Paul Auster- Winter Journal

Winter Journal

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

2012

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - In The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Hand To Mouth - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - The Brooklyn Follies - Travels in the Scriptorium - Man in the Dark - Invisible

“Most other people, your wife included, with her unerring inner compass, seem to be able to get around without difficulty. They know where they are, where they have been, and where they are going, but you know nothing, you are forever lost in the moment, in the void of each successive moment that engulfs you, with no idea where true north is, since the four cardinal points do not exist for you, have never existed for you. A minor infirmity until now, with no dramatic consequences to speak of, but that doesn’t mean a day won’t come when you accidentally walk off the edge of a cliff.”

After his last piece of fiction, 2010's Sunset Park, Paul Auster suggested (though I can't seem to find the quote) that he might be done with fiction. I don't quite believe that, at least not completely, but for now it has resulted in the author switching his focus primarily to an alternative obsession and writing a thematic sequel to his first notable work. From almost thirty-five years ago that book was The Invention of Solitude, consisting of Auster's personal memoirs relating to the recent unexpected death of his father. I found it to be a powerful, absorbing read. Approaching Winter Journal, though, I was admittedly more apprehensive.

Cool Auster

As Auster recognises in his prose, Winter Journal was 'inspired' (if that isn't an inappropriate term) by the death of his mother, naturally causing another outburst of emotions and memories from an extremely introspective writer. As a die-hard Auster fan I was quite happy to read another memoir, but already it became hard to ignore the fact that he might have already drained his personal anecdotes in previous releases. The aforementioned Solitude took a serious look into the structure of his family and upbringing, The Red Notebook (later released as part of The Art of Hunger) took a scattershot look at notable incidents of coincidence and apparent fate in Auster's life, and Hand To Mouth was a more amusing, honest look at Auster's life as a struggling student and aspiring author.

That leaves the twenty years or so since Hand to Mouth (1997) to cover, and while that seems a long enough time I doubt that the latter, success-filled years of an established author are anywhere near as interesting as his origins. Auster must have realised that, and as a consequence Winter Journal again takes in the whole scope of Auster's life until that point, this time (as the title suggests) looking at it all from the perspective of a much older man observing the changes and declines in his physical well-being. Not really an immediately exciting concept, I know.

Henry Holt & Co. Publishing

The key stylistic choice that essentially defines the novel as a whole (and which I probably should've mentioned by now) is that Auster goes the Slaughterhouse-Five route of chronologically flying all over the place with each paragraph- loosely following his themes to connect each one. As a result of this division each paragraph gains its own sense of relevance and own artistic identity, of a fashion; quickly switching between drama, tragedy or comedy when required. There's also the sense that each segment carries its own sense of poetic integrity, its own evocative notions and balance of ideas and style. Earlier on in the book I found this seemed to make an easy read, such was the variety.

Unfortunately I found it became less and less interesting the further I read. Despite being only 230 pages long in a typically-modern large font, Winter Journal outsays its welcome two thirds of the way through, where the lack of a particular journey and too much of a focus on mundane life events (mundane to me, anyway, obviously not to Auster, but compared to his usual standards of intricate stories quite mundane) made it fairly clear that Winter Journal is ultimately a self-indulgent project. Don't get me wrong,. Auster has clearly achieved enough to justify a personal side-project, and there are some genuinely emotionally resonant sections, but as a whole there's not enough interesting content to keep this up to Auster's usual standard. Considering  that his next book Report from the Interior is a companion piece, I'm worried that the inevitable future review of it will be even less flattering.

Paul Auster- The Brooklyn Follies

The Brooklyn Follies

Faber&Faber

Paul Auster

2005

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - In The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Hand To Mouth - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Travels in the Scriptorium - Man in the Dark - Invisible

“As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.”

In 2005, Paul Auster was coming off a six-year run consisting of three phenomenal novels. Seemingly determined to shed his reputation as a promising novelist to be recognised as the real deal, Auster did so in  style with three distinct, powerful novels that showcased his range and imagination as a talented postmodernist with a continually improving grasp on realistic human emotion; in 1999's Timbuktu he toyed with readers' emotions through writing from the perspective of homeless dog Mr. Bones. He followed with 2002's The Book of Illusions, a more complex story about the legacy of fictional silent film star genius Hector Mann, and continued with dark novel Oracle Night, refocusing on Auster's primary concerns of the meaning of identity and coincidence. The Brooklyn Follies, released just two years later, was under the pressure of matching-up to the collective twisted penmanship of that period while offering something new.

Auster's new approach, then, was in hindsight the obvious thing to do in order to create a new challenge for a man who, over the last twenty years, had mastered the art of alternative contemporary literature; he went completely back to basics, and wrote a novel without the aid of his once-impressive box of post-modernist tricks. Though Auster was lauded for the intelligence of the timing of his various unexpected techniques, perhaps by this point he simply tired of the pressure of coming up with another ingenious concept The Brooklyn Follies, then, is Auster's response; his most realistic novel yet, focusing on a busy period in the life of his central character Nathan Glass, where the remnants of his fractured family are brought back together following a series of dramatic events.

60-year-old Glass is at a pivotal point in his life, after having narrowly survived a battle with lung cancer and divorced his wife. This 320-page novel tells Glass' story upon his return to his native Brooklyn, where he meets the cast of characters set to change the rest of his life. At first he befriends his estranged nephew Tom and learns of the misfortunes of the separated side of his family, then Tom's charismatic and flamboyant boss Harry, and three three plot together to find a way of alleviating the financial difficulties of every day life. It's from this point that the novel begins to seriously differ from Auster's typical direction; though I was expecting the beginnings of a certain labyrinthine direction and perhaps a tinge of magical realism, in The Brookyln Follies Auster goes against these expectations to swing in the direction of a much more realistic human interest story.

I found it to be an easy, enjoyable read. Auster's central characters are likable and sympathetic, particularly the narrating Glass whose aged introspection and growth in confidence through the novel give it real direction. It's well-plotted and paced, with the shifts in tempo well-timed to prevent any dullness and emphasis the tempestuousness of this period in Glass' life. The central thread is revealed when, out of nowhere, Glass' nine-year--old great niece arrives on his doorstep, determined to stay while observing an apparent vow of silence, and as the protagonist moves to protect her he learns to reconnect and be there for other lost family members. 

Of all of Auster's novels it's relatively feel-good stuff, perhaps from an author at this point tired of the intense mystery and character misery of his earlier work. The catch to making this novel more accessible than most of his other work, though, is that it still has to be compared to it, and in comparison to Auster's best this falls short. The removal of all postmodernism or magical realism may be refreshing for Auster, but removes one of his most potent weapons. I'm not saying that every Auster book requires rampant postmodernism to be worth looking at, but his past novels decisively proved that he is at his best when incorporating certain aspects of the surreal. Moon Palace is the perfect example in a novel that doesn't break any storytelling rules but relies upon hints of surrealism through atmospheric depictions of larger than life, but technically possible situations. The Brooklyn Follies strictly keeps to real-life, and while it was engaging to read at the time, upon completion just didn't leave a particularly large impact. Overall an enjoyable, interesting read, but not up to the top standards of such a talented author.

Paul Auster- Hand To Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure

Hand to Mouth- A Chronicle of Early Failure

Picador Press

Paul Auster

1997

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - In The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Travels in the Scriptorium - Man in the Dark - Invisible

“But money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.”

One of the more obscure entries in Paul Auster's bibliography (which after ten years I'm finally getting near to finishing), Hand to Mouth is a prequel to his name-making 1982 debut The Invention of Solitude- the collection of introspective personal memoirs surrounding the death of his father. Again taken with the need to chronicle his own life, this short tome covers the period of Auster's experiences from his latter university days up until his first serious attempts at novel writing, and so mostly consists of self-admittedly overzealous failed writer angst, mixed-up with his memories of some very odd people whom influenced him on the way. It's also a very brief read, as Auster purposefully condenses experiences and descriptions of others that others may have dwelled upon into barely 160-pages.

Auster is super cool.

This brevity is the key to Hand to Mouth's final status as an amusing, but unfortunately irrelevant read- even to someone as fascinated by Auster's long-form prose fiction as I. The appeal of the book was obvious; the chance to perhaps further understand the creative process of a literary hero, but such opportunities seemed few and far between. Though Auster describes the extent of his earlier self's desperation, the introspective self-analysis contains more than a hint of embarrassment at the naivety of youth, and lacks enough detail to suggest important life-points. I get the feeling that Auster wanted to recapture the autobiographical spirit of his predecessors (such as Jack London with John Barleycorn), but was probably too much of a normal person to stand out.

As a result, his exploits meander from slightly interesting, such as his travels to France and Ireland, to generic normality, to absurdity- the latter referring to the time he spent serious time and effort trying to create and have published his own baseball-inspired card game. Auster's baseball fascination nearly always results in easily the worse segments from his fiction, and does so again in this autobiography, where it just seems so stupid and pointless it actually seemed to bring him down in my estimation.

As an Auster devotee (as, I imagine, 95% of the people who read this book will be), I found it amusing and mostly likable enough, but disappointing with that. There are certain aspects which relate to the motivations of characters in his book (particularly the sublime Moon Palace), probably more than I noticed, but not enough for it to seem revelatory. If any non-Auster fans come across Hand to Mouth, I'm sure they'd probably appreciate it as a decent, well-constructed light read also, though little more than that. In essence it's a curio, a self-obsessed long essay that Auster likely never intended to make waves but which he probably felt he needed to write.

Paul Auster- Travels in the Scriptorium

Travels in the Scriptorium

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

2007

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - In The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Man in the Dark - Invisible

“Without him, we are nothing, but the paradox is that we, the figments of another mind, will outlive the mind that made us, for once we are thrown into the world, we continue to exist forever, and our stories go on being told, even after we are dead.”

If there's anybody who's looked at this blog more than once and become reasonably annoyed at the constant stream of positive reviews for Paul Auster books, then this is your lucky day; an Auster book that I really did not like. Preceded in the author's bibliography by The Brooklyn Follies (which I have not read yet, though I hear and expect good things), and followed by the previously-reviewed similarly-sized novella Man in the Dark, the novella Travels in the Scriptorium is, an ambitious and confident piece of post-modernism. It's an author literally calling back to his characters and concepts of the past in order to try to create something distinctly new with the aid of a ton of metafiction. Far too much of it, as it turns out.

Auster, like all of the authors I most enjoy, has made a career out of focusing on certain deep-seated philosophical themes that become the basis for most of his novels. He's also a pioneering postmoderinist harking back to his debut collection of stories The New York Trilogy (mandatory reference complete) who uses his characters to toy with our notions of identity. I can see why the intensely focused strangeness of the genre can (fairly) put off casual readers, but usually with Auster's books, no matter how strange a plot development or how seemingly irrelevant a side-story might be, it all pays off for the dedicated reader by the end, and then I write an annoyingly positive review.

Spot the difference

The problems I had with Scriptorium arrived at the beginning. First of all, the main character is a non-entity with no memory and barely any personality. His name is Mr. Blank (or at least that's the name the narrator gives him, while insinuating he has another) and he lives in some sort of medical facility. Throughout the novella he is visited by a selection of different people whom he doesn't remember, but who know him, and they have a selection of pointed ethereal conversations where none of them actually explain what's going on (just like watching Lost). The real kicker, and the thing that's set to initially appeal to dedicated Auster fans, is that these visitors are all characters from prior novels of his. Anna Blume, from In the Country of Last Things is the most prominent one. Ultimately, though, there's no real established connection bar the character names.

The overall tone is a little bit irritating, written in the present tense with a certain sense of smugness, also minimalistic in style and explanations to the extent where I found it hard to care. I get the sense that Auster was trying to present an ourobourian piece of metafiction; Mr. Blank is clearly meant to be a simulacra of Auster himself, and some of the characters hint at knowledge of a higher relationship between them and he. I found it to ultimately be an unappealing mess thanks to the incoherent structure. Auster's typical elements are there in various ways, like a story-within-a-story tangent, but none of them hit the right note, and in this 120-page paperback have little time to leave an impact. Maybe other readers out there have deconstructed a clearer understanding of Scriptorium, but even if there is one the overall writing drove me away from seeing it. i hate to criticise Paul Auster's writing because I usually love it, but Travels in the Scriptorium was a big miss for me.

Paul Auster- Man in the Dark

Man in the Dark

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

2008 

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - In The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

“Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time."

Continuing on my rapid exploration of Paul Auster's bibliography, I came to this curious, thoughtful and sometimes bewitching novella, taking a premise featuring an amalgamation of some of Auster's most prevalent ideas from both his earlier and later authorship styles. Weaving in a series of short, tangential stories of varying realism into the framework of one dominating main narrative, Auster was attempting the potentially paradoxical (alliterative mood) goal of fitting a meaningful, multi-layered series of reflective stories into the very limited space of a 180-page (in my Faber & Faber paperback edition) novella. Featuring the strong post-modern styles of Auster's ground-breaking and edgy earlier fiction- like obviously The New York Trilogy, which I think I must have mentioned in every Auster review I've written on this blog and have to re-read one day- mixed in with the more grounded, contemplative character-study-based, magical realism-tinged fiction of his latter days, Man in the Dark  is far from perfect, but overall is a great story containing a nice mixture of drama, suspense, and even a bit of action.

The main plot, from which the narrating lead character inter-weaves a series of other stories, is an intense, realistic human interest drama stylistically most comparable to Auster's later fiction, such as Invisible or Sunset Park. Lead character August Brill is an elderly writer living with both his daughter and granddaughter, all three of them grieving over separate losses that are explored further towards the end of the book. As the unwavering framework of the whole book, grief and the search to overcome it permeates every page, as Auster presents it with the utmost seriousness. So seriously, in fact, that when it came towards the very end, where Brill and his granddaughter face-up to the rather horrific death of her fiance, things had become so serious and straightforward that I started to find it actually a bit silly, which I suppose isn't a great recommendation. Thankfully things are kept from being bogged down in a potential mire of seriousness by the other stories that Brill tells with his own, one in particular.

Auster doesn't do colour.

August Brill, the narrator, changes from the past to the present tense to narrate a story he's composing in his head, a story much different in tone and style from the 'real' main story about his family. In this story a man named Brick goes to bed next to his wife one night and then wakes up in the morning to find himself stuck down in a hole, in the middle of nowhere, in a parallel universe. He soon learns that, in this world, the US is embroiled in a bloody, modern civil war, and that he specifically has been chosen to cross worlds and act as an assassin, one who could end the fighting with a single bullet. I'm refrain from giving many details, since half the pleasure of this side-story is the thrilling suspense- for the first time in a while, possibly since In The Country of Last Things, Auster embraces more contemporary popular storytelling techniques and genres, and it's a lot of fun. I don't think I'd want him to switch to this kind of thing more often, but I do think that he was perhaps making a conscientious effort to catch the eye of new readers, to lure them into his web of postmodernism as he balances the stories of Brick and August Brill.

I have to admit that it disappointed me to discover that Brick's story ends rather abruptly, mid-way through Man in the Dark, since it was very entertaining, but the truth is that Auster's key concern was always with the realistic human drama of his center story; August Brill's grieving widower-hood, and his efforts to connect with his daughter and granddaughter, so the three of them can together overcome the tragic losses they've suffered. Brill ruminates on other short stories and memories, with the cumulative effect all relating to the whole. Auster packs quite a lot into a small book, keeping things constantly fast-paced; something that also might appeal to newbies. The same quickness and short length of the book is in some ways a hindrance to the overall story, since I don't think it allows Auster the space he needs to create enough of an emotional impact; especially in regards to the revelations as to how Brill's granddaughter's fiance was killed, something that was meant to shock and move the reader, but left me feeling somewhat unmoved through its over-the-top nature. Very topical, though.

In conclusion then, Man in the Dark is a very enjoyable, but rather flawed novella that thankfully overcomes its flaws to stand as a notable achievement. Though far from Auster's best work from a critical standpoint, the suspenseful nature and quick pacing make it a very easy read with far more crossover appeal than Auster's typical novels. Cautiously recommended as probably a good introductory novel, with a nice blend of the author's preferred styles from across the years.
 

Missing Review Catch-Up

Though originally when I started this blog I wanted to fully review every book I read, the next two years of haphazard blogging proved that, for me, this was going to be impossible. It's not really anything to do with the amount of free time I have, but instead related to the main plan behind this blog in the first place; to push myself into becoming a better and more productive writer. Although trying to review everything helped with the latter aspect, it seemed to make the former harder when I came up against books that I simply didn't have the knowledge (or sometimes desire) with which to write a half-decent appraisal. The nadir of this came when I tried to write a review of established philosophy classic Fear and Trembling (which I keep accidentally writing as Fear and Loathing every damned time) by Soren Kiekergaard. It was less a review and more of an admission of incompetence.

So the best thing to do to tackle the few books I've read over the past year without fully reviewing them would be to put together a series of mini-reviews in one post, just to put my obsessive compulsive mind at rest- and as if by magic, here's a bunch of them right here. For those curious, the main reasons why I've skipped full reviews of certain books are that they're either too short, too technical, or too classical for me to put my ugly stamp on them.

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Auggie Wren's Christmas Story (1990/2004)

Paul Auster

I had no idea what Auggie Wren's Christmas Story was when I ordered it from Amazon a few months back. I'd never seen it in bookshops, rarely seen it listen in the usual 'also by this author' pages, and never looked at a summary on Wikipedia thanks to its mysterious and definitive red font colour status. I knew I had to have it regardless, since I'm working on a complete Auster collection, and was excited by the mystery of what this book might actually be. Obviously I worked out that it might be a story about Christmas.

When the Amazon package turned up at my door (well, my mother's door actually, since my apartment doesn't have a big enough letterbox for parcels, so I send them all to her), the mystery was revealed and left me feeling like I'd been more than a little ripped off, but also I didn't mind too much. Auggie Wren's Christmas story, it turns out, was originally a short story commissioned by The New York Times way back in 1990, back when Auster was the new in-thing in the NY literary world thanks to The New York Trilogy. This 2004 edition is a small hardback re-release featuring art by Isol (a woman I didn't know anything about prior to this, but apparently is a very highly-regarded children's illustrator). At no more than a few thousand words, the story and images barely make 30 pages, making it automatically not worth buying if you're not a huge Auster fan.

The story is a very nice, thoughtful modern Christmas tale, one that embodies the more intellectual and introspective side of the season thanks to being utterly Auster in its nature. Written early in Auster's career as a novelist, it's very much in the mold of The New York Trilogy and Moon Palace. I enjoyed it so much that I wish Auster would try out more short stories in the future. Unfortunately I didn't get the appeal of the art at all. Done in a style that I couldn't possibly name or even it seems describe, I didn't find it much to look at. Altogether then, considering the brevity of the text and non-interest of the art, it was a bit of a rip-off, but I'm in complete Auster fan-mode at this point in my life so it didn't really matter.

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The Disappearing Spoon- And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements (2011)
Sam Keane

The Disappearing Spoon was another attempt to try and break my way into somewhat understanding some aspects of science, since it seems to be the type of real world thing I should know something about, rather than just constantly writing about people and events that aren't real. Seriously though, I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable with science as I should be, so I'm at the point where I think trying to write a full review of a book like this would be redundant. In the past I have written a couple of science book reviews here (Elephants on Acid being the most recent), but The Disappearing Spoon fell short by addressing a subject I really needed some inspiration to get interested in and then not providing it. The book, if you didn't guess by the title, is about the elements and all that.

As a writer in the genre of popular science, Sam Keane's main task is to get on board all the stupid people like me who really don't know what he's talking about, by being affable and enthusiastic, while all the while leading them on a coherent path that somewhat resembles a narrative. He's okay at the former, but the latter is where this book really fell apart in my eyes, since it's essentially a collection of tangentially linked stories of scientific discovery and the occasional weirdness. As a result the book tackles human history just as much as scientific fact, which I appreciated, but once I'd finished I really didn't feel like I'd learned anything. That's probably mostly my fault, but it does mean that ultimately I can't particularly recommend The Disappearing Spoon as an enlightening read.

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 Signal To Noise (1992)
Neil Gaiman - Art by Dave McKean

I like Neil Gaiman, I really do, I'll read anything with his name on it, but I try not too expect too much each time. Gaiman has the mind of a genius storyteller, something he's proven time and time again over the years through his various short story collections, and of course his magnum opus (I love that phrase) the inestimably great The Sandman, a comic book series I've been meaning to write about on this blog for far too long but just don't have the courage. The problem is, in my opinion, that despite Gaiman's ability to develop a story like few others, his actual prose can often come up a little short. I don't think any of his longer novels can truly be called classics in the usual sense- alright, American Gods is probably a fantasy classic- and as such his best novel, again in my opinion obviously, was the co-authored Good Omens with Terry Pratchett. 

What I'm trying to say is that I wasn't surprised when I found Signal To Noise to be a very pretentious book with very little to offer, despite its creator's credentials. Providing the art for this graphic novel- for that is what it is- was Dave McKeane, most famous in comics for his artwork on Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum. Unfortunately I've never been particularly taken with McKean's neo-Gothic patchwork art style, as though it's very effective in establishing mood, I find it terrible at portraying a cohesive panel-to-panel story. I'm not sure how much of a part the art played in my lack of interest in the story, but it certainly played a part. The bottom line though was I found Gaiman's writing in Signal To Noise to be pretentious in its constant efforts to try and sound deep and meaningful, without any depth behind the attempted gravitas.

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 Doctor Faustus (1592)
Christopher Marlowe

To give it its full title, Marlowe's The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus will always hold a special place in my memory for being chronologically the first text I studied at University, in the English Literature department of a big university in a small town on the coast of Wales. Truth be told, I was never the most diligent student, and often if a book didn't take my interest I'd barely study it; especially if it was historically important and not particularly interesting to read today. Faustus, thank god, despite certain features that put me off, is still a rather entertaining play, and one that rewrote the old Germanic tale and defined the notion of the Faustian Pact. It's wordy influence crosses boundaries of interest for those who study Shakespeare (for Marlowe is his closest predecessor, to the extent that conspiracy theorists suggest they were the same person) and for those more into romanticism.

Personally I enjoy the bombastic, intentionally self-important tone of it all. My typical problem with the vast majority of classical literature in this vain is that I find extended decorative prose to be kind of annoying, frustratingly avoiding the issue of explaining things for the sake of sounding impressive and being classed as poetry. I'm way more of a fan of minimalism, as my love for Bukowski and Orwell hopefully shows. Marlow's Faustus, however, gets a pass from me in this respect because it's a very straightforward story with a straightforward plot, and the over-written dialogue to me represents the folly of Faustus' assumptions of self-control and Mephistopheles' amusement at his arrogance. I re-read the play recently since I found a nice hard-bound old copy also containing the rather similar topic of the review below. I much, much preferred Marlowe's work.

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Faust (1829)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  

I had to buy the hardback mentioned above, since though I already had a copy of Marlowe's Faustus somewhere on my bookshelves I'd never read the probably-even-more-fanous version of the folktale in Goethe's Faust, and needed to remedy that. I suppose that even beforehand I knew I most likely wasn't going to enjoy it a huge amount, especially since, unlike Marlowe's Faustus, Goethe's didn't have the advantage in my eyes of being associated with one of the definitive times of my life. There's also the consideration that my very slight exposure to Germanic literature so far had shown me that the style (translated, anyway), probably wasn't really for me thanks to the complete lack of humour and uber-seriousness.

As a result, I'm not going to try and properly review Goethe's Faust because I'm nowhere near capable of it. I can say that, reading it in 2014 (and taking a long time about it) reminded me that I don't like flowery poetry since I can't be bothered to spend the time doing the research to translate the antiquated terms or many intellectual references, and that's obviously my fault rather than the book. I'm sure that if I had a capable teacher leading me through it I would've enjoyed Faust, and maybe in the future I'll have reason to look at it again with more care.

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Complete Shorter Fiction (No idea what year and I've given up looking)
Oscar Wilde

I was optimistic about enjoying this Penguin collection of Oscar Wilde's Complete Shorter Fiction, having many years ago enjoyed The Picture of Dorian Gray, but as it turns out it didn't really happen. Wilde was far from a prolific prose author, hence this complete collection is a thin volume of some fairly random things, the most famous probably being The Canterville Ghost. Unfortunately I didn't enjoy or engage with any of these stories to anywhere near the same extent as Dorian Gray. Wilde's talent as a aesthetic writer is noticeable in every story, of course, but his style alone isn't enough for me, and I only have a very limited interest in the turn of the century British nobility. As a result I found myself deeply uninterested in a lot of these stories. 

Wilde also writes quite a few of his own fairy tales, included in this volume. They're okay, interesting at first but soon become repetitive, which is a feature not helped at all by Wilde's often-pompous prose style. I got a sense with each one of the stories in this collection that they were experimental writing exercises for Wilde to stretch and exercise his prose fiction muscles, and as a result of his reluctance to write in such a fashion very often (as opposed to his playwright career), he lacked the passion or methods to come up with many interesting short stories. I suppose I am glad I read it because it was interesting, just not as enjoyable as I hoped.

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That's it for now. I expect I'll have to do this again one day.

Paul Auster- The Art of Hunger

The Art of Hunger: 
Essays, Prefaces, Interviews, The Red Notebook

Penguin

Paul Auster

1993

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

“In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life”

It's an obvious sign that you're obsessed with a particular author when you get unreasonably excited at the thought of reading their miscellany. Things like essays, unfinished scripts, correspondence and interviews might seem self-indulgent or irrelevant by people not quite so obsessed, but to you each individual random article is a potential goldmine of revelation. There are only a few authors in my collection who I've cared enough about to buy their assorted leftover crap, such as Douglas Adams' posthumous The Salmon of Doubt, Terry Pratchett's recent A Blink of the Screen, and, the master of extra-curricular collections, George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant. As anyone who's ever looked at this blog more than once might see, Paul Auster easily ranks alongside those greats as someone who's entire bibliography must be mine.

In many ways I think Paul Auster is potentially the ideal author for such a collection, since the works in his bibliography are extremely self-referential, drawing upon Auster's self-confessed obsessions (questions of identity and chance) and weaving them around absorbing narratives that always encourage the reader to think. He also a massive student of literature himself; each of his books is influenced by a seemingly limitless number of classic and cult classic authors whom laid the path out for Auster to re-imagine and re-invigourate. It's Auster's studentship that provides the foundation for this collection The Art of Hunger, released early on in Auster's career as a novelist but far enough into his life to be able to select a range of his non-fiction written from the 1970's onwards.

As indicated by its subheading, The Art of Hunger is split into four sections based on format. The first section collects a large selection of critical essays on literature, and was undoubtedly the section which dragged the most in certain places. Heavy critical literary analysis is never really fun to read, even if you're a fan of the subject matter. I hate to admit my own ignorance on this sort of thing, but I'd never read any of the main prose texts Auster wrote about in these pieces,  and while they each began on an interesting note, Auster's tendency to assume reader knowledge regarding the fairly obscure people and movements doesn't help maintain interest. Despite the heaviness of these essays, there are some interesting indications as to how Auster developed many of his ideas. The essays on poets and poetry, meanwhile, completely lost me since I just can't get into poetry. There's also an excellent article on French street performing legend Phillipe Petite that I very much enjoyed. 

The second section, the self-explanatory 'Prefaces', did nothing for me, since the majority of it was one Auster preface to a poetry collection that I couldn't begin to care about. It was the third section, 'Interviews', that gave me more of what I wanted; insight into the imagination and creative process behind some of my favourite books. One particularly long interview from 1990 sees Auster ruminating over the inspirations both direct and subconscious for his novels up to that point, from his autobiographical debut The Invention of Silence to the brilliant Moon Palace- as an aside, I was curious but not shocked to discover that his second fiction, In the Country of Last Things was something he started writing as a college student and eventually returned to after making his name.

The final section with the much more interesting title of 'The Red Notebook'  is the highlight of the book. It's comprised as a collection of short memoirs from Auster's life, each barely longer than a few pages, where the author highlights curious incidences that drove him to contemplate the powers of coincidence. Some are perhaps much less impressive than others, but the cumulative effect very much establishes the basis for one of Auster's obsessions that he toys with in his novels; specifically regarding the power of chance to change the course of an individual's life. Split into very small chapters, one includes Auster further extrapolating on the random phone call that inspired the beginning of City of Glass (first part of The New York Trilogy). It's far from Auster's best work, but it's a bemusing, thoughtful short piece, and the hidden gem I was hoping for when I picked this book up.

That's not to say that without it The Art of Hunger would be unenjoyable, but the more relaxing ending took my overall enjoyment of the book up a notch. Still, I wouldn't recommend it to anybody without a real attachment to Auster's bibliography since it's a rather self-indulgent compendium, but I did find it mostly interesting.

Excitable Post

My pre-ordered copy of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgramage by Haruki Murakami finally turned up today. After the brilliance of his last novel, the two-part (in the Western edition, anyway) 1Q84 released in 2011 I've been waiting impatiently for Murakami's next work. Now it's finally here it'll jump straight to the top of the to-read pile (which has about 40 books on it right now). I just have to finish my current in-progress review of World War Z, then finish reading my current main book (I usually have a back-up on the go, most often a book about science), Paul Auster's critical essay collection The Art of Hunger, which probably won't get a full review.  Then it's Tsukuru Tazaki a-go-go, baby.

I just felt I should write all this down for some reason.

Paul Auster- In the Country of Last Things

In the Country of Last Things

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

1987

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

"The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginery, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to the end."

I had great expectations coming in to this very distinctive early Paul Auster novel, since like most people on the Internet I love a good piece of dystopian post-apocalyptic end-of-days fiction. In the Country of Last Things is an incredibly bleak story full of misery and death, set in a world with just the right balance of mystery and detail. Auster's heroin,, Anna, narrates in the form of a letter where she tells the story of her attempt to find her brother William in the decaying metropolis of an unnamed city. In this world society has crumbled as the earth has turned on the human race, with food and energy resources rapidly diminishing countless are dead, as the survivors desperately cling on to some semblance of civilisation. From the very first pages it was clear that Auster's dedication to establishing the tone of this world meant that his usual style of prose would also change.

 

I breezed through the book across a couple of days, captivated by this dying, polluted world, and aided by the familiarity I have with good dystopian survival horror narratives. I think it's clear that Auster was writing a form of genre fiction here. He made his name writing on the surface a form of genre fiction with The New York Trilogy (most specifically the first part; City of Glass) where he created a detective story with all the usual trimmings only viewed through a kaleidoscope. Only it was more than that somehow, a unique, mind-bending experience that reveled in messing with the familiar. I mention all this because In  the Country of Last Things, for better or worse, is not a genre-defying post-modern mindfuck, but is *simply* an excellent normal piece of genre fiction. I suppose I find that slightly disappointing thanks to my expectations of the author, to be honest.

Auster being Auster, there was no way that certain examples of his favourite literary themes wouldn't feature. As always Auster is fixated on the concept of identity, which in the book is under threat on a ubiquitous scale as the human race in the eyes of Anna seem to constantly be losing theirs. The title of the book itself refers to this, the 'last things' representing the final resting place of human culture. At one point in the book Anna is aghast when a man she meets has never heard of an airplane. In a more general sense, concepts such as charity and friendship are dying out in the face of pure despair, The term is cliche, but I found it to be very, very Orwellian altogether, with the main difference between this and Nineteen Eighty Four being the infirmity of the crumbling society. It has the same kind of hopelessness occasionally very slightly permeated by a drop of optimism.

Ultimately though, after having time to ponder it it's impossible for me not to conclude that In the Country of Last Things doesn't have the same depth that I've come to expect from Auster. It's streamlined, minimised prose does firmly establish it in its genre and I really did care to find out Anna's fate, but the lack of detail left me feeling unfulfilled upon the conclusion. Auster usually revels in exploring his ideas and creations from unexpected perspectives, offering stories-within-stories that melt into each other to create one undefinable whole, and I love how the ideas linger in my mind afterwards. I simply didn't get that with this book; it's very good for what it is but it's not really that much more complicated than The Road, for example. There's lots of edginess that gave me the feeling that this was a young author determined to follow his debut impact with something equally anti-cultural, but I think it was quickly proven by his next book Moon Palace that his real legacy would come from focusing on what obviously came naturally to him.

Paul Auster- Moon Palace

Moon Palace

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

1989

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

“That was the trouble. The land is too big out there, and after a while it starts to swallow you up. I reached a point when I couldn't take it anymore. All that bloody silence and emptiness. You try to find your bearings in it, but it's too big, the dimensions are too monstrous, and eventually, I don't know how else to put it, eventually it just stops being there. There's no world, no land, no nothing. It comes down to that, Fogg, in the end it's all a figment. The only place you exist is in your head.”

I finished reading Moon Palace four days ago, but it's taken me a while to open up a Wordpad file to try and make sense of the novel I'd just read. My first reaction was to decide that this was one of the best works of fiction I'd ever read, and for a short while the best. Fast-forward to now and I'm leaning away from the latter statement but certainly towards the former, but it's all on a very contextual basis, which is what reading is all about, I suppose. All of our opinions on what makes great literature is shaped by our past reading experiences, and there are so many thousands of worthwhile books of all genres out there that we all follow our own paths, for better or for worse. The shaping of this path and the constant growth of individual context is what keeps me addicted to reading, and also draws me to particular authors who revel in exploring grand themes or obsessions over numerous books. My favourite authors all do this; Orwell, Murakami, Pratchett, Bukowski, Vonnegut, and of course the unique Paul Auster. A polarising figure for some, he has dedicated his writing career to exploring his own obsessions within maze-like neo-noir stories.

Published in 1989, Moon Palace is one of Auster's earlier novels (having already made his name with The New York Trilogy) but since I feel well-acquainted with most of his later work it felt like a perfect culmination of everything he'd been trying to show me so far. Had I read it earlier I know it wouldn't have had the same impact- the same reason why I feel the need to re-read more than a couple of Auster books- and for that reason I absolutely understand why Moon Palace probably isn't for everybody, but for me it was absolutely amazing. In many ways it strikes me that of the Auster bibliography it's most similar to the recently reviewed Book of Illusions, where a lead character on the verge of spiritual and physical death is saved by exposure to knowledge of the past of an enigmatic elder, with that story reflecting the narrator's own character arc in the style of magical realism.

The narrator, the curious MS Fogg, is a simulacra of Auster himself. A young man living and attending college in Brooklyn, his life is a shambles. When his uncle, his only known living relative, passes away (leaving him nothing but his thousand-strong collection of books) MS consciously decides to abandon his fate to the whims of the universe, essentially living in poverty and nearly starving, eventually living homeless in Central Park before being rescued by his only friends. Trying to recover from hitting an absolute low, MS applies for a job as the personal assistant of an old man named Thomas Effing. Effing, I think, is one of Auster's greatest creations, a devious, manipulative and decrepit shadow, whom constantly tests the wits of his new man servant (not too unlike the plot of Mr. Vertigo). When Fogg gains some measure of trust, Effing lets him in on the real job he's there for; to record Effing's own self-written obituary; leading in to another Paul Auster favourite, the story within a story.

For me, the strange tale of Thomas Effing's life is the real meat of the book, putting into context as it does the road that Fogg took to get to this point, while remaining a fascinating tale of its own accord. Drifting into the American frontier, taking in the landscape to present a meandering, dramatic and constantly surreal story that leans on the sense of magical realism without being impossible. In part it feels like a parable mixed in with a folk myth, but it's also dirty and grimy like a downtrodden Western. Effing takes Fogg on a journey leads to further developments in the plot of the book, including the revaluation of who the obituary is for. This leads into another backstory within a story, the details of which I'll refrain from giving aside from to say that eventually all three stories collide to provide a circular truth. I loved the ending, as I said before it made me wonder for a while if that was the best book I'd ever read. It's both tragic and optimistic, with an ethereal sense of destiny surrounding these characters. 

I suppose anyone who might regularly check this blog would get a bit sick of these constant Paul Auster reviews, but right now I'm finding it so very easy to choose his books as my next read, thanks to how much I've been taken by his obsessions that permeate each of his novels. The key is that the details of each story are dramatically unique, taking inspiration from cult stylistic genres to explore the notions of identity and reality by in different compelling ways. Bar the story structure and thematic coincidences, Moon Palace is less of a post-modern work than some of Auster's other work and more of a complex drama. It mesmorised me from start to finish thanks to the strong story and flowing prose, connecting with Auster's bibliography in a way that reminded me why I love the exploratory nature of reading and the places it can take you.

Paul Auster- The Book of Illusions

The Book of Illusions

Picador Press

Paul Auster

2003

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

“It was one of the most sublimely exhilarating moments of my life. I was half a step in front of the real, an inch or two beyond the confines of my body, and when the thing happened just as I thought it would, I felt my skin had become transparent. I wasn't occupying space anymore so much as melting into it. What was around me was also inside me, and I had only to look into myself in order to see the world.” 

As I continue to fill the gaps in my collection of the bibliography of Paul Auster, my fandom has definitely increased remarkably over the past few months thanks to reading firstly the recently-reviewed Oracle Night, and now the book he wrote just prior to that- and subject of this review, obviously- the uniquely curious The Book of Illusions. I noticed this specifically recently when briefly skimming through reader reviews posted on Goodreads, and became curiously angry with the few people who chose to give Illusions a poor score; unfair of me I know, since everyone has the right to their opinion, and art by its very nature is subjective, but after just finishing the book myself the idea of people massively negatively criticising it drove me somewhat insane, especially since said criticisms were all exactly the same, exactly the same in fact as any criticisms I ever see of Auster novels; that they're self-absorbed and pretentious. Well first of all, yes Auster certainly is absorbed with particular philosophical and post-modern concepts he addresses from different angles in most of his books, but he's so adept at it and each effort so rich with individual attributes that you might as well criticise Dickens for being overly concerned with Victorian England, or Orwell for worrying about fascism.

I definitely prefer this cover.

While I don't like to begin a review with a bit of a whiny complaint, the truth is that I enjoyed The Book of Illusions so much for so many reasons that I can't help biting back at such harsh criticism. I found this book to be one of Paul Auster's very best efforts (that I've read so far, at least), particularly for its ability to stick with Auster's trademark introspective, often noir-ish post-modern take on murky issues of identity and narrative power without slowing down the genuinely outstanding, constantly intriguing plot. Auster creates a rich backstory for two very different, but somehow similar main characters and brings it to the forefront with a developing human drama that somehow sits comfortably between real human drama and uncontrolled surrealism, containing elements of magical realism without ever pushing too far into that genre.

The book begins with a tale of human tragedy that sets the stage for things to come. First person narration from lead character Robert Zimmer (who, like so many Auster leads, is a curious amalgamation of the author's own traits) introduces his life as a ruined mess. Once happily married with two children, writer and professor Zimmer's immediately family were all killed simultaneously in a commercial airplane crash, leaving Zimmer absolutely devastated, unable to work, unable to talk to other people, unable to do anything bar wander his now-otherwise empty home and drink very heavily. Zimmer is clearly heading towards suicide, until a moment of chance saves him; while drunkenly watching television he comes across an old silent film by a comedian named Hector Mann, and, miraculously, it makes him laugh for the first time in months. At that moment a spark of obsessive compulsive behaviour saves his life and gives it meaning, as Zimmer decides to find out more about the man who bought about a moment of happiness to him. He discovers that Mann's career in Hollywood was mysterious cut short through his abrupt vanishing and presumed death. As it happens, Zimmer discovers that very recently a previously unseen set of Hector Mann films has been mysteriously sent to various museums and film houses across the world, and from that moment Zimmer decides to watch every one of those films and write a book about Mann's career.

Not too bad either.

Eventually Zimmer achieves his goal, becoming a foremost expert on the works of the comedian, but that's really only the start of the novel. After his book is published, Zimmer receives a letter out of the blue purporting to be from Hector Mann's wife. Fifty years after Hector Mann's presumed death, Zimmer is told that he is alive somewhere, and he wishes to meet the man who so expertly wrote about his life. Zimmer is naturally suspicious, but a visit from a young woman (and future love interest) claiming to be part of Mann's family finally changes his mind, and inevitably wraps him into a fifty year plot involving murder, deceit, and the last, never before seen films of Hector Mann. I found this plot to be gripping, eerie in places and constantly tragic, but involving honourable, likable characters that somehow balance out the tragedy with uplifting hope for the future. Auster meticulously lays out the foundations for the plot's present through detailed descriptions of a murky past, essentially making Robert Zimmer and Hector Mann equally important as characters, and interesting reflections of themselves as a similar character archetype.

Interestingly. I found this book somewhat balanced in style between Auster's classic experiments using postmodernism techniques to explore the intangible questions of identity and reality, and his more recent efforts to ground his characters in realism through more relatable human drama. Everything in this book is technically possible (unlike the fantasy of of Mr. Vertigo, for example), with the overarching aura of surrealism surrounding the events powered by coincidence, or narrative fate. It's perhaps a more traditional way of progressing the plot than other Auster books (I think it could make a good low-key on-screen drama), but I found that it engaged me with the fate of the characters very well, and gave the mixed messages of tragedy and human resilience more power upon the novel's dramatic conclusion. Auster also cleverly uses the Hector Mann's Hollywood background and subsequent underground film making as another way to more directly present a few powerful, fantastical scenes packed with resonating symbolism entwined with the novel as a whole, within the context of Hector's films. It's very carefully composed, a labyrinthine arrangement of plot threads unfolding on each page.

So, as I always end up doing with Auster, I'm going to recommend this book to anyone looking for cutting edge contemporary literature by a master of the style. With a rounded, conclusive story that you don't always get from him, The Book of Illusions would probably be a great introduction to Auster for someone who likes the sound of what he does.