by C. D. Rose
The gallery was off a backstreet in Naples. How Guyavitch had ended up there, I do not know. The paintings were adequate, fine: I hardly remember them. But there was a wooden table, bare except for three iron bowls. One held salt, another oil, the third, blood.
Le Miroir Assombri de l’Amour, Claire Ligne (Hervé Frères, 1979)
A study of paraphilias in nineteenth-century French literature. While Ligne’s reading of Baudelaire may be trite, her take on Verne is breathtaking. Mostly notable here for a mention of “Sosia and the Captain” in her discussion of the figure of the doppelgänger, which poses the question that when faced with our shadow-self, this premonitor of our end sent to fetch us, what else can we do but attempt to seduce them?
Maxim Guyavitch and the Defeated God, Simon Crubellier (Wiese & Pilaster, 2002)
In this book, Crubellier stakes the strange claim that Guyavitch was actually a member of the Protectors of the Word of God Defeated, and that all the stories (most notably, and inevitably, “Dead Johann”) are an exegesis of their beliefs. The PWGD are a still-active heretical sect who maintain that when Lucifer and his rebel angels clashed with God, they were not vanquished. Lucifer won the battle, took the place of God, and remains there to this day. He has not been as destructive as some feared, instead proving to be indolent, chaotic, and capricious, given to short bursts of incredible malevolence and intense brutality mixed with longer bouts of casual laissez-faire cruelty, neglect, and injustice. The true God, meanwhile, has taken mortal form, and walks among us, unseen, unnoticed.
“Les fantômes de Guyavitch,” Paul d’Aspremont (in Contes et nouvelles, Baldini, 1972)
A story in which the narrator reads all of Guyavitch’s stories, and believes them all to be about ghosts, and himself—in turn—to be haunted by each of these ghosts. D’Aspremont was a minor French writer and critic who seems to have mysteriously vanished after writing this, his last story.
Skip Notes
1 “I was going to throw this in the bin,” he told me, “but thought that you might be interested in it.”
2 The reader of Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else will already have met her.
3 In a certain sense, their endeavour—whether real or not—was successful: I would be pleased to be a citizen of any nation in which Guyavitch were the notional national bard.
4 For more information, the reader is directed to my book Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else, pp. 164–171.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AT THIS POINT, I fear, the reader may be growing weary of lists, so I will endeavour to be brief.
To all at Melville House for supporting this venture; to Nikolai Gogol, Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Joseph Roth, Daniil Kharms, Walter Benjamin, and Robert Walser (and their translators) for building the world in which Guyavitch wrote; to Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Enrique Vila-Matas for furnishing it; to Andrew Gallix, Luke Kennard, Eley Williams, and all readers of the preceding volumes; to Jim Hinks, for a conversation at the Sandbar which led to my discovery of Guyavitch; to Fausto Squattrinato for his critical reading of early versions of this book, and to the manufacturers of Zapovit, who fuelled such criticisms; to the anonymous librarian who risked opening a cache of Guyavitch rarities for me; to everyone at the Hotel Terminus, for helping me to shelter from the angry mob of Guyavitch scholars that one night; to you the reader, for bearing with me this far, and trusting the tale; to the Guyavitchs yet to come; and to Dr Devereaux, for film knowledge, and more.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C. D. ROSE is an award-winning short-story writer and the author of the novels The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure and Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else. He lives in Hebden Bridge, England.