![]() ![]() What one might call a phenomenology of breathing. Perhaps it is just as well to put aside your stories for now and try to examine what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one. The use of the second person draws readers in to (re-)experience things along with the author, while also creating an artistic distance between the subject and his reminiscences. Here he parades them past in a seemingly random order yet manages to give a sense of the sweep of his life. ![]() Approaching age 64 and the winter of his life, Auster decided to assemble his most visceral memories. This is one of the most remarkable memoirs I’ve ever read. I’m reading another two Auster books, one fiction and nonfiction, and will see if I can finish and write them up before the week ends. This year I’ve enjoyed having Annabel’s Paul Auster Reading Week as an excuse to binge on more Auster, including one of his memoirs, Winter Journal, and his most famous set of novels, the New York Trilogy. Before this year, I’d read only one book by Paul Auster: Timbuktu, which fit into last year’s all-animal 20 Books of Summer for its canine main character. ![]()
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