 |
| Paul Auster, photographed at home in 2010. Photo: Michal Rubin |
In 1974, Samuel Beckett sat in a Paris café across from a nervous, chain-smoking American—a 27-year-old named Paul Auster. Auster wouldn’t become a well-known man of letters for another decade: Back then, he was just another lost expatriate freelancing his way through France, young and glum, and so obsessed with Beckett that a mutual acquaintance took pity and set up a meeting. At Beckett’s opening gambit—“Well, Mr. Auster, tell me all about yourself”—Auster froze. He suddenly found he had absolutely nothing to say. Or maybe the idea of revealing something real about himself—his poverty, his rootlessness, the crises of purpose he’d later recall in a memoir, Hand to Mouth—terrified him.
“I felt like crawling into a hole,” Auster recalled in 2009.
This is the kind of harrowing and funny scene that might be found in books by either man. Both Auster and Beckett famously embrace the comic horror of being held helpless in absurd situations. For both writers, humor is a way out, a means to dignify and redeem what might otherwise be anguished, insufferable. “Even in some of my grimmest works, there have been comic touches,” Auster told The Washington Post in 2003. “There have to be, because that's the way we're built as human beings, and often when we're in dark circumstances we survive them by cracking jokes.”
When I asked Paul Auster to contribute to this series, he chose to return to Beckett, in an essay celebrating a brief but masterful example of the Irish author’s use of humor. For Auster, Beckett’s Watt is a profound reminder of how humor can help writers and readers alike foster the courage to endure. [Read More]
 |
| Paul Auster (left) and J. M. Coetzee (right) |
There is a vein of rather distasteful back-scratching: Coetzee, an austere, laconic man hardly given to extravagant compliments, speaks of the “pleasure of having [Auster] visit our living room”, and goes on to admire his “enviably considered, just, and well-formed sentences”, rather as though he has just been conversing with an unusually intelligent computer. He also expresses “a certain fraternal tenderness for you and your dogged, unappreciated bravery”, a bravery which turns out to be no more exacting on Auster’s part than sitting alone at his desk all day. There have been more illustrious acts of courage. Auster, in his more emotive American style, is the more ingratiating of the two, declaring his “unbounded faith in [Coetzee’s] work” and sounding mildly distressed at the prospect of having to disagree with him. There is not the faintest chance that either author is going to submit the other’s work to a rigorously critical analysis.
[...]
Like a good many writers, these two novelists share a predictable distaste for critics. The more eminent the author, the less accustomed he or she usually is to negative comment, and thus the more prickly and thin-skinned when it comes along. Auster remarks of a notoriously abrasive assault on his work by the critic James Wood that it felt like being mugged by a stranger, a simile which those who have been coshed over the head and robbed might well regard as a touch hyperbolic. (How many people are mugged by friends?) The critic, Coetzee grumbles, is “like the child lobbing pebbles at the gorilla in the zoo, knowing that he is protected by the bars”. Apart from being untrue – critics have actually been punched by irate writers, as Auster himself concedes, or savaged by their wrathful responses – the zoo image is unwittingly revealing. Are all critics really infantile, and all writers helpless, lumbering victims of their poisoned shafts? Auster himself isn’t averse to a spot of character assassination, deploring the “arrogance, self-importance, and single-minded, all-consuming vanity” of a deceased friend, though this, admittedly, is for private consumption only.
[...]
The fact that Coetzee is the better novelist is reflected in the difference between two men’s epistolary styles. Even in a casual letter, Coetzee writes a sculpted, disciplined, meticulous prose, in contrast to Auster’s more garrulous, loose-jointed brand of English. (The latter speaks at one point of certain Norwegian landscapes as being “literally” not of this earth). There are times when the precisely worded South African sounds more like the author of a legal textbook than a spinner of imaginary worlds; but he has a current of subdued ironic humour largely lacking in his interlocutor, who cracks one good joke and two or three abysmal ones. Perhaps it is no coincidence in this respect that Auster is also given to high-flown cliché, such as “We crave friendship because we are social beings” and (toe-curlingly) “I am an ardent believer in universal happiness”. He also produces such sententious, Boy Scoutish tags as “There is pleasure in the new, but also pleasure in the known” and “The idea [in sport] is not to win but to do well”. When Coetzee indulges in some wry self-criticism, deriding his own role as an elderly moaner at the ills of modernity, Auster overlooks the sardonic tone and earnestly exhorts the two of them to “carry on with utmost vigilance, scorned prophets crying into the wilderness”. The air of self-importance is distinctly un-Coetzeean. [Read More]
 |
| J. M. Coetzee |
J M Coetzee, the notoriously publicity-shy Nobel Prize-winning author, has made an art of revealing almost nothing about his life.
But now the South African novelist has surprised critics by revealing his profound, almost obsessive respect for an unlikely figure – the Swiss tennis star Roger Federer.
One of literature’s great recluses, the South African writer rarely submits to being interviewed but has granted a glimpse into his daily musings in an exchange of correspondence with the American author Paul Auster, to be published as a book in the UK in May.
Revealing himself as an armchair sports fan, Coetzee describes Federer’s best tennis as “something like the human ideal made visible” and says the experience of watching him play is “very much like my response to masterworks of art”.
The two authors, who met in February 2008 and decided to embark on an epistolary friendship to “strike sparks off each other”, corresponded via post and fax for three years, covering topics as diverse as philosophy, friendship, the financial crisis and their shared love for the “guilty pleasure” of watching sport. [Read More]
 |
| Jen Bervin, Nets |
Jen Bervin has reimagined Shakespeare as our true contemporary. Her little poems sing.
— Paul Auster
Nets has the strange feel of verbal topography: the original sonnet text is a sort of plain that single, select words soar up from like jagged spires.
— Paul Collins, The Believer
Bervin’s text breaks the urns of the sonnets into their fragmented parts… rendering the ghostly whole wholly ghostly.Jen Bervin is a poet and visual artist. Her recent text/textile books include The Dickinson Composites (Granary Books, 2010) and the limited-edition chapbook The Silver Book (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). Her work appears in many special collections, including the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the J. Paul Getty Museum and at Yale and Stanford. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. [Read More]
— Philip Metres, Jacket
 |
| Georges Perec, La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams |
To read Georges Perec one must be ready to abandon oneself to a spirit of play. His books are studded with intellectual traps, allusions and secret systems, and . . . they are prodigiously entertaining.The beguiling, never-before-translated dream diary of Georges Perec …
—Paul Auster
 |
| Paul Auster, The Red Notebook |
 |
| Paul Auster |
 |
| Trilogy images courtesy of Neven Udovičić |
 |
| Paul Auster, Winter Journal |
 |
| Paul Auster |
 |
| Granta, Autumn 2011. Cover design: The Chapman Brothers. |
 |
| Paul Auster, Book of Illusions |
 |
| American-Jewish novelist Philip Roth |
1. The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz KafkaSource: Jason Diamond, 'The 50 Most Essential Works Of Jewish Fiction Of The Last 100 Years', Jewcy, 9 February 2011
2. In Search of Lost Time (1913) by Marcel Proust
3. Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) by Philip Roth
4. Death of a Salesman (1949) by Arthur Miller
5. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
6. The Trial (1925) by Franz Kafka
7. Herzog (1964) by Saul Bellow
8. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971) by Cynthia Ozick
9. A Contract With God (1978) by Will Eisner
10. Call it Sleep (1934) by Henry Roth
 |
| Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy |
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined from the first word that came from the stranger's mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.Also at A Piece of Monologue
Paul Auster, City of Glass in The New York Trilogy
 |
| Terrence Malick, Days of Heaven (1978) |
 |
| Woody Allen |
