Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Paul Auster
Faber 2009
I liked this novel very much; whilst not up there with Moon Palace, Leviathan, and The Music of Chance, this is much better than a lot of Auster’s recent work. I think the key is that the post-modern trickery Auster does so well does not detract from the story – or stories – he tells. The first section (which appeared as an appetizer in Granta last year) is told by Adam Walker. It is 1967, and a mysterious stranger, Born, a French professor on sabbatical at Columbia, offers him both $25000 to start a magazine and, it seems, his girlfriend. Walker avails himself of both but, after his affair with Margot has run its brief course, the plans for the magazine come to nothing when Born stabs a man who has threatened the pair with a gun. In the second part it is 2007; the narrator is Jim Freeman, a friend of Walker’s forty years before. It turns out that Walker is now dying; out of the blue he has sent Freeman the manuscript of his autobiographical account of the meeting with Born. Now he sends the second part also: the story of the death of his seven-year-old brother and his incestuous relationship with his sister, Gwyn. An account of Walker’s time in Paris - his reacquaintance with Margot and with Born, now engaged to a Frenchwoman whose daughter, Cecile, becomes infatuated with him – is partly fleshed out from brief notes made by Walker just before he dies. Later, Freeman meets Gwyn, who denies the affair ever happened. Furthermore, we learn that all the names in the apparently autobiographical sections have actually been changed by Freeman “to protect the guilty”. The final section is Cecile’s account – translated from the French – of her meeting with the now aged Born, who suggests another autobiographical joint writing venture: a fictionalised account of how he might – or might not – have caused her father’s disabling accident. The final irony is that this is clearly a novel written by Paul Auster – with whom both Walker, the Francophile student, and Freeman, the successful novelist who has written an autobiographical novel not unlike The Invention of Solitude, share some characteristics. Reading this summary alone, I would conclude that this was a novel to avoid like the plague. The reason it isn’t is Auster’s brilliant and engrossing story-telling, and his thought provoking meddling with structure and form. It is hugely enjoyable: quick to read, but leaving much to ponder. Highly recommended.
22 February 2010
http://www.paulauster.com/
See also: Sunset Park; The Brooklyn Follies; Man in the Dark
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