Paul Auster (1947–2024)

Part puzzle, part mystery, and part postmodern commentary, I loved how this book kept me guessing until the very end when my head spun around so fast I had to go to the chiropractor. It's not your everyday straightforward narrative, but it's also not so esoteric that you start to snooze just from reading the jacket flap. It would make a great group read, because it's a book begging to be discussed.

"Interrupt all you like. We're involved in a complicated story here, and not everything is show more quite what it seems to be."

An old man wakes up to find himself alone in a small room with complete amnesia. The only clues are stickers conveniently labeling "wall", "lamp", "desk"; and a pile of photographs and several manuscripts on the desk.

"He can't remember how long he has been here or the nature of the circumstances that precipitated his removal to this place. Perhaps he has always been here; perhaps this is where he has lived since the day he was born. What he knows is that his heart is filled with an implacable sense of guilt. At the same time, he can't escape the feeling that he is the victim of a terrible injustice."

In an existential kind of way, the old man begins to explore his physical and psychological boundaries. I don't want to give away too much, so I'll just say it's a fun read. show less

I love Auster's narrative voice. I still can't exactly put my finger on it, but right at the very first sentence I felt I was at home. Finally. A sigh of relief, and then trying to make this very short book last longer, somehow. Especially towards the end, when a sense of foreboding was added. I was expecting two kinds of ending, and one was what I got but how he was able to make it with one last sentence a completely different experience is beyond me. I know I said it before but what he show more achieves with words is simply on an entirely different level.

How everyday shared experiences are perfectly described, how a slow, sad flow is so beautiful I want to prolong living in it, what a complete world, multiple generations, beautiful human connections and embedded stories can fit into these less than 200 pages! How he made me cry so that the tears rolling down my cheeks caught me by surprise.

I read the Wolves of Stanislav, one of the embedded stories, written in the first Covid lockdown, before on Literary Hub. I wonder whether the other embedded ones had also been published somewhere earlier, and he wrote a wonderful novel around them. Several inkable sentences without ever being didactic. I can't say it any better than someone here already had: it is indeed a love letter. I hope it's not a farewell. show less

Perhaps it is something as simple as this: that a man fears death more at fifty-seven than he does at seventy-four.

I’ve only read Paul Auster’s nonfiction but I love it -- whether it’s life’s coincidences in The Red Notebook or this memoir on aging, written over a winter as Auster moves from midlife toward old age. I also feel that the total of an Auster book is less than the sum of its parts. In other words: I love the reading but like the overall work somewhat less.

Here he journals show more about his first 64 years and filters his recollections through his body and the spaces around and within it. It’s a chapter-less sequence of musings with just the occasional space on a page to separate vignettes. It’s written entirely in second-person point of view -- which immediately raised my guard and then surprised me by becoming less visible and even pulling me into the experience just like it’s supposed to. The best passages are the sections of 8-10 pages of solid, unparagraphed text, where he dives deeper and takes the reader along; I grew to love seeing them ahead.

Whereas Auster wrote about his father in The Invention of Solitude, here he writes about his mother, including this passage from a night after they visited her gravely ill second husband in the hospital:
…just when you thought it would be impossible for anyone to say another word, when the heaviness in your hearts seemed to have crushed all the words out of you, your mother started telling jokes {…} jokes so funny that you and your wife laughed until you could hardly breathe anymore {…} an unending torrent of classic yenta routines with all the appropriate voices and accents, the old Jewish women sitting around a card table and sighing, each one sighing in turn, each one sighing more loudly than the last, until one of the women finally says, “I thought we agreed not to talk about the children.”

And then this:
You have seen several corpses in the past {…} but none of those corpses belonged to your mother, no other dead body was the body in which your own life began, and you can look for no more than a few seconds before you turn your head away.

As a whole, it feels like a journal -- a notebook filled with stream-of-consciousness writing from prompts in a memoir class (especially the 53 pages -- one-fourth of the book -- that recall the place of his birth and his 21 residential addresses since). Yet the pages are so good! I’m definitely going to read the rest of his nonfiction.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.) show less

3.5 stars

For the first half or so, I wondered if this was a test: how reprehensible does a person have to be before one abandons him as such? Adam Walker just drags the reader deeper into a moral abyss. You can forgive one thing, excuse another as his age, the era, see another through the lens of insufferable grief. But then he goes a step too far, and there's no telling where else this will go.

But then... we get another perspective, calling into doubt Walker's distasteful confession. And if show more that part is untrue, is any of it real? Why would he confess to some transgressions, but then make some up? If he is too ill for his memory to be trusted, is any of it real?

The lure proves too much, and Walker's college friend tries to track down some truth. He seems to get some... but it only leads to more confusion about the truth of another character.

So... we're left with a bunch of characters we can't really know. If you like beautiful prose and a compelling, if convoluted, storyline, then you'll like this. If you need clear answers to all your questions, walk away from this book. It's not for you. show less