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. 

Sostiene Pereira – Antonio Tabucchi

Often people forget that, in the sea of mediocrity that has been the Italian literary landscape for the last 20 years or so, some great books have still been written. And that’s a shame. Often people forget that – though softer than many of its contemporaries – Salazar’s Estado Novo was still a Fascist regime. And that’s probably an even greater shame.

Sostiene Pereira is an excellent book. The reader feels for the uncertainties, aloofness and naivety of old Pereira and at the same time falls in love with the charming and young Monteiro Rossi. The constant repetition of the fact that “Pereira maintains” most of the things happening in the book is a wonderful way to keep the pace of the novel. Lisbon’s melancholy comes alive in Tabucchi’s pages (even more so than in Saramago’s ones in my opinion). And the clarification, in a note at the end of the book, on the racial/religious connotations of Portuguese surnames coming from names for fruit trees (“Pereira” means “pear tree” in Portuguese) puts the novel under a different light.

The movie by Roberto Faenza is also something that should have enjoyed more success than it did, seeing together some of the greatest European actors of the last 30 years (and more): Stefano Dionisi (already mentioned for his role in Il Paritigiano Johnny), the inimitable Marcello Mastroianni, Daniel Auteuil, and Joaquim De Almeida. Ah, and also Nicoletta Braschi, who I think has made a career just out of being Benigni’s wife (why even Jim Jarmusch felt like giving her important roles in some of his movies is just beyond me).

Ben, in the World - Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing’s Ben is still – rather unsurprisingly – a problematic figure even in this sequel to The Fifth Child. Yet, whereas The Fifth Child was one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read, Ben, in the World didn’t quite have the same effect on me.

The first of the two books was fundamentally all about the mother’s struggles with the foetus and, later, the boy. This second book is about Ben’s fight, essentially, for survival. Maybe because of the protected life that I live – much like Ben’s family – I read this book with interest, but not with as much as empathy as I had when I read its prequel.

In the first book, Ben gave readers the creeps. In this one, the readers ultimately want Ben to find his way in the world, but, hell no, no reader would hope of bumping into Ben in real life and actually help him out.