An evening with Paul Auster

One of the amazing things of living in this city is the cultural opportunities that abound everywhere…something that unfortunately was lacking in both of the ‘jungles’ I have come to know in the past couple of years.

However, being unemployed has actually been a bit of an impairment to my knowledge of all the wonderful events that are happening in the city…leaving the house requires spending money and when all your friends work during the day, leaving the house also becomes a lonely journey into the unknown, or errand running (which is more usually the norm for my leaving the house these days!) Thankfully, New York also provides us with visitors, lots of them these days actually! And through these visitors we learn about things that are happening right under our noses that we wouldn't normally know about. This past weekend, for example, looking for things to do with our visitors, we found out that it was the last weekend of the Dekalb Market before it closed shop for winter; we also found out it was Dumbo Arts Festival weekend, events that we normally wouldn't be on the look out for on a lazy Saturday and which ended up providing us with a greater awareness of our borough of Brooklyn and its myriad of neighborhoods.

Today was the same…thanks to our visitors I learnt that Paul Auster was speaking at the New York Public Library on 42nd St this evening. 

I was very recently introduced to Paul Auster just this year by one of my flatmates in East Timor. We had a lot of time on our hands and reading was one of our ways to ‘kill’ it. She had one of his books, Sunset Park, and she lent it to me. I devoured it in a matter of days (I think it was literally 2) and quickly moved on to the next one, Invisible, which I borrowed from her cousin and read just as quickly. I became enamored with Auster’s writing. And, unbeknownst to me at the time, I was already familiar with Auster’s wife, having 2 of her books in my collection, which I very much enjoyed. Auster writes in a completely different style than his wife and knowing now a bit more about his life from today’s talk, I wonder if (well, like most writers, surely) whether his novels aren't appropriated from parts of his own life.

Today’s talk was about his latest book, Winter Journal, which consists of biographical fragments of the author’s life in a bodily context, meaning based on physical rather than spiritual events. He was asked to read excerpts from his book and talk to some depth about the events that inspired the book. The speaker also talked about the Paul Auster archives that are now in the library open to the public, containing notebooks and essays dating from his earlier work up to the present.

Auster’s voice is soothing, he didn't dramatize his reading and made the audience comfortable with his self-abasement. He introduces himself as a wanderer, a husband, a father, a writer, among 3 other things, which I seem to have forgotten at the moment (should really start taking pen and paper to these things!). I love his way with words, he is elegant without wanting to be since his belief is that you write to live, to describe life, not to make words beautiful or elegant. But his words are elegant and beautifully written and they make me want to keep reading his books, his words. I need to thank my flatmate again for the introduction and our visitors for letting me know about these gems of the city!

A very enjoyable evening indeed!