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Baumgartner’s life has been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna. But now Anna is gone, and Baumgartner is embarking on his seventies whilst trying to live with her absence. Rich with compassion, wit and Auster’s keen eye for beauty in the smallest, most transient episodes of ordinary life, ‘Baumgartner’ is a tender late masterpiece of the ache of memory. It asks: why do we find such meaning in certain moments, and forget others?
Baumgartner’s life has been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna. But now Anna is gone, and Baumgartner is embarking on his seventies whilst trying to live with her absence. Rich with compassion, wit and Auster’s keen eye for beauty in the smallest, most transient episodes of ordinary life, ‘Baumgartner’ is a tender late masterpiece of the ache of memory. It asks: why do we find such meaning in certain moments, and forget others?
‘Bloodbath Nation’ is about the epidemic that is tearing apart the fabric of American society. An epidemic caused – not by Covid – but by guns. Among its victims are men, women, teenagers, children, and even babies. The massacres have taken place in churches, schools, movie theatres, and at rock concerts. Auster establishes how America’s love affair with guns goes all the way back to the arrival of the first British settlers – guns in hand – who used these guns to eradicate the Native Americans who occupied the country. This history of carnage continues to this day. Guns have become one of the issues dividing America today, but Auster doesn’t take sides. The book is a plea for both sides to find a way of avoiding more death and grief. Accompanying Auster’s text is a series of photographs of the locations of these mass killings.
American writer Stephen Crane died in 1900 at the age of 28. In his short, intense life, this burning boy wrote a masterpiece, ‘The Red Badge of Courage’, as well as other novels, short stories, and dispatches from the front of two wars. His adventurous life took him to the Wild West, Mexico, then to Cuba during the Spanish American War – dodging bullets which killed those around him, and suffering shipwreck on his way home. Fleeing America because of a scandalous love affair, his last 18 months were spent in Britain where he became a close friends of H.G. Wells, Henry James and, especially, Joseph Conrad. Through Auster’s skill as a novelist, Crane leaps off the page, and into the reader’s heart.
‘In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts’. Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in ‘Winter Journal’, Paul Auster now remembers the experience of his development from within, through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world. From his baby’s-eye view of the man in the moon to his childhood worship of the movie cowboy Buster Crabbe to the composition of his first poem at the age of nine to his dawning awareness of the injustices of American life, ‘Report from the Interior’ charts Auster’s moral, political and intellectual journey as he inches his way toward adulthood through the post-war fifties and into the turbulent 1960s.
In ‘Winter Journal’, Auster presents the abandonment of his family by his father from his mother’s point of view: her struggle as a single mother, love found again late in life, her troubled later years and her death: and the subsequent anxiety attacks Auster suffered in the face of her death.
Paul Auster’s three stories explore the nature of identity. He uses the detective, spy and friendship genres as vehicles to delve into the relationships between different groups of people.
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