Report from the interior

Review by New York Times Review

WRITING MULTIPLE NOVELS is generally considered a triumph, writing multiple memoirs a somewhat shameful habit. Still, I've never heard anyone sniff about Paul Auster's autobiographical recidivism; perhaps his 16 acclaimed novels compensate for it. In any case, on the basis of his five memoirs alone, Auster should be recognized as one of the great American prose stylists of our time. "Report From the Interior" is a companion text to the 2012 "Winter Journal." Where that book was a history of the author's body, this one is a history of his psychological development, from childhood through early adulthood. Both use second-person narration, which is easy to label a gimmick, but here it feels natural, inextricable from the rest of the prose. In the first of the book's four sections, Auster describes his childhood by presenting a series of objects. "In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts, and even the clouds had names." In one heartbreaking scene, Auster's father buys a small collection of Army surplus items and claims them as his, afraid to disappoint his son with the truth that he'd never served in the military. The anecdote brilliantly translates the childhood emotional experience in which mundane objects - in this case a canvaswrapped tin canteen - seem to accumulate mythologies all by themselves. This first part, dotted with serendipities and nearly magical coincidences, recalls Auster's volume of "true stories," "The Red Notebook." On the first day of junior high school: "You saw that it was exactly 7 a.m., that the second hand was sweeping past the 9 on its way to the 12, meaning that you had woken up 10 seconds before you had to, and you, who had always slept so soundly, who could never wake up without the blasting bell of an alarm, had woken to silence for the first time in memory, as if you had been counting down the seconds in your dreams." I might belong to the last generation of people who watched the sweep of second hands on clocks, but the sweep is so vivid, I almost brace myself for the inevitable jangling bell. The second section consists of almost scene-by-scene summaries of two films Auster describes as "blows to the head" : "The Incredible Shrinking Man" and "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang." The approach brings to mind his 1997 book "Hand to Mouth," in which he recounts the various jobs he took in his 20 s and 30s, including writing a synopsis of a screenplay. Perhaps I am inclined more to reading than to watching, but despite knowing both films, I found a furious momentum in this section. The third section collects annotated passages from Auster's letters to the writer and translator Lydia Davis, his college sweetheart and first wife. The correspondence contains all the flaws you'd expect from a young writer: badly extended metaphors, attempts at highbrow humor, passages in French, condescending advice about what to read and how to think. ("Don't be discouraged about being a woman. It's a fine profession.") I don't much care that Auster (correctly) values Henry Miller above Jack Kerouac or that the letter written after this pronouncement reads like semi-digested Henry Miller, but it's the sort of thing that will interest those who want to witness Auster's first tentative steps toward becoming a serious writer. In 1969, at age 22, he observes: "For me the problem of the world is first of all a problem of the self, and the solution can be accomplished only by beginning within and then ... moving without." This of course foreshadows the project of this book and its predecessor. The most interesting moment here is when the older Auster realizes the letters were a proxy for a diary. Recognizing neither the tone nor his own adolescent handwriting, he understands that "this massive pile of paper was the journal you hadn't been able to write when you were 18, that the letters were nothing less than a time capsule of your late adolescence and early adulthood,... the only door you have ever found that opens directly onto your past." AUSTER LAMENTS THAT there are no pictures to accompany the letters: "For a person born in the mid-20th century, the era of the inexpensive camera, the postwar boom days when every middle-class American family was gripped by shutterbug fever, your life is the least documented of anyone you have ever known. How could so much have been lost?" The book's fourth and final section consists of 64 pages of captioned photos, a visual annotation to preceding text: a collection of generic photos to stand in for typical family snapshots. The concept carries the potential for tremendous emotional resonance. A close-up black-and-white stock photo of some beefsteak tomatoes bears the caption "Every year for the 26 and a half years that remained of his life, your father spent his summers cultivating tomatoes." Familiar portraits of writers, baseball players and other famous men accompany familiar publicity stills from the two films so important to Auster. For "no Sabbath meals on Friday night, no lighting of candles," we are given a stock photo of a Hanukkah menorah (though a shot of Shabbat candles would have been just as easy to come by). The line "So we finish off the misadventure with sandwiches at Ratner's" accompanies an unevenly cropped photo of the restaurant's neon sign. If the point was to gather stock images to emphasize the absence of legitimately personal photos, the joke is too broad and much too long. Auster's first three autobiographical works are jewels perfectly cut, luminous little books. It is as if he had been audacious enough, as a younger man, to resist the 350-page Serious Book, but has in late middle age begun to relax. Or perhaps after perfecting the vivid and instructive novella-length essay, he has diverged from it to escape the boredom of his facility. Never mind; the best parts of "Report From the Interior" are as excellent as one could hope. It would not be inaccurate to describe the first section, which gives the book its title, as perfect. 'Your life is the least documented of anyone you have ever known.' SARAH MANGUSO is the author, most recently, of the memoir "The Guardians."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 22, 2013]

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Review by Booklist Review

Internationally revered novelist Auster follows Winter Journal (2012), his body-centric memoir, with a high-wire explication of his inner life, from his child's sense that everything was alive to the birth of self-consciousness to his first writing attempts. Auster's phenomenal literary powers are generated by his equal fluency in matters emotional and cerebral. Here the origins of that sustaining duality are revealed as he recounts his conscious efforts to toughen up and fend for himself as a boy in an unhappy Newark household. Auster nurtured himself with two great obsessions, baseball and books. He intricately chronicles his harsh awakenings to the world's cruelty, revisits his reading passions, and offers long, enrapturing disquisitions on movies that, for him, were blows to the head. A cache of his old letters demolishes his tenuous memories of his student years at Columbia University during the Vietnam War protests and solitary sojourns in Maine and Paris. Closing with an album of historic photographs, Auster's piquant self-portrait as a headstrong boy and floundering boy-man maps the internal geography of a hungry mind catalyzed and sustained by stories.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Chronicling his earliest reading and writing to his parents' unhappy marriage, Auster uses specific moments to extrapolate larger themes and meanings in this memoir that is a companion to Winter Journal. Auster's narration is impressive, but somewhat flawed. His mature tone perfectly captures the reflective quality of his writing, and the deep, gentle reverberation of his voice grabs listener attention. However, his pacing is sometimes problematic. At times, he reads too quickly and his performance feels rushed. Additionally, Auster often fails to vocally convey emotion. Still, there is a clear power to his delivery that will keep listeners-and fans-engaged. A Henry Holt hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Auster (Winter Journal) is a good reader and a great writer. Unfortunately, though well narrated, this work does not display Auster's typical quality. His early years as a schoolboy baseball player and Yankees fan are quite entertaining. Also, his extended takes on the films The Incredible Shrinking Man and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang as formative experiences in his youth are very interesting. Less so is the final portion of the book, a second-person dialog with his adolescent self, based on selections from love letters written in the 1970s to Lydia Davis, who became his first wife. Apart from his commentary on his Columbia University education and his participation in anti-Vietnam War protests, it's pretty boring. VERDICT This audio presentation is recommended to libraries with extensive literary audio collections and of course to fans of the author. ["Auster presents a fascinating take on the memoir," read the starred review of the Holt hc, LJ 10/15/13.]-Cliff Glaviano, formerly with Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The interplay of memory, identity and the creative imagination informs this portrait of the artist as a young man, a memoir that the novelist's avid readership will find particularly compelling. Even by the standards of the distinctive literary stylist and his formal ingenuity, this is an unusual book. Auster introduces it as something of a companion piece to his previous Winter Journal (2012), as he compares the two: "It was one thing to write about your body, to catalogue the manifold knocks and pleasures experienced by your physical self, but exploring your mind as you remember it from childhood will no doubt be a more difficult task--perhaps an impossible one. Still, you feel compelled to give it a try." While writing throughout in the second person, inviting readers inside his head, Auster has divided the book into four distinct and very different parts. The first is a childhood psychobiography, to the age of 12, recognizing the distortions and holes in memory while discovering the magic of literature, "the mystifying process by which a person can leap into a mind that is not his own." The second consists of exhaustively detailed synopses of two movies that he saw in his midteens, The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), noteworthy for the way such a formative experience "burns itself into your heart forever." The third compiles college letters to his future (and now former) wife, the author/translator Lydia Davis, unearthed when she was compiling her archives--"you have lost contact with that person [he writes of his younger self], and as you listen to him speak on the page, you scarcely recognize him anymore." The fourth is a scrapbook, not of the author and his family, but of images from the era that remain emblazoned on his consciousness. Auster has long rendered life as something of a puzzle; here are some significant, illuminating pieces.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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REPORT FROM THE INTERIOR In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts, and even the clouds had names. Scissors could walk, telephones and teapots were first cousins, eyes and eyeglasses were brothers. The face of the clock was a human face, each pea in your bowl had a different personality, and the grille on the front of your parents' car was a grinning mouth with many teeth. Pens were airships. Coins were flying saucers. The branches of trees were arms. Stones could think, and God was everywhere. There was no problem in believing that the man in the moon was an actual man. You could see his face looking down at you from the night sky, and without question it was the face of a man. Little matter that this man had no body--he was still a man as far as you were concerned, and the possibility that there might be a contradiction in all this never once entered your thoughts. At the same time, it seemed perfectly credible that a cow could jump over the moon. And that a dish could run away with a spoon. Your earliest thoughts, remnants of how you lived inside yourself as a small boy. You can remember only some of it, isolated bits and pieces, brief flashes of recognition that surge up in you unexpectedly at random moments--brought on by the smell of something, or the touch of something, or the way the light falls on something in the here and now of adulthood. At least you think you can remember, you believe you remember, but perhaps you are not remembering at all, or remembering only a later remembrance of what you think you thought in that distant time which is all but lost to you now. January 3, 2012, exactly one year to the day after you started composing your last book, your now-finished winter journal. It was one thing to write about your body, to catalogue the manifold knocks and pleasures experienced by your physical self, but exploring your mind as you remember it from childhood will no doubt be a more difficult task--perhaps an impossible one. Still, you feel compelled to give it a try. Not because you find yourself a rare or exceptional object of study, but precisely because you don't, because you think of yourself as anyone, as everyone. The only proof you have that your memories are not entirely deceptive is the fact that you still occasionally fall into the old ways of thinking. Vestiges have lingered well into your sixties, the animism of early childhood has not been fully purged from your mind, and each summer, as you lie on your back in the grass, you look up at the drifting clouds and watch them turn into faces, into birds and animals, into states and countries and imaginary kingdoms. The grilles of cars still make you think of teeth, and the corkscrew is still a dancing ballerina. In spite of the outward evidence, you are still who you were, even if you are no longer the same person. In thinking about where you want to go with this, you have decided not to cross the boundary of twelve, for after the age of twelve you were no longer a child, adolescence was looming, glimmers of adulthood had already begun to flicker in your brain, and you were transformed into a different kind of being from the small person whose life was a constant plunge into the new, who every day did something for the first time, even several things, or many things, and it is this slow progress from ignorance toward something less than ignorance that concerns you now. Who were you, little man? How did you become a person who could think, and if you could think, where did your thoughts take you? Dig up the old stories, scratch around for whatever you can find, then hold up the shards to the light and have a look at them. Do that. Try to do that. The world was of course flat. When someone tried to explain to you that the earth was a sphere, a planet orbiting the sun with eight other planets in something called a solar system, you couldn't grasp what the older boy was saying. If the earth was round, then everyone below the equator would fall off, since it was inconceivable that a person could live his life upside down. The older boy tried to explain the concept of gravity to you, but that was beyond your grasp as well. You imagined millions of people plunging headlong through the darkness of an infinite, all-devouring night. If the earth was indeed round, you said to yourself, then the only safe place to be was the North Pole. No doubt influenced by the cartoons you loved to watch, you thought there was a pole jutting out from the North Pole. Similar to one of those striped, revolving columns that stood in front of barbershops. Stars, on the other hand, were inexplicable. Not holes in the sky, not candles, not electric lights, not anything that resembled what you knew. The immensity of the black air overhead, the vastness of the space that stood between you and those small luminosities, was something that resisted all understanding. Benign and beautiful presences hovering in the night, there because they were there and for no other reason. The work of God's hand, yes, but what in the world had he been thinking? Your circumstances at the time were as follows: midcentury America; mother and father; tricycles, bicycles, and wagons; radios and black-and-white televisions; standard-shift cars; two small apartments and then a house in the suburbs; fragile health early on, then normal boyhood strength; public school; a family from the striving middle class; a town of fifteen thousand populated by Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, all white except for a smattering of black people, but no Buddhists, Hindus, or Muslims; a little sister and eight first cousins; comic books; Rootie Kazootie and Pinky Lee; "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus"; Campbell's soup, Wonder bread, and canned peas; souped-up cars (hot rods) and cigarettes for twenty-three cents a pack; a little world inside the big world, which was the entire world for you back then, since the big world was not yet visible. Armed with a pitchfork, an angry Farmer Gray runs across a cornfield in pursuit of Felix the Cat. Neither one of them can talk, but their actions are accompanied by a steady clang of jaunty, high-speed music, and as you watch the two of them engage in yet another battle of their never-ending war, you are convinced they are real, that these raggedly drawn black-and-white figures are no less alive than you are. They appear every afternoon on a television program called Junior Frolics , hosted by a man named Fred Sayles, who is known to you simply as Uncle Fred, the silver-haired gatekeeper to this land of marvels, and because you understand nothing about the production of animated films, cannot even begin to fathom the process by which drawings are made to move, you figure there must be some sort of alternate universe in which characters like Farmer Gray and Felix the Cat can exist--not as pen scratches dancing across a television screen, but as fully embodied, three-dimensional creatures as large as adults. Logic demands that they be large, since the people who appear on television are always larger than their images on-screen, and logic also demands that they belong to an alternate universe, since the universe you live in is not populated by cartoon characters, much as you might wish it was. One day when you are five years old, your mother announces that she will be taking you and your friend Billy to the studio in Newark where Junior Frolics is broadcast. You will get to see Uncle Fred in person, she tells you, and be a part of the show. All this is exciting to you, inordinately exciting, but even more exciting is the thought that finally, after months of speculation, you will be able to set eyes on Farmer Gray and Felix the Cat. At long last you will discover what they really look like. In your mind, you see the action unfolding on an enormous stage, a stage the size of a football field, as the crotchety old farmer and the wily black cat chase each other back and forth in one of their epic skirmishes. On the appointed day, however, none of it happens as you thought it would. The studio is small, Uncle Fred has makeup on his face, and after you are given a bag of mints to keep you company during the show, you take your seat in the grandstand with Billy and the other children. You look down at what should be a stage, but which in fact is nothing more than the concrete floor of the studio, and what you see there is a television set. Not even a special television set, but one no bigger or smaller than the set you have at home. The farmer and the cat are nowhere in the vicinity. After Uncle Fred welcomes the audience to the show, he introduces the first cartoon. The television comes on, and there are Farmer Gray and Felix the Cat, bouncing around in the same way they always have, still trapped inside the box, still as small as they ever were. You are thoroughly confused. What error have you made? you ask yourself. Where has your thinking gone wrong? The real is so defiantly at odds with the imagined, you can't help feeling that a nasty trick has been played on you. Stunned with disappointment, you can barely bring yourself to look at the show. Afterward, walking back to the car with Billy and your mother, you toss away the mints in disgust. Copyright © 2013 by Paul Auster Excerpted from Report from the Interior by Paul Auster All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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