Austerity

The latest Paul Auster memoir, Report from the Interior, disappointed me.  He’s such an innovative writer I expected something more striking.  It’s a book in three parts.  The first is about his boyhood.  The second is about two Hollywood movies and the influence they had on him as a boy.  The third, and by far the most interesting, quotes letters from him to Lydia Davies from his twenties.  Davies (a prominent and important novelist and translator in her own right, winner of the 2013 Mann Booker International Prize) was his girlfriend at the time.  They would marry later.  Some notable passages from the letters:

‘. . . to get going again, to write, you must meditate, in the real sense of the word. Honest, painful. Then the hidden things will come out. You must forget the everyday Lydia, your sister’s Lydia, your parents’ Lydia, Paul’s Lydia – but then you will be able to come back to them, without loss of inspiration next time. It’s not that the two worlds are incompatible, but that you must realize their interconnections.’

 

The Book of Illusions is one of my all-time favs.

‘He <a friend> spoke of order, precision, limited tasks, I of chaos, life and imperfection, unable to agree with him about the imminent annihilation of the individual. For me the problem of the world is first of all a problem of the self, and the solution can be accomplished only be beginning within and then . . . moving without. Expression, not mastery is the key. <He>, I believe, is still too much of a critic, too absorbed in abstractions that are not counterbalanced by the brute facts of gastral pains. Stick to life, I say. I will make it my motto. Do you agree? Stick to life, no matter how fantastical, repulsive, or agonizing. Above all freedom. Above all dirtying your hands.  . . . I saw that I had once and for all broken the bond with … academic prattle, with the seduction of neat ideas, with literature spelled with a capital L, elegantly embossed in fancy leather bindings.’

The memoir is written in the second person, which gives it an almost eerie personal tone. Knowing more about his literary pedigree does make me respect him more. Nonetheless I was hoping for more.