Da Vinci's Bicycle

If the story is good enough, a story collection can be worth buying simply for the one. "A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg," which features German author Robert Walser [whom I haven't read], is that good, but it is not the only story in this marvelous volume worth owning. "A Field of Snow" jumps among 3 times in Walser's life--the presumed present, when he is riding in a hot-air balloon; his stay in a mental institution; and his time as a butler for a "dotty" German lord. In all of these Walser is a compelling character, a man we want to know more about, a man capable of telling us, "The snow is a kind of music. Were I ever to write again, perhaps a poem as deft and transparent as one by a Chinese, I would like to witness to the beauty of the snow. And their books, these people who keep writing, who reads them? It is now a business like any other." Another story, "The Invention of Photography in Toledo," revolves around the rival claims of two possible inventors of photography and is laugh-out-loud funny as the [to us unknown] narrator confuses Toledo, Spain, and Toledo, Ohio. Characters in other stories include Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus, and Richard Nixon [in China, no less]. Davenport's fictional world is constructed out of reality in a way unlike most writers, and thus he can have a character wonder, as Walser does, "Is it not preposterous that a shoe would go the journey of a foot?" Perhaps it is, but it is more preposterous that too many American readers do not know Davenport's work