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‘Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!’ cries one character in Vladimir Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins!, playfully referring to her own non-existence There is art that projects itself as real, that replaces the reader’s rational world with one that is imagined and invented, and asks everyone to play along And then there is art – like Nabokov’s – that rebels against reality, that draws attention to its own artifice and unreal-ness C D Rose’s latest work belongs to this latter category, and is a refreshing example of literary play done well   I liked this book And I liked liking it, basking in its twee, timeless, self-conscious world An English professor is invited to give a series of lectures in an unnamed central European city on the subject of forgotten books, following the success of his book The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure — the title of Rose’s own previous work, published in 2014 This brief interruption of fact within fiction occurs in chapter one, as if to invite the reader to prepare for a sojourn in the supernatural   The name of the city, we are told, is unimportant, but we’re placed in a Kafka-esque urban environment, somewhere between the Austro-Hungarian empire and Post-Soviet Eastern Europe, where the newspapers contain ‘disturbingly few vowels in their mastheads’ and where Liberation Square and Revolution Square are regularly confused In a kind of Truman Show reality, the professor’s world is peopled by few but all too-deliberate characters: the crazed taxi driver-cum-personal chauffeur in his orange football shirt and ‘80s Lada; the pair of identical non-same-sex twins Ono and Ana, who interchangeably serve as the professor’s assistant and whose palindromic names amplify their malleable identity; and the permanently performing performance artist Squattrinato, who appears to have parachuted straight from the final act of a Pirandello play without removing his make-up The town is also the resting place of the professor’s favourite writer Guyavitch (who allegedly never existed) – ‘Guy’ alluding to everybody and therefore nobody In sum, they create a world not of people, but characters, who serve knowingly to position the novel as a feat