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Illustrated and clothbound Auster.

Condalmo — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:40:08 +0000

File under “that’s a lot of money for a book I already have in a different edition” and also under “but ooooo looky”:

The New York Trilogy

Paul Auster

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Published price: US$ 54.95

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Winner of Best Illustrated Book and Best Overall in the 2009 V&A Illustration Awards.
Illustrated by Tom Burns. Bound in cloth, printed with a design by Tom Burns.

Frontispiece and 12 full-page colour illustrations.

Set in Fournier. 272 pages. 11″ × 6½”.

Finding a Common Link Between Paul Auster and Freddie Mercury

Jason Diamond — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:46:46 +0000

(Via New York Magazine)

You seem to really love French women. Do you love watching women ride bikes in Paris, smoking and carrying a baguette?
Young women on bicycles I find very erotic, I have to say. Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.

Wood versus Auster

Ana Carolina Arantes — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:35:51 +0000

“Cova Rasa” é o título do artigo de James Wood sobre Paul Auster, publicado na última New Yorker na esteira do lançamento de Invisible, livro mais recente do escritor. Considerado por muitos de seus pares o melhor crítico literário de sua geração, Wood é reconhecido pela defesa do realismo literário em detrimento da literatura pós-moderna, e a resenha de Auster concentra grande parte dos argumentos frequentes de Wood em sua cruzada.

O crítico sugere uma fórmula aos “agradáveis, levemente condescendentes” livros do escritor e a toma emprestada para criar o começo de um romance a la Auster na abertura do artigo, dando indício aos leitores de que não será dócil o teor dos parágrafos seguintes.

Há uma longa passagem em que comenta a presença de clichês nas obras de Auster. Ao contrário de Flaubert, em cujos romances as expressões gastas são empregadas com ironia, ou mesmo de Beckett e Nabokov, conscientes do “tomar emprestado” da cultura de massa, Auster “não faz nada com o clichê, a não ser usá-lo”, afirma Wood.

Seus enredos, de forma geral, são caracterizados por Wood como de um realismo pouco convincente e até dotados de certa atmosfera de filme B. As reviravoltas da trama – que, a propósito, Hollywood foi pródiga em consagrar-, fariam de seus romances máximas do surrealismo ou, tomando uma perspectiva otimista, suas histórias traduziriam apenas um realismo diluído, pasteurizado.

E quem esperava do artigo ao menos um final redentor não soube dimensionar o cinismo de seu início. Aqui, a superficialidade e a futilidade sugeridas pelo título soam como galanteios: Wood traz à tona o conceito da linguagem contemporânea ligada ao vazio, à ausência, apenas para solicitar: mais silêncio, Auster.

Para quem deseja assistir a todos os rounds, o artigo pode ser lido na íntegra na versão digital da New Yorker, que trouxe ainda conto inédito de Don DeLillo.

women on bicycles

Lily Hoang — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 15:40:02 +0000

this interview with paul auster from New York Magazine is hilarious. no other word for it. read it. tell me what you think… one day, i hope people read my books & ask me questions about how similar i am to my characters. oh paul auster: by the way, are you a pedophile, do you like incest, & what about parisian women on bicycles!? http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/62258/

Invisible by Paul Auster - A Book Review

Scott William Foley — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:47:16 +0000

Invisible spoke to me more potently than many of Auster’s other recent works.

Don’t misunderstand, Auster again explored themes of identity, chance, and reality, but this novella in particular struck me as being far more concerned with character. Moreover, though the story jumped around in time and made use of several perspectives, it was one of his more linear stories in quite some time—that is, it definitely had a clear beginning, middle, and end.

I also appreciated the format in which he chose to deliver the story. Auster is always one to experiment with narrative technique, and Invisible’s endeavor succeeded. Sometimes such fiddling can distract the reader, but not with Invisible. The shifts felt organic and added to the overall story, making it far more interesting than had it been written conventionally.

Perhaps the most electrifying aspect of Invisible was the pure mystery involved. I don’t want to go into detail for fear of spoiling any plot points, but Auster did a magnificent job of providing enough evidence to make you scratch your head and question your allegiances.

The only complaint I have—albeit a minor one—is that the book ended rather abruptly, even by Auster’s standards. It had to conclude somehow, I suppose, and it’s always better to leave the reader wanting more, but I think a very interesting discussion could ensue analyzing why Auster chose to end the book with the specific scene he did. I was also surprised by the sexual explicitness in this work. I’ve never read anything quite so sexually descriptive from Auster, but the scenes ended up playing a very important role in the question of character and were absolutely warranted. He even added a line about writers having to be willing to make themselves uncomfortable if they wanted to be any good, and I wonder if that was a nod to the gratuitousness.

All in all, if you’re an Auster fan, I think you’ll find this outing enjoyable and challenging. If you’ve never read Auster before, you have to accept him as a writer who demands much from his readers and offers few answers in return. However, he is a superb writer and he will make you think, which is unusual in today’s books.

Las novelas de Paul Auster

hugoalfredohinojosa — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:02:44 +0000

Esta semana la revista The New Yorker publica un interesante artículo de James Wood, con respecto al trabajo novelístico de Paul Auster. Algo que vale la pena leer…

Shallow Graves

The novels of Paul Auster.

by James Wood November 30, 2009

Roger Phaedo had not spoken to anyone for ten years. He confined himself to his Brooklyn apartment, obsessively translating and retranslating the same short passage from Rousseau’s “Confessions.” A decade earlier, a mobster named Charlie Dark had attacked Phaedo and his wife. Phaedo was beaten to within an inch of his life; Mary was set on fire, and survived just five days in the I.C.U. By day, Phaedo translated; at night, he worked on a novel about Charlie Dark, who was never convicted. Then Phaedo drank himself senseless with Scotch. He drank to drown his sorrows, to dull his senses, to forget himself. The phone rang, but he never answered it. Sometimes, Holly Steiner, an attractive woman across the hall, would silently enter his bedroom, and expertly rouse him from his stupor. At other times, he made use of the services of Aleesha, a local hooker. Aleesha’s eyes were too hard, too cynical, and they bore the look of someone who had already seen too much. Despite that, Aleesha had an uncanny resemblance to Holly, as if she were Holly’s double. And it was Aleesha who brought Roger Phaedo back from the darkness. One afternoon, wandering naked through Phaedo’s apartment, she came upon two enormous manuscripts, neatly stacked. One was the Rousseau translation, each page covered with almost identical words; the other, the novel about Charlie Dark. She started leafing through the novel. “Charlie Dark!” she exclaimed. “I knew Charlie Dark! He was one tough cookie. That bastard was in the Paul Auster gang. I’d love to read this book, baby, but I’m always too lazy to read long books. Why don’t you read it to me?” And that is how the ten-year silence was broken. Phaedo decided to please Aleesha. He sat down, and started reading the opening paragraph of his novel, the novel you have just read.

Yes, that précis is a parody of Paul Auster’s fiction, l’eau d’Auster in a sardonic sac. It is unfair, but diligently so, checking off most of his work’s familiar features. A protagonist, nearly always male, often a writer or an intellectual, lives monkishly, coddling a loss—a deceased or divorced wife, dead children, a missing brother. Violent accidents perforate the narratives, both as a means of insisting on the contingency of existence and as a means of keeping the reader reading—a woman drawn and quartered in a German concentration camp, a man beheaded in Iraq, a woman severely beaten by a man with whom she is about to have sex, a boy kept in a darkened room for nine years and periodically beaten, a woman accidentally shot in the eye, and so on. The narratives conduct themselves like realistic stories, except for a slight lack of conviction and a general B-movie atmosphere. People say things like “You’re one tough cookie, kid,” or “My pussy’s not for sale,” or “It’s an old story, pal. You let your dick do your thinking for you, and that’s what happens.” A visiting text—Chateaubriand, Rousseau, Hawthorne, Poe, Beckett—is elegantly slid into the host book. There are doubles, alter egos, doppelgängers, and appearances by a character named Paul Auster. At the end of the story, the hints that have been scattered like mouse droppings lead us to the postmodern hole in the book where the rodent got in: the revelation that some or all of what we have been reading has probably been imagined by the protagonist. Hey, Roger Phaedo invented Charlie Dark! It was all in his head.

Paul Auster’s latest book, “Invisible” (Holt; $25), though it has charm and vitality in places, conforms to the Auster model. It is 1967. Adam Walker, a young poet studying literature at Columbia, mourns the loss of his brother, Andy, who drowned in a lake ten years before the novel opens. At a party, Adam meets the flamboyant and sinister Rudolf Born, Swiss by birth, of German-speaking and French-speaking parentage. Born is a visiting professor, teaching the history of French colonial wars, about which he appears to have decided views. “War is the purest, most vivid expression of the human soul,” he tells a startled Adam. He tries to get Adam to sleep with his girlfriend. Later, we learn that he has worked clandestinely for the French government, and may even be a double agent.

Perhaps because Rudolf Born is so obviously a figure from spy movies—Auster could have called his novel “The Born Supremacy”—he never sounds remotely like the person he’s supposed to be, a fastidious and well-educated French-speaking European of the nineteen-sixties. He says things like “Your ass will be so cooked, you won’t be able to sit down again for the rest of your life,” or “We’re still working on the stew” (about a lamb navarin), or “All I have to do is pull it out of my pants, piss on the fire, and the problem is solved.” He takes an immediate interest in Adam, and gives him money to set up a literary magazine. “I see something in you, Walker, something I like,” he says, sounding oddly like Burt Lancaster in “Local Hero,” “and for some inexplicable reason I find myself willing to take a gamble on you.” For “some inexplicable reason,” indeed: Auster anxiously confesses his own creative lack.

This being an Auster novel, accidents visit the narrative like automobiles falling from the sky. One evening, while walking along Riverside Drive, Born and Walker are held up by a young black man, Cedric Williams. “The gun was pointed at us, and just like that, with a single tick of the clock, the entire universe had changed” is Walker’s banal gloss. Born refuses to hand over his wallet, draws a switchblade, and ruthlessly stabs the young man (whose gun, it turns out, was unloaded). Walker knows that he should call the police, but the next day Born sends a threatening letter: “Not a word, Walker. Remember: I still have the knife, and I’m not afraid to use it.” Full of shame, Walker goes to the authorities, but Born has left for Paris.

(…) leer más en este sitio

Jawbone — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:04:00 +0000

James Wood has offically taken a side in the divorce.

'INVISIBLE', de Paul Auster. 1 de diciembre del 2009

isetemv — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:57:55 +0000

Aunque él dice que “no es para nada autobiográfica“, la próxima novela de Paul Auster ar

Más Auster: 'Invisible', regreso triunfal

lalibrera — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:33:31 +0000

El nuevo libro de Paul Auster, que en España publica Anagrama, promete. Estoy inmersa en su lectura y os aseguro que recupera al Auster de los viejos tiempos, ese de ‘La noche del oráculo’ o ‘El libro de las ilusiones’. Personajes bien trazados, la literatura como telón de fondo, y escritores como protagonistas de una historia contada a varias voces y que se mueve entre los convulsos años 60 y la actualidad. De nuevo, crea esa atmósfera ‘Auster’, con personajes carismáticos y misteriosos y mucho amor, de ese intenso pero no siempre triunfal que tanto le gusta al autor de Brooklyn. En Estados Unidos, ‘Invisible’ ya está recibiendo buenas críticas. Entre ellas, de The New York Times. Aquí dejo el enlace para el que esté interesado en leer la crítica. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Martin-t.html

Pechada por vacacións

meditecadogrilo — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:40:01 +0000

Os habitantes desta grileira imos pechar ata o 9 de decembro. Pero mentres andamos aos grilos queremos deixar unha suxerencia para ler. Para este grilo que fala unha das súas debilidades literarias é sen dúbida Paul Auster, polo que toda nova que nos chega á Biblioteca dun novo libro deste autor norteamericano é un motivo de alegría. En decembro Anagrama edita Invisible e na páxina de El País xa podemos ler o seu primeiro capítulo. Pola miña banda xa estou ansioso por poder disfrutar do resto de páxinas.

Teño que dicir que esta admiraciónpor Auster ven de moi atrás pero quedei cautivado con El Libro de las ilusiones , sobretodo a idea dun home nunha depresión profunda diante da televisión e que de súpeto comeza a sorrir ao ver unha película de cine mudo. Paréceme un arranque ao mesmo tempo intrigante e cunha gran carga poética.

En fin, suxerimos dende a nosa Grileira que os que non coñezades a Auster fagades por descubrilo e os que sí que sabedes del sigades a telo en conta para telo nun lugar privilexiado das vosas lecturas.

Se tedes interés, nas nosas biliotecas temos algunhas das súas obras anteriores. Así, podedes levar en empréstito:

La trilogía de Nueva York
El palacio de la luna
La música del azar
Leviatan
Mr. Vértigo
Brooklyn Follies
Viaxes no Scriptorium

Podedes consultar a dispoñibilidade nos catálogos correspondentes.

Ata a volta e felices lecturas

o caderno vermelho

k. sérgio gomes — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:09:52 +0000

Alguma coisa acontece no meu ser quando noto que não tenho um livro na bolsa. Me falta ar, fico inqu

El primer capítulo de "Invisible", de Paul Auster.

Alguien — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:07:11 +0000

Paul Auster da un salto literario en su nueva novela: Invisible (Anagrama). Esta vez el autor neoyorquino se sirve de tres narradores para contar una historia que oscila entre 1967 y 2007. Es la vida de un veinteañero que sueña con ser poeta y que conoce a una pareja de franceses, a partir de lo cual su vida se precipita hacia un juego perverso de ilusión, exploración, y peligro. Una historia marca Auster que Babelia avanza hoy en ELPAÍS.com, ya que la novela llegará a las librerías el 1 de diciembre.

No recuerdo en absoluto por qué me encontraba allí. Alguien debió invitarme, pero hace mucho que se me fue de la memoria quién pudo ser. Ni siquiera me acuerdo de dónde se celebraba la fiesta -en el norte o en el centro de la ciudad, en un apartamento o en un loft- ni de mis motivos para aceptar la invitación en primer lugar, porque por aquella época tendía a evitar las grandes congregaciones de gente, harto del barullo de la multitud que habla mucho y dice poco, azorado por la timidez que me sobrevenía en presencia de personas desconocidas. Pero aquella noche, inexplicablemente, dije que sí, y acompañé a mi olvidado amigo adondequiera que me llevase.

Lo que recuerdo es lo siguiente: en cierto momento de la velada, me encontré solo en un rincón de la estancia. Estaba fumando un cigarrillo mientras observaba a la gente, docenas y docenas de jóvenes cuerpos apiñados en los confines de aquel espacio, oyendo la estruendosa mezcla de palabras y risas, preguntándome qué demonios hacía allí y pensando que tal vez era hora de marcharme. Había un cenicero sobre un radiador a mi izquierda, y al volverme para apagar el pitillo vi que, sujeto en la palma de la mano de un desconocido, el receptáculo lleno de colillas se elevaba hacia mí. Sin que lo hubiera advertido, dos personas acababan de sentarse en el radiador, un hombre y una mujer, ambos mayores que yo, y sin duda con más años que ninguno de los que se encontraban en la habitación: él, alrededor de los treinta y cinco; ella, veintinueve o treinta.

Leer el primer capítulo de “Invisible”, de Paul Auster (PDF)

También disponible en:
El poeta decapitado – lanacion.com
Novelista con alma de poeta – El Universal.com.mx.

PORTADES: Auster vs. Modiano

Roselles — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:10:48 +0000

INVISIBLE, Paul Auster, publicat a la tardor 2009. En el cafè de la joventut perduda, Patrick

Bad Awards

Mark Athitakis — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:34:43 +0000

Last week the Literary Review announced its nominees for its annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, which seems to have prompted some ritualistic mea culpas. John Banville, who’s been on the shortlist before, smirkingly suggested he ought never write about sex again; writing in the Telegraph, previous nominee Iain Hollingshead is candid about his own experience being on the list. “Writing about sex is generally more technical, and certainly a lot less fun, than having it,” he writes. “Either you descend into flowery metaphor or you indulge in the ‘naming of parts.’”

But that’s a concern with any kind of writing, no? Writers, especially fiction writers, constantly run the risk of either looking like they’re showing off or making their writing feel dead on the page. I’ve read only two of the books on the shortlist, Philip Roth’s The Humbling and Simon Van Booy’s Love Begins in Winter, enjoyed both, and didn’t feel either was a lesser work because of some howlingly bad sex scene. This may mean only that I have a tin ear for that sort of thing, but I’m comfortable figuring that the scenes worked just fine within their contexts. The Humbling is about an aging man in the midst of an unusual sexual reawakening—of course any sex scene is going to convey a feeling of awkwardness.

Among the problems with the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards is its implication that that sex is the worst thing a fiction writer could screw up. The ways a writer can screw up are legion; as I read, I tend to note badly written passages by scribbling the word “ugh.” Below, a few passages that made my heart sink from 2009 books:

Bad Attempt at Monologue Jokes by Late-Night Talk Show Hosts Award:

So science has finally discovered that happiness is mostly inherited. But just remember these are the guys who discovered that sterility may be inherited…. It’s interesting that, for some reason, the happiness genes aren’t particularly widespread. Not as widespread as, say, the obesity gene. Now the obesity gene: talk about wide spread…

—Richard Powers, Generosity: An Enhancement

Bad Small Talk Award

“You know, ” Isabelle commented by way of introduction, “before you start cooking with me, I should tell you, I am losing my way, these days.”

—Erica Bauermeister, The School of Essential Ingredients

Bad Union Caricature Award:

“I can get you all fixed up and install a proper system, but I can’t fix that old gal. I can even give you some heat while I’m doing it. It’ll take a little longer that way but I don’t charge union wages. And I don’t do union work neither—I do the job right.”

“How much?” Mrs. D asked.

“About sixteen grand. that’s for as sweet a boiler you ever seen included, and all the fittings. And all I charge is ten percent over cost for the materials. I don’t have my hand down everyone’s pockets, not like them union bosses with their diamond pinkie rings and their shivery smiles, all teeth.”

—Marjorie Kernan, The Ballad of West Tenth Street

Bad Strategy to Build Dramatic Energy by Listing All the Ways One Might Die Award:

Death by drowning, death by snakebite, death by mortar, death by bullet would, death by wooden stake, death by tunnel rat, death by bazooka, death by poison arrow, death by pipe bomb, death by piranha, death by food poisoning, death by Kalashnikov, death by RPG, death by best friend, death by syphilis, death by sorrow, death by hypothermia, death by quicksand, death by tracer, death by thrombosis, death by water torture, death by trip wire, death by pool cure, death by Russian roulette, death by punji trap, death by opiate….

—Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

Bad Journalist Award:

Sarah looked into his eyes. He was a congressman. He was a source. But not that much of a source anymore. She had already gotten into trouble twice for sleeping with the wrong men. But he felt just right, at least for now.

—Leonard Downie Jr., The Rules of the Game

—–

My review of Paul Auster’s new novel, Invisible, is in today’s Chicago Sun-Times. It starts this way:

Relatively early in Paul Auster’s new novel, one of its narrators says that “any writer who feels he is standing on safe ground is unlikely to produce anything of value.” True enough, Invisible (Henry Holt, $25) is a book whose value is a function of its riskiness.

Auster’s readers will be familiar with some of the chances he takes, like the deliberately confused identities and stories within stories, and here they’re so smoothly deployed they feel more like pulp-fiction reveals than metafictional gimmicks. But Auster’s real daring in Invisible is in his study of morality, which covers a lot of ugly, unsettling territory: murder, psychological abuse, physical exploitation and, not least, incest.

Our Next Meeting's Going to Suck!

lisaflores — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:45:39 +0000

Sorry, I know it’s groan-worthy, but I couldn’t resist.

We’ll be meeting at 8 Dec. 17 at Claire’s to talk about Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. Teresa and Charlotte will be joining us by Skype, a Makioka first!

Optional: Read about Edward’s ancestors in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and/or various vampire stories by Arthur Canon Doyle. If you don’t have a chance to get to the library, you can read them online, since they are all in the public domain (for those who can recall our Moveable Feast copyright discussion).

Not everyone will be able to make this impromptu, added meeting. Our next regularly scheduled meeting will be January 14 at Beth’s where we will discuss Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium. As a few of us noted, Edeet’s astute take on Auster was validated in last week’s New York Times Book Review piece on Auster’s most recent book.

Literaturgoldstück der Woche: Die Verzauberung der Lily Dahl

goldstuecke — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:10:15 +0000

Es ist wieder Zeit für einen kleinen Buchtipp. Diesmal kein aktuelles zwar, aber eines, das sich zu lesen wirklich lohnt und sich auch (Weihnachten naht) gut als Geschenk macht.

1996 erschien “Die Verzauberung der Lilly Dahl”, geschrieben von Siri Hustvedt.

Lily ist 19, außergewöhnlich hübsch und arbeitet in einem kleinen amerikanischen Ort als Kellnerin, um sich Geld für ihr Schauspielstudium zu verdienen. Eines Tages sieht sie von ihrem Zimmerfenster aus den Maler Ed und ist vollkommen hingerissen. Lily lernt Ed kennen und ihr Leben wird nicht mehr so sein wie zuvor- denn da gibt es auch noch Mabel, Martin und zwei merkwürdige Brüder.

Die Verzauberung der Lily Dahl ist keine Liebesgeschichte. In welches Genre das Buch stattdessen einzuordnen ist fällt nicht leicht zu sagen- und genau das macht seinen Reiz aus.

Man erwartet als Leser etwas ganz anderes- und bekommt so viel mehr. Die Verzauberung der Lily Dahl hat micht so mitgerissen, dass ich das Buch an zwei Abenden durchgelesen hatte. Siri Hustvedt hinterlässt einen atemlosen Leser, der noch viele Fragen hat und froh und zugleich traurig ist, dass es keine Seite mehr zu lesen gibt.

Sie kann es halt – schreiben… das liegt wohl in der Familie; ihr Mann ist niemand geringeres als Paul Auster. Auch empfehlenswert: Siri Hustvedt: “Was ich liebte”

[Thursday 3pm #34] Paul Auster's Invisible : a review

Nathan Hobby — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:00:44 +0000

It’s been a prolific decade for my favourite author, Paul Auster –he has just published his sixth novel of the noughties. As prolific as he’s been, he’s also published some of his weakest works –I don’t care for the crowd-pleasing Brooklyn Follies nor Travels in the Scriptorium, although at least they’re better than Timbuktu, his late nineties novel told through the eyes of a dog. I rate his new novel, Invisible, the second best of the six of the decade, after The Book of Illusions. It is the most typical of his whole career, with many of his recurring elements appearing – a mysterious stranger, a change of fortune, a struggling poet translating French texts, a random act of violence, and a framed narrative.

As almost always happens in Auster’s novels, the protagonist is a male New Yorker born in 1947 and a student at Columbia. Adam Walker is a college student and aspiring poet and the novel is about the defining year of his life, 1967.

Adam meets a mysterious stranger at a party – Rudolf Born – who makes him an offer that will change his life; Born will pay Adam to edit a literary magazine. Born is called away on business, and Adam is seduced by Born’s girlfriend, Margot. Yet it isn’t this that causes a rift between them, but Born’s violent stabbing of a mugger. Adam spends much of the rest of the novel hoping to see justice served on Born for the murder.

In between, he has lots of sex with his sister, and even though there’s been hints of incest in Auster’s work before (In The Country of Last Things, The Red Notebook, from memory) it is the sexual explicitness of this novel that is its most atypical feature. Usually Auster summarizes sex without going into much detail at all, but this time he is more anatomical.

Complicating the story is a complicated framing device. The first part about Walker meeting Born and things going wrong, is revealed to be the first chapter of a manuscript Walker has written in the present day and sent to his friend Jim, a famous writer. Walker is terminally ill and is trying to finish the memoir before he dies. (A situation which recalls Thomas Effing telling Fogg his life story in Moon Palace for his obituary, and Hector Mann bringing Zimmer to his ranch to see his secret films before he dies in The Book of Illusions.) After Jim’s framing, the second part of the novel is told in second person to overcome Walker’s writer’s block. The third part of the novel is filled out by Jim from Walker’s rough notes. As Walker’s narrative ends, Jim does some detective work, tracking down the people involved and trying to solve some of the mysteries.

It is a compulsively readable story, fascinating and littered with insights into the way we make meaning of life and how we decide what to do with ourselves. In her review, Lionel Shriver contended that there is nothing to take away from the book, that it’s like a glass of lemonade. I think part of what she is noticing and what disappoints her is an insistence by Auster that his narratives attempt to mimic some of the randomness of life, with both its coincidence and its failure to resolve. I read a reviewer once describe Auster’s work as a handful of smooth stones rubbing against each other, but not yielding anything as simple as meaning.

Perhaps Auster has had a bad influence on me over the last nine years that I’ve been reading him. Particularly in my first two novels and in an abandoned novel or two, I attempted to emulate his randomness, thinking I could just add it as one more element in a palimpsest of all my favourite writers – a bit of Auster’s randomness, a bit of Joyce’s stream of consciousness, a bit of Dick’s madness – in the one narrative. Not possible. The whole narrative world has to be driven by randomness, if one wants to write about the music of chance.

Prose: hot, fresh & handmade

Richard Gilbert — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:32:47 +0000

The above is Gay Talese’s outline for his famous “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”—which Esquire named the best article it has ever published. I was struck by its childlike creativity when I saw it in the Summer 2009 issue of the Paris Review, and it and the journal’s interview with Talese are now on line. His working method is idiosyncratic: writing notes and detailed outlines on the thin cardboard that comes with new men’s shirts. He also supposedly peers at his typed pages, pinned to the wall, through binoculars.

I was reminded of Talese’s playful or at least colorful approach by a recent story in the Wall Street Journal about the composition process of prominent writers, mostly novelists. Of seventeen writers, eight compose initially by hand, and Margaret Atwood alternates between handwriting and typing. Five compose at the keyboard. One, Richard Powers, lounges in bed and speaks into a computer that recognizes his voice. For two writers, their method wasn’t made clear.

But add Talese and John Irving, mentioned in a recent post, and handwriting first drafts seems more common than one would suppose in this age of the computer. And brainstorming and planning seem heavily skewed toward the sketched, pasted, storyboarded, jotted and otherwise handmade. Such organizing efforts themselves result in works of art.

I wonder if this is changing, with so many kids growing up keyboarding. But there’s something about that tactile connection—words are evidence of a way of thinking and seeing and feeling—and computers are cold and mechanical. In adolescence, I got the idea that the real pros typed, especially after I went to work as a journalist for a dozen years. We pounded out stories! Art takes time, though, drawing on the brain’s shy intuitive and wary unconscious realms.

Obviously many fine writers do this work at the keyboard, but just as obviously, many don’t. Poking around the web on this writing-process question, I was surprised by the allegiance of some writers to typewriters for first drafts. It made me nostalgic—I wrote on manual typewriters at my first two newspapers. Although I embraced the ease of computers when they came, I miss the crisp keystroke of a good manual.

Harlan Ellison, prolific science fiction writer and typewriter holdout, spoke for other typewriter users, and perhaps for hand-writers, when he said on his web page, “Making it easier, I think, is invidious. It is a really BAD thing. Art is not supposed to be easier! There are a lot of things in life that are supposed to be easier. Ridding the world of heart attacks, making the roads smoother, making old people more comfortable in the winter, but not Art. Art should always be tough. Art should demand something of you. Art should involve foot-pounds of energy being expended. It’s not supposed to be easier, and those who want it easier should not be artists. They should be out selling public relations copy.”

Paul Auster is famous for relying on a typewriter. But in his interview with the Paris Review, he made clear his initial process is even more hands-on: “I’ve always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil—especially for corrections. If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body, and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.”

Annie Dillard, in an interview with NPR, indicated that the decade-long composition of her novel The Maytrees was traumatic—near the end, she cut about 1,000 pages to arrive at a book of a little more than 200—and blamed the computer’s ease, in part: “A story should be simplified and enlarged. Instead the computer dilutes it, spreads it all over the place. It muffles any impact it might have had as the poor reader makes his way through billions of unnecessary paragraphs about billions of unnecessary things.”

Meanwhile a friend of mine, the author of several books, loves his computer—the one he uses for writing isn’t connected to the Internet, to keep him focused—because his process involves thinking, playing around, and exploring at the keyboard. Amidst one of my recent typewriter fantasies (my handwriting is ugly, so when I think of doing something more tactile it’s often a return to typing first drafts), I asked another writer if he missed typewriters. Heavens no, he said. “Computer writing is much more spontaneous and creative, for me anyway.”

Yet, a few years ago at a conference, I heard a panel of first-time novelists describe their method. A commonality seemed to be initial, partial composition by hand—and writing “islands,” the good stuff, ignoring narrative bridges. I got the sense that many moved to the keyboard after the book’s tone was set in fifty or 100 pages.

There’s no formula, but each writer’s task is to find what works in his case. Art is intensely personal. And so must the artist be.

No País das Últimas Coisas, Paul Auster

Gabe Dubard — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:38:41 +0000

Deprimente. Esse livro é assim: cada página é um soco no estômago, cada coisa que acontece na vida da Anna Blume é um passo a mais rumo ao abismo. O livro começa fragmentário, como são as memórias da personagem. É todo na forma de uma longuíssima carta, eliminando o que acho mais chato em um romance epistolar: as respostas. Na Cidade – não há nome nem tempo, mas aparentemente é um futuro próximo e desolado -, a vida está no fim, e a luta pela sobrevivência transforma o espaço urbano numa verdadeira selva.

Enquanto Anna continua sua busca desesperada pelo seu irmão que foi fazer uma reportagem sobre A Cidade como está, vemos sonhos sendo destruídos e mutilados, e pessoas se tornando animais, e a esperança dando lugar ao entreguismo. Por fim, ficamos tão fragmentados quanto tudo na Cidade.

Ou, como Paul Auster coloca logo no começo, “Essas são as últimas coisas. Uma por uma elas desaparecem e nunca mais voltam”.

Bites: Juliet Linderman Interviews Paul Auster, LOOK on Display, Wes Anderson's Music Choices, and more

Jason Diamond — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:15:20 +0000

Juliet Linderman, managing editor of The Greenpoint Gazette and featured reader at last month’s Vol. 1 Storytelling anniversary party, has lovingly and skillfully interviewed Paul Auster for The Rumpus. It is “lovingly” done in the sense that she clearly holds the novelist to eminent, celebratory respect, and “skillful” in that she just did it really fucking well. And Auster upholds it with his writerly charm, eclipsing the recent unpleasing flavor left atop my literary taste buds by Cormac McCarthy.

Lexicon, Lit., and Print Journalism as Art

“Unfriend” is the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2009 Word of the Year.
Bookforum’s latest omnivore topic: “Blog culture invades academia.” Yeah!
“How Memoirs Took Over the Literary World”
The Millions on Bolaño backlash (inevitable, but naturally unfounded).
New York Mag tries to explain why your mother loves Twilight.
The Museum of the City of New York has put together a nostalgic exhibit comprised of photographs from the now defunct LOOK Magazine.

Music, The Sound of Films

Wes Anderson talks about a song from his latest film, Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Pop Matters did a very nice thing by giving us all the videos from the upcoming Twilight film. Thanks buddies.
Yo La Tengo are hittin’ the road.

Politics, etc.

A roundup of what commentators are saying about the prospect of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed being tried in a civilian court.
“The number of Americans who lack dependable access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million, the largest number since the government has been keeping track”
Um, The Awl liked 2012. [ed. note: I felt for whatever reason like I needed to end on a positive, but not too positive, note.]

Paul Auster y la traducción

davidoffberlin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:00:31 +0000

No es un secreto que Paul Auster ha sido traductor esporádico de grandes nombres de la literatura francesa: Mallarmé, Sartre, Blanchot… Por eso me sorprenden, por superficiales, las reflexiones del protagonista de El libro de las ilusiones al embarcarse en la traducción de las Memorias de ultratumba de Chateaubriand (que en la novela reciben el título de Memorias de un muerto). Ahí va un párrafo representativo (en traducción de Benito Gómez Ibáñez, Barcelona, Anagrama, 2003, págs. 79-80):

Así que lo preparé todo y me puse a trabajar otra vez. Me olvidé de Hector Mann y pensé únicamente en Chateaubriand, enfrascándome en la monumental crónica de una existencia que no tenía nada que ver con la mía. […] Gran parte del trabajo era mecánico, y como yo era el sirviente del texto y no su creador, me exigía un esfuerzo de distinta especie del que había realizado al escribir El mundo silencioso. Traducir es un poco como echar carbón. Se recoge con la pala y se lanza al horno. Cada trozo es una palabra, y cada palada es otra frase, y si se tiene una espalda recia y suficiente energía para seguir con la tarea ocho diez horas seguidas, se podrá mantener un buen fuego. Con cerca de un millón de palabras a la vista, me sentí preparado para trabajar incansablemente el tiempo que fuese necesario, aunque el resultado fuese incendiar la casa.

Almanacco del Giorno - 16 Nov. 2009

Nicola di Bowery — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:44:30 +0000

Daily Beast – Ultimate Fighting: Not Gay, Per Se The Book Cover Archive – Top Ten Covers

What have I been reading?

aninsideoutsock — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:57:42 +0000

Time for yet another episode of the ‘What Have I been reading’-lists I’ve been keeping. I use a little booklet for this, and I’m already dreading the day that the book is full. Most of it is written in pencil, so that I could erase it, but maybe I’ll just make a 900 pages long notebook myself, in which I meticulously keep listed what I’ve read in my life. My children, or my parents, my friends will find this list one day, thinking that I spent too much time reading and too little time living. But They don’t know that that’s just the same. By the way, no Amazon links this time, cause i think you all should start to buy at your independent or secondhand bookstores. Go for it guys.

David Eagleman – Sum

This is one of the best books I read this year, I think. Eagleman, a neuroscientist and writer, comes up with 40 short tales (microfiction it is called) about how the afterlife would be. Especially the first ones made me gasp for air, admiring the great train of thoughts Eagleman is taking in all these little stories. On his website you can read a few sample stories. They are not all as great, and I think I read the book in a too short time. You should be able to just read one story a week, so you’ll be amazed for forty weeks. I tried to keep it to 3 stories a day, but ended up finishing it faster than I could.

Richard Brautigan – The Abortion

A story from the sixties about a man who works in a library for unwanted books, hooks up with an unwanted writer, gets her pregnant, and they decide to have an abortion in Mexico. The plot is a perfect recipe for melodrama, but Brautigan, the hippie that he was, makes into this sweet love story. There is this lack of tension, which makes it a good in-between read, but I’m not sure if Brautigan will ever become my favorite sixties writer (he has to compete with people like Vonnegut and Tom Robbins)

Paul Auster – Timbuktu

I’m a big Auster fan, and this was one of the few books i hadn’t read yet, but it quite disappointed me. I love the beginning, when Mr. Bones is still around his excentric boss, Willy Christmas, whose job it is to spread the merry Christmas thought, after Santa Claus himself told him too. I loved the hobo monologues. But then Willy Christmas disappears from the story, and you get this tale of a dog looking for a new home. It was just too much a disney story to me. It hadn’t the same depths like other Auster books. The main character being a scruffy dog just didn’t work for me. I can remember I felt the story had a bit a too much constructed plot, just because you’re dealing with a dog here. Making the dog able to understand people? It’s a bit too easy.

Alex Robinson – Box Office Poison

This was my Graphic Novel portion for this month – I have no graphic novel buying frenzy planned for the following weeks, so there probably won’t be one in my next list, though you never know off course how much i break my own promises – but boy did I love it. It wasn’t too alternative underground this time, although it still had this typical American “look at me, cause I’m neurotic feel to it”. Box office poison deals with the life of twenty-somethings in New York, growing up; It was like a more serious version of Friends in a way. One of the main characters is a comic book artist (see, it’s all self-indulgent), and ends up working for this guy who invented a famous super hero, but doesn’t get the recognition for it. But it’s also about friendship, relationships… really nice one…

Hugo Claus – Friday

Hugo Claus is supposed to be one of the finest writers to have ever lived in Belgium, the one Belgian writer ever been named for the Nobel prize, but I never had read something from him before. Excuse me: I had tried, but put the book away after 10 pages, cause it bored the hell out of me. Friday was okay, because it was a play, and because it was short. It’s about this man who returns from prison where he has been because he supposedly sexually harassed his own daughter. His wife in the meantime got pregnant from the man’s best friend. The emotional relationships between those three characters, the doubt about the guilt or innocence from the father..it was quite interesting. But there are so many referrings to a world in Flanders that no longer exists, that it also seemed archaic… I guess that most people nowadays will think this is just out of time.

Magnus Mills – The Scheme for Full Employment

Magnus Mills is a British writer, who is writing about absurd situations. Not very high-brow literature, but just a writer who likes to amuse his audience. I read a few books of him, and quite liked this one. It’s about the Plan, a sort of government business that involves people riding down in vans from one storage place to another, being on very tight time schedules. People that are part of the plan get payed good, have job security. But then there is this feud about the time schedules, and everything starts crumbling down. Witty stuff.

Mario Reading – The New Prophecies of Nostradamus

I’m interested in the obscure, and Nostradamus has fascinated me. But, I also think it’s a lot of bollocks. Mario Readings thinks it’s not and tried to interpret quite a few of Nostradamus’ predictions. I bought this book from a friend who works in a secondhand bookstore, and texted her just a few hours later that this is probably the worst book I’ve ever read in my entire life (well, no..nothing beats Siloam in Dutch translation) . You see, Mario Reading’s readings are laughably far-fetched. He connects dots by pulling a curly line from point A to point Q, to end up at point B. If he reads about burning suns, he’ll look up some sort of mythology, going from Egyptian to Persian mythology, and then come up with an interpretation that makes me think the writer’s a bit schizophrenic. This book got released in 2006, and the fact that every interpretation thus far, is completely wrong, proves my point. Don’t buy this junk.

Michel Tournier -The Ogre (book cover is in Dutch, exactly like the book I have)

Classic of the month. Don’t know how I do it, but I always end up reading at least one novel that is part of world literature a month. Anyway, this one definitely deserves to be there. It’s perhaps quite the dramatic, baroque and intellectual – with all the cultural references – story, but it touches a strange nerve that only classics are able to touch. I don’t know. These books have proven themselves, and though the status of this book is probably not that big in Anglosaxon parts of the world, it is also a book of a certain status. The story is quite hard to just put into a few words, but it’s about this man Tiffauges, who has his own garage on the dawn of World War 2, but has this urging sense of some sort of holy mission in his life. I don’t wanna spoil the rest of the story, but the outcome seems to be quite gruesome. It’s an allegory about the dark sides of life, without even realizing it until you finish it.

Brian Evenson – The Wavering Knife

This guy was on my list for a long time, as many others, but I finally decided to buy a copy of one of his books. Based upon reviews I read about other works of him, I had suspected more something in the line of Chuck Palahniuk, but Evenson is gruesome in a different way. He has this aura of intellectuality over him, which i like at times, and deals not so much with typical american themes. That being said, some of his stories are hilarious, e.g. the one where a disgruntled German man writes an essay about a travel guide his grandfather has written about mexico. He’s raving about the poor English translation by this American writer, but it turns out the English book isn’t even close to a translation. It’s a different book all together. Very nice one. Really makes me wanna read one of his novels.

Ian McEwan – Amsterdam

A modern classic perhaps, but one that didn’t appeal to me that much. Just up until the ending, when I decided that i was curious enough to read it all the way to the end. Here, the artifial atmosphere of intellectuality quite bothered me. An editor-in-chief of a news paper, a classical composer… I normally don’t care about jobs and lives, but I always have a hard time if books have characters of a certain standing (That’s why victorian novels don’t appeal to me at all). That being said, I think the book had some interesting themes, and the ending was quite surprising. I just think it would’ve worked better as a short story though.

Things I am reading now, but haven’t finished yet, are: Roland Topor, Daniil Charms and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Enjoying all three of them.

See you next time.