Winter Journal
Paul Auster
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 125000909X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"That is where the story begins, in your body and everything will end in the body as well."
On January 3, 2011, exactly one month before his sixty-fourth birthday, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster sat down and wrote the first entry of Winter Journal, his unorthodox, beautifully wrought examination of his own life, as seen through the history of his body. Auster takes us from childhood to the brink of old age as he summons forth a universe of physical sensation, of pleasures and pains, moving from the awakening of sexual desire as an adolescent to the ever deepening bonds of married love, from meditations on eating and sleeping to the "scalding, epiphanic moment of clarity" in 1978 that set him on a new course as a writer.
wagon in the summer, the coffee roasted on-site at D’Amico’s and the blast of sharp, beautiful smells that assaulted you whenever you walked into that shop, but Carroll Gardens was also the place where you asked the single most stupid question of your adult life. You were upstairs in your apartment one afternoon, at work on the second half of The Invention of Solitude in your windowless study, when a great clamor of voices rose up from the street outside. You went downstairs to see what was going
feeling more and more tempted to hang up on her, you cannot find the will to do it. Then comes the onslaught, the barrage of verbal cannon fire you should have been expecting from the instant you picked up the phone. How could you have been so naïve as to think that kind words and quasi-hysterical warnings would be the end of it? There is still the question of your mother’s character to be dealt with, and even if her body was discovered only two days ago, even if the crematorium in New Jersey has
more than pleased, you were flabbergasted. You can still see your mother running around the bases in her den mother’s uniform and coming in to the plate with her home run—out of breath, smiling, soaking up the cheers from the boys. Of all the memories you have retained of her from your childhood, this is the one that comes back to you most often. She probably wasn’t beautiful, not beautiful in the classic sense of the term, but pretty enough, more than attractive enough to make men stare at her
hours you do nothing but talk, not about the past and the thirty years that are behind you but about the present, about your daughter and your wife’s mother, about the work you are both engaged in now, about any number of things both pertinent and trivial, and in that respect this evening is no different from any other evening of your marriage, since the two of you have always talked, that is what defines you somehow, and for all these years you have been living inside the long, uninterrupted
because she couldn’t bring herself to quit something she had started. A question of stubbornness and pride. Second: because she was a woman. It was all very well that you had bailed out of graduate school after one year, you were a man, and men control the world, but a woman who wears the badge of an advanced degree will gain some respect in that man’s world, will not be looked down upon as much as a woman who does not have that badge. Third: because she loved it. The hard work and discipline of