist is asked to comment on a retrospective which includes a replica of the studio. In "Flora" a restrained man is kind to a female art student, though he knows little about Art. She leaves a hidden message.
I like all the stories so far.
"The Fall" is 40 pages long. A member of a religious sect creates situationist pieces with the sleath of secret service missions. He's promoted to an inner sect which does more GreenPeacey things. But he's an aesthete. And his girl has abandoned him. There's a fall from aesthetics (music and poetry) to eco-politics to the fragmentary language at the end, when he's fled the city.
"The Fifth Beatle" wasn't as good; as with "Dedication" its non-linearity seems contrived. To enjoy "Viyborg - A Novel" you may need to like (or be amused by) art-crit and maybe lit-crit too. The piece is an essay about a novel, with extended quotes - e.g. "The chapter ends with him sitting reflectively, then making notes on the back of a letter. Are we to infer from this that he is no longer in the room? Or that he is, but has no notebooks or tape recorder? Clarification would have been welcome"
"Clean" is more mysterious - a person under cover can sometimes see the future? "Rectilinear" comprises memories of a childhood with a violin-playing father ("He struggled hardest over the Second Partita, with its arduously long Chaconne ... Chaconne à son goût") and Slade-trained mother. This time the prevailing subject's Architecture - Loos in particular. A couple design their house to out-Loos Loos. At the end, after the divorce, the text becomes centred. "Evening in soft light" does nothing for me, nor "Shuffle" (about a book-lover) that includes "this is the sort of pretentious drivel only theorists would bother with, only Borges could make interesting". The main character in "Lector" does public speaking for a job in a world where orators are paid. He freelances in the park. For 5 pounds he'll read out 30 pages of a thriller, 8 pages of Henry James, or 1 of Pinter - "You're paying for the pauses". Interest in the technique of reading eventually interferes with his professionalism. Typo on p.124 - "beating time with with his slippered foot".
I wasn't keen on "Tragos" where a cornered, armed man is talking on a mobile to a negotiator. He gives himself up. "Zimmerman" is another account of a novel - "The story begins with a man - we assume him to be Zimmerman - loading an accordian onto a cart ... There is a lyrical description of the effect of the sunlight on the snow-covered pines, the scent of wet needles in the still-sharp air from where the snow has shrunk and the earth is discovered". In the end I wasn't convinced. "House" has non-PC jokes with an edge, and a hint that purposely inadequate language may have benefits.
"The Castle" is a novella, beginning with an allusion to Beckett to overlay Kafka. Then Rilke's Elegies take over. Like the other pieces, this one contains passages that in themselves make the journey worthwhile - "Behind me the warm walls of the Castle bulked up black against the dark, the lights from the slot windows like a virgin's wink"; "Etymology is an odd business. Like lifting a paving stone to reveal a dead frog"; "My fingers ran over the Braille of the granite and along the scars on my wrists. My mind wandered over the valleys of memory, grazing on the years since. Those years, gentle slopes of monotony, featureless. Borrowed time. But then, most of my life feels borrowed; that feeling of living another's life, of being in the wrong novel". At the end I expected the "smallish men" from the start to re-appear, for the main character to be a sleeper, a royal assassinator.
On the back cover the prose is described as elegant, 'sinewy and spare', 'crisp, succinct and finely wrought'. I know what they mean. That control permeates the content too - undercover ops, assignations - and the characters who are mostly male, reticent, Pure O. And there's lots of interpreted culture, of non-artists in an artistic setting.
February 1, 2014
A fantastic book - ideal for those who would like to take a master class in short story writing. 'Zimmerman' is definitely one of my favourite stories of recent times - one that I will re-read and recommend to anyone who will listen. 'Private View' is equally stunning. Full review to follow.
March 7, 2016
review coming
June 29, 2014
Distinctive and unusual short stories - impressive and, on the whole, entertaining.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews