I really enjoy Auster's voice in this memoir. ( )

I had given up on Auster in recent years. The novels were becoming too repetitive in style and substance. (It pains me to say that, since I still think of The New York Trilogy all the time.) I picked this up when I saw it at the library for old times' sake and began it that day. The first two thirds are very good, and the middle third--where Auster describes two movies that affected him as a kid--is fantastic. Anyone who has ever been affected by a movie when he or she was a kid should read this section. He describes The Incredible Shrinking Man as if it were Citizen Kane, which is the whole idea--to a kid, this was like Citizen Kane. Granted, after that he tackles I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, a much better movie, but the intensity remains. In both cases, he reduces the films to their lowest terms, arguing through the urgency of his writing that their protagonists are Everyman figures. I've been watching the original episodes of The Fugitive recently and often find myself thinking of them in the manner Auster uses when he writes of his favorite films: A man is accused of a crime he did not commit. By a chance occurrence, he escapes and assumes a new identity. However, he soon learns that his cover as a bartender will be threatened by . . . etc. Reading this part of the book actually made me want to try to do the same thing with my favorite movies.

The last third, however, is a falling off. Auster presents a series of letters he wrote while a student at Columbia and their scope is very narrow. He comes across as a whining, self-important graduate student, wringing his hands about French translations. Perhaps that was the point--I was naive enough to think that poetry mattered while the Vietnam War was occurring--but it doesn't make for good reading. I wish he would do a whole book of film synopses. ( )

What a sublime pleasure to get a glimpse into the personal fragments of one the quintessential American writers of our times. This might not be Auster at his best, but who cares, it is Auster after all: flowing sentences wrapped up in a psychology that some of us might know only too well.

The book is like a time capsule, with messages that are ready to be decoded differently by different readers, hopefully not first-time-Auster-readers, just to enhance the pleasure a little more. For me, it is impossible not to relate to my childhood memories, necessarily reconstructed, again and again, always imperfect and dependent on the context: Some of the pages sounding and smelling almost like home, some of them pretty alien. His childhood imagination of the great wars replaced with my remembering of horrors of the smaller ones.

The references to his other books trigger many other memories: this is Auster reshaping my memories of reading them; in an apartment flat that had been the location to so many weird adventures, on a airplane with full of passengers and false hopes. Memories of giving Auster books as gifts. Memories of talking about those books. Memories of remembering those conversations.

"There is nothing so depressing as to watch an uninspired stripper", and there's nothing like reading Auster, reporting from the past and the interior, after having tasted already this strong and beautiful spirit of literature, not only to be read but also savoured. ( )

I'm always intrigued with Paul Auster, and I admit he is one of my favorite writers (though there have been some duds over the years, like Timbuktu, or Brooklyn Follies). This one reminded me of the Hunger Artist or Winter Journal. I disagree with the negative reviews, particularly on the second section of the book, with the retelling of The incredible Shrinking Man and other film plots. The act of retelling a movie is not so much ekphrasis as revealing the particular subjectivity of Auster that was formed in having seen a film. I also didn't find the letters indulgent, and what's so irritating about the use of second person? A pronoun is merely rhetorical. The second person creates distance and mirroring. Auster here is indulging in memoir, but he's doing it in fresh experimental ways. ( )

This is rare for me. Most Auster books I've read (and I've read most Auster books) would get 3 stars or above. (Many would rate 4 stars.) So I was ready to love this, in it's Audible edition with Auster reading...but, it was fragmented and sometimes felt pointless. I really liked Winter Journal--this is meant to be a companion volume to that--but this didn't hold together as well from my perspective. The movie summaries were entertaining; the initial chapter, charting a young boy's thoughts and perceptions, were wonderful; but it quickly grew self-indulgent and rambling. The discovery of letters to his first wife, Lydia Davis, was, no doubt, important to Auster...not so much to the rest of us. In summation: read Paul Auster's novels! Let this one go. ( )