Bluejake

Paul Auster's new book came out this month and I bought it at Dutton's bookstore when we were out in Los Angeles. Auster was my favorite author in college- I read the New York Trilogy during the last few months of my Junior year at Columbia. K remembers me telling her about it as we said goodbye to each other in Brooklyn Heights the week I went to meet L in London in May of 1997. We were walking down Orange Street in the Heights, and I pointed out the names of the streets and mentioned how they came up in this amazing book written by a Park Slope author named Paul Auster. I read Moonpalace the night L and I took the boat train from London to Dublin, and finished it a little while after the boat left Holyhead. I couldn't carry extra weight so I tossed the book overboard into the Irish Sea. Or at least that is how I remember it- I was always tossing something overboard. I read the other books as L and I crossed Europe- finding them in little bookshops everywhere- in Paris, in Rome, in Madrid. By the time I got back I had read almost all of his fiction. Senior year in College I read his later works and his non-fiction, things like the Red Notebook and Disappearances, rough sad stuff.

By 1999 I had taken Auster about as far as I could. I knew Smoke and Blue in the Face by heart, and I bothered everyone until they read the books. Auster taught me to treasure coincidence and variation on a small number of constant themes: loss, depression, twists of fate, quests. By the time you have read seven or eight of his books, you begin to see them less as separate projects but rather as instantiations; instances of a single larger work. Or at least, that's what I thought until I read Timbuktu, the book he released in 2000 with the first-person narration by the dog. I just assumed he had cracked up, like one of his characters, but K and I went to see him read a portion of it in Park Slope, and he looked fine. I decided that I was a fan of the early, pre-dog Auster, and left it at that.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up The Book of Illusions- I worried that it might suck, and I would begin to question the strength of the early books, of the whole Auster enterprise. I began reading it on the plane back to New York, and I realized within twenty pages or so that it was good. Moonpalace good- Leviathan good. It was cold and sad and heartbreaking- and it was totally devoid of any talking dogs. It was written in an older voice than the first novels- more weathered. It was an amazing meditation on films and the moving image, and the impermanence of all things. It was so solid that I was shocked- it made me remember why I liked Auster so much in the first place. Go out- buy this novel.

Books