The Art of Hunger:
Essays, Prefaces, Interviews, The Red Notebook
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.
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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.
.jpg)
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.
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