Squeeze Play - Paul Benjamin

A novel that I read only because I was curious to read something by Paul Auster when he was writing under his pen name. After all, I loved Smoke and in it William Hurt's character is Paul Benjamin. On top of that, with time I have grown to like Auster's obsession with baseball. 

I had pretty low expectations of this book, and I'm pleased to see those low expectations were met. A quick enough read. An easy enough read. 

Nothing much beyond that. As far as noirs are concerned, this feels a bit out sync with the canon because it was published in the 1980s, but it's probably of a quality similar to that of hundreds of other novels of the same genres that have been forgotten with time (and if this one is still published somewhere, it's only because Paul Benjamin was Paul Auster). 

Baugmartner - Paul Auster

 

And thus one of my favourite authors got a book published just by virtue of being Paul Auster. 

This book has no redeeming features. It is a series of short(ish) chapters in the life of the titular character as he grows old. A lot of them look like they were put together haphazardly, and Auster most likely recycled bits and pieces of some of his previous unpublished work to put together the underwhelming story of an ageing academic. 

Auster can only be forgiven because of the tough times he's going through, but I doubt an up-and-coming writer would have been able to publish a book of this (low) calibre. 

Leviathan - Paul Auster

 

With my most sincere apologies to 4 3 2 1 , I think this is the Paul Auster novel to end all Paul Auster novels. 

It is the first Auster's novel I had heard of (possibly the first that my parents read?), but, not being as ubiquitous in all second-hand bookshops as The New York Trilogy, also one that I hadn't touched until the Westminster library kindly gave me access to the e-book. 

Besides the traditional Auster trademarks (chance, mystery, fortuitous crossings of metaphorical paths) what particularly struck me of this novel is how relevant to today's world it still feels. Perhaps, after all, America and its identity (crisis) hasn't changed that much since the end of the Cold War...

Moon Palace - Paul Auster

 

The one time in my life I had to request a renewal of a library book loan (it took me more than two weeks to read it!) and it was a Paul Auster novel...

Testament to the fact that we had a lot going on (family holidays, in part, and a huge kitchen refurb waiting for us back home), but also to the fact that this wasn't my favourite Auster book. 

Had it not been for the fact that I've read most of his other works, I would have probably enjoyed Moon Palace a lot more, but (un?)fortunately I have read most of his other works, and had already come across much better renditions of his traditional "cultured and troubled Columbia student is confused and tossed around by chance and mysterious fortuitous encounters". 

4 3 2 1 - Paul Auster

 

Self-indulging. Obscenely long. Repetitive. 

And yet. 

Beautiful. (Not overly) ambitious. Surprisingly readable. 

After investing the classic £2.50 at Fopp, this book was used to stop any door in the flat (even the heaviest ones) from slamming. Then I was left with only this and some other long-unread tomes, and decided to give it a chance. 

Sure, 4321 is a stylstic exercise if there ever was one, but because Auster is such a superb writer, and because he has so much to write about, the countless pages actually flow quite seamlessly. The reader actually grows to like every single one of the Archies, and actually fall in love with every single version of Amy. 

If this was anybody without Auster's skills (or without the life-experience that he can draw upon for the autobiographical passages) this book would be absolutely unreadable. Or, actually, it just wouldn't get published. But it did, and hopefully enough readers have decided to give it a chance rather than using it as a door-stopper.

Winter Journal – Paul Auster

A book that I had often seen in bookshops but avoided because, let’s face it, I don’t really like self-celebrating memoirs/reflections on an author’s life etc. Like a child, I only read it because my mom said so. And clearly my mom knows best – sure, it’s a self-celebrating reflection on the author’s life, but if the author in question is Paul Auster, then the book is bound to be extremely well written and, at the very least, the mirror of a very interesting life.

What this book has left me with are chiefly two things: the love and profound respect Auster feels for his wife Siri Hustvedt, and the fact that that he is, or at least he portrays himself to be, rather happy at the prospect of growing old.

At times there are passages I didn’t feel particularly interested in (some stories about his youth, for instance, left me quite untouched), but overall the book is at the very least quite thought-provoking. I never thought Paul Auster would have played pick-up basketball growing up, as pretty much all of his sports references in his other books seem to be about baseball, but reading about that made me happy, as did seeing him go through all the houses he lived in and what these meant to him. 

The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster

Quite possibly the best Paul Auster novel I’ve ever read, and I don’t say this lightly.  

Hector Mann, the real protagonist of the book, is as mysterious and fascinating a figure as Master Yehudi in Mr Vertigo (and his bizarre career path post-acting reminds one of Walt’s life in the same book). The love story between the narrator and Alma is a thing of beautiful delicacy, and by the end of the book the reader is happy to know that Zimmer has moved on, but also that he sees no need to tell us anything about who has taken Alma’s place. And it is always refreshing to read an Auster novel that is not set in New York (despite the fact that Zimmer lives there for a while, accidentally in Brooklyn – who would have ever thought…).

The fact that Auster went through the trouble of inventing not just a character, but also his movie plots and his entire body of work, is something that deserves a literary standing ovation (and they’re so realistic that I actually had to look up Hector Mann on Wikipedia, thinking he was a real – if a bit obscure – figure of the silent film era that I had never heard of…). 

In the Country of Last Things – Paul Auster

I don’t even know how I got this book. A fairly typical Auster novel. And the issue with fairly typical Auster novels is that, well, they are a bit too typical. And when they’re not works of art (to me Sunset Park still tops the list, together with the slightly more atypical Mr Vertigo) they’re just more of the same. And when you have read a lot of them, well, you get the idea.

The entire book/letter reads like an extended introspective anecdote from one of Auster’s bigger novels, and while there is nothing wrong with that in itself, it just doesn’t excite me anymore.

Ah, and I think that McCarthy does American dystopia so much better (although the preparations for the final uncertain trip remind me of the tension of the final scene of The Birds). 

Oracle Night – Paul Auster

Another solid 30p buy from the Barbican Library’s overstock titles. On its cover it has a line from its Herald’s review saying “If you have never read Auster before … this is the place to start”. True that. The issue, however, is that if you have read plenty of Auster before, this is quite far from being a particularly original work.

Sure, it’s beautifully written like all of Auster’s novels, and it’s also gripping and nerve-wrecking as only his stories can be, but everything in it has already been seen: the Sisyphean task of reorganizing phone books reminds the reader of the wall of The Music of Chance, the inability of a writer to proceed with his work is, well, just like pretty much every other novel Auster has ever written, the importance of colours (like team Blue) echoes The New York Trilogy, and both the in-house aggression and Nick’s story within the story and his slow but inevitable death look very much like scenes and anecdotes taken from Smoke.

This remains a really good read, and, I agree, it would be a great introduction to Auster’s world, but it’s not exactly ground-breaking. To give credit where credit is due, however, the little side-stories that the author develops in his page-long footnotes are truly great. 

The Music of Chance – Paul Auster

Last Saturday I crossed the Thames and went to Stratford for my Life in the UK test (which I passed, by the way – meaning that there is now nothing stopping me from becoming a British citizen, hopefully). I had to walk through the Shopping Centre on my way and found this wonderful place (https://www.facebook.com/BooksforFreeStratford/) where they give away up to three free books for every visitor – no strings attached and no catches! In terms of maintaining my faith in mankind, this place ranks right up there with Parkrun. Visit it, pick up books, donate books, and prevent them from essentially going to landfill…

Moving on to the actual book, I have now read most of Auster’s works and, as far as absurdist novels go, this is one of my favourites (I liked it a lot more, for instance, than the stories of the New York Trilogy). It’s deeply disturbing and the reader knows from the start that everything is spiralling out of control but doesn’t know how it will all end (Will the wall close in on Nashe like it used to do on Roger Waters and David Gilmour after the first half of The Wall? Will Stone and Flower create a tiny little replica of Nashe and run his life for him through the “City of the World”? Will he get killed as he tries to escape?). Yet, there is always a sense of hope: maybe Nashe’s sister, his daughter, Pozzi, or maybe even Tiffany, the prostitute from Atlantic City, can help the guy survive in one way or another.

The one thing that annoyed me, though, is that I am sure I didn’t manage to pick up on tons of the novel’s insightful remarks and metaphors – the links to the myth of Sisyphus are clear, but there are surely millions more…

Mr Vertigo – Paul Auster

When I met Paul Auster at the literary festival where I was working, I only asked him to autograph one book – after all I was there in some sort of official capacity as an interpreter, and I didn’t want to run the risk of upsetting him by being your standard hysterical fan (but do writers actually have hysterical fans?!?). The book I asked him to autograph was a Turkish copy of Mr Vertigo, a wedding present for a friend of mine who was divorced within a year. Moral of the story: I should have just got an autograph for myself.

But I digress. Mr Vertigo is, together with Sunset Park, my favourite novel by Paul Auster. Master Yeuhdi is right up there in terms of mentoring figures with Melquiades, Ephraim Gursky. The rest of Master Yeuhdi’s family is also a great inspiration, both for Walt and for the reader, with the highly educated Aesop and the loving Mother Sioux.

The book’s back cover simply presented it as a story of a levitating kid, but it’s so much more than that: there is the already mentioned mentorship, but also friendship, race and racism, and the circle of life that closes itself wonderfully with the old Mrs Whiterspoon.

Man in the Dark – Paul Auster

An Auster book that encountered mixed reviews (at best) from critics and was quickly forgotten by readers, and one which I actually really liked.

Dystopia is boring, dystopia is overdone, dystopia is so very often the same old story. But Auster writes it differently: Auster is supremely talented, Auster is (nearly) always interesting, Auster is cynically critical of everyone (including himself, I believe).

And Man in the Dark is not just about a supposed dystopian future, it is about a man facing his own fears, the pain of fixing a shattered family, the dynamics between a father and grandfather and his daughter and granddaughter, the long – and possibly impossible to complete – process of recreating a life after a massive loss.

This might not be Auster’s best book, yet it is still better (or, if not better, at least way more interesting) than 96.7 % of the books published over the last 10 years.

The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster

Countless critics and readers consider this to be Auster’s best book. For me, however, there are a few issues. For starters, I’m not too fond of the format: the three stories are too long to be considered short stories, but they are way too short for anyone to even think of splitting them into three separate books now (although they were originally published as such), so what we end up is, in my opinion, a somewhat unhappy mixture. In most of his books set in New York, Auster paints a beautiful picture of a city that is so unequivocally New York-esque – I have the feeling he doesn’t capture the same magic in this book, which ironically has the city’s name in its title (to me, the stories could be set pretty much anywhere in the US). Lastly, I find the alienation of the characters to simply be a bit too much – I wish at least some of them would act rationally and not lose their mind...

The book, however, does have a huge plus for me: it is where Auster has put in written form so many of the wonderful anecdotes shared by Harvey Keitel and William Hurt in Smoke, the movie for which he wrote one of the greatest scripts of the last 30 years.

Sunset Park – Paul Auster

Probably the best Paul Auster book I’ve ever read, despite the fact that public and critics don’t seem to agree with me.

I don’t quite know why I liked it so much. Maybe because I secretly envy the main character, who initially refuses to keep on living the life of the promising gifted student, or maybe because I have an idealized view of Brooklyn and how cool the lives of young locals are, in spite of all their problems. It’s not one of the most introspective of Auster’s novels, but maybe because of that it flows particularly smoothly.

Bottom line is: I wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s one of my favourite books of all time (though maybe it is), but surely it’s one of the ones I have enjoyed the most.