Paul Auster (1947–2024)

The Invention of Solitude contains two exquisite essays/memoirs, "Portrait of an Invisible Man," Auster's reminiscences about his difficult-to-pin-down father, and "The Book of Memory," an intoxicating longer memoir about memory, writing and experience. In both cases, but especially in the latter work, the prose is often somewhat dense and quite often dreamlike in nature, but at the same time almost impossibly precise, as if it were necessary for Auster to first blur the lens before show more sharpening the view to hone in directly on his point. I found myself frequently astonished. There were a dozen passages that made me think, while I was reading them, "I'll quote that." But I'll just quote this one:

". . . For a man to remember so precisely things he had seen only once, things which could not have had any bearing on his life except for a fleeting instant, struck A. with all the force of a supernatural act. He realized that for Ponge there was no division between the work of writing and the work of seeing. For no word can be written without first having been seen, and before it finds its way to the page it must first have been part of the body, a physical presence that one has lived with in the same way one lives with one's heart, one's stomach, and one's brain. Memory, then, not so much as the past contained within us, but as proof of our life in the present. If a man is to be truly present among his surroundings, he must be thinking not of himself, but of what he sees. He must forget himself in order to be there. And from that forgetfulness arises the power of memory. It is a way of living one's life so that nothing is ever lost." show less

What a clever essay, in a voice I have loved since the first time I read it. Auster tell us about the origins of gun ownership in the USA, and helps us see why there are fervent defenders of the second amendment (which doesn't really mean what they say it does). He argues against a ban very convincingly (it could very easily backfire, as did the ban on alcohol during the Prohibition), shares how guns have touched the lives of basically every American citizen, not only through popular culture show more but through the consequences of shootings; meaning injury, death, mourning, and also the destroyed mental wellbeing of every friend, family member, colleague, classmate, person living in an area affected, or in an area having a family that was affected. There isn't a person whose life has not been touched by gun violence at this point. And as urgent it is to take action, he makes us see how complicated the issue is in reality. With more guns being owned by American citizens today than the number of citizens themselves (including children). The black and white photos show the places where something violent happened. The absence of any person in these pictures screams louder than anything I have ever seen about the tragedies. show less

[magyarul lentebb]

On my journey of discovering graphic novels... just kidding, I have no intention of doing that. But I really liked this one. With a foreword by Maus's Art Spiegelman, City of Glass has a great story written amazingly (that should not come as a surprise, it's Auster after all), so it had a strong skeleton. But the graphics were not just illustrations either, they helped the story transform into something new. I found an original idea on every page, in the creative use of the show more grid, showing the character of a voice, the disintegration of a mind in pictures instead of words while still keeping the importance of language, and it was fun to see the drawn versions of Auster and his family, too. My attention never faltered for a second, this graphic novel had a firm grip on it. Very well done.

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A kép(es?)regények világában tett felfedezéseim következő állomása Paul Auster New York trilógiájának átdolgozása. Valójában nincs szó semmiféle műfajfelfedezésről, csak ez a kettő* érdekelt, de az Üvegváros alapján nem tennék le a formáról. A Maust elkövető Art Spiegelman előszavával megjelent kötetnek persze őrülten erős alapja volt, hiszen Auster írta. Az előszó szerint figyelmeztette is a projekt mögött álló Spiegelmant, miszerint már többször próbáltak filmforgatókönyvet varázsolni ebből a szövegből, mindhiába. Karasik és Mazzucchelli párosának végül mégis fantasztikusan sikerült az adaptáció. Nem csupán illusztrálták a történetet, egy egészen új művet hoztak létre. Minden oldalon újabb eredeti ötlettel találkoztam, a képregény rácsainak kreatív használatától az írott jellemzések képi megjelenítésre cserélésén át (miközben a nyelv semmit nem veszít jelentőségéből) a rajzolt Auster-családig. Egy pillanatra sem eresztette a figyelmem, remek munka.

*a másik a Cheshire Crossing volt, sóhaj show less

In Paul Auster’s inventive new novel Man in the Dark, an aging writer named August Brill narrates stories over the course of a single long night to keep his mind off a devastating series of recent family tragedies; near dawn, his granddaughter joins him for an intimate pre-dawn conversation. In the hands of a less gifted writer this would be barely a short story, yet upon this slender armature Auster hangs a tale that incorporates magic realism, science fiction, Kierkegaardian dread, show more postmodern metafiction, and a burning evocation of the terrors and dislocations of war.

The strongest part of the book is the story-within-a-story that the insomnia-wracked Brill makes up on the fly, a Vonnegutian whopper about a man who is transplanted to a parallel reality where the United States is mired in a brutal civil war. The crabwise relation between story and creator—a familiar theme for Auster, beautifully handled here—invests the episode with a dreamlike anti-logic that recalls Flann O’Brien. The adventures of Brill’s creation (tellingly, a magician named Brick) tap the primal power of one of the most enduring scenarios in science fiction: that of the outsider suddenly transplanted to an alien world. Brick’s bizarre experience in this alternate America mirrors the strangeness of post-9/11 life without slopping over into the didactic or obvious: Auster leaves the reader to register his own emotional response to this peculiar fable. Unfortunately, Brill grows tired of his jeu d’esprit and abruptly truncates it, returning to the obsessive plumbing of his grief.

When Brill is joined near the end of his restless night by his granddaughter Katya, equally shattered and adrift, he relates the story of his courtship and long marriage to his recently deceased wife in a sustained gulp of anguished reminiscence. Katya responds with some deep secrets of her own, and despite some tinny dialogue (“Why is life so horrible, Grandpa?” “Because it is, that’s all. It just is.”), the cross-generational connection between these two damaged souls is both odd and touching. Man in the Dark’s sole glimpse of surcease comes in the halting reassurances the two offer each other.

Although Auster’s prose is precise and burnished, at the heart of August Brill’s meditations lies a self-absorption and petulance that eventually feels weary and circular. Brill’s mind is a claustrophobic place, and no amount of mental games and allusions can fully open it up—readers can be forgiven if they occasionally wish that the guy would just fall asleep, already. More to the point, the horrific tragedies he has endured do not necessarily make his pain feel earned, and Auster’s inclusion of several unrelated vignettes of catastrophe, riot, and war feels like piling on. Still, this somber, elegant book, rife with nuances and subtle echoes, crisscrosses the line between memory and loss, reaches for the profound, and very nearly finds it.

— Rain Taxi, Fall 2008, Volume 13, No. 3 show less