Moments

When I listen to Bach, I seem to turn into a fish&apos;. – Bach (Pau) in Love.<br /> <br />&apos;We forget because we want to live. We forget because we live in hope for a better life. It&apos;s this wretched hope that demands that we forget the unforgettable&apos;. – The Last Smile of Graf Tolstoy.<br /> <br />These stories explore the nature of love, loss and memory: central to them is the uneasiness the narrators feel about their place in the world. A critical moment in the life of each narrator illuminates these themes in remarkable ways. For instance, in the story &apos;Walter Benjamin&apos;s Pipe&apos; the narrator wants to comprehend that critical moment when Walter Benjamin, the famous Jewish-German philosopher and literary critic, decided to end his life. In the story &apos;Bach (Pau) in Love,&apos; the famous Catalan cellist Pablo Casals imagines the situation which would have inspired Bach to compose his six suites for cello. In the story &apos;Anna and Fyodor in Basel,&apos; Anna, Fyodor Dostoevsky&apos;s wife waits for that moment when Holbein&apos;s famous painting about the dead Christ makes its appearance in the novel The Idiot. In &apos;The Quartz Hill,&apos; a Cantonese photographer looks at the prints of Paddy Bedford&apos;s paintings about the Bedford Downs massacre and decides to visit Halls Creek in search for her Gija grandmother&apos;s roots.