Paul Auster

I was in my friend's apartment in Syria the other day, browsing through his bookshelves, and I was delighted to find a copy of a book by Paul Auster, which I borrowed and read from cover to cover that very night (finally going to sleep at 0730). The book was Oracle Night. It's about a writer who has just recovered from a serious accident, about his relationship with his wife and about some of his writing. But like other Auster books, it's really about ideas.

One of the main themes of the book is about starting a new life. The main character, inspired by an anecdote in a Raymond Chandler novel*, tries to write a story about a man who is nearly killed in a freak accident, and who then spontaneously abandons his family life in New York in order to start from scratch in a new city. Leaving the house to post some letters, the main character of this story within a story ends up taking a plane to Kansas City to embark on a new and bizarre existence, working in an underground room filled with telephone directories.

Like other Auster books, Oracle Night zips along and is very easy to read, and raises plenty of existential philosophical questions in the reader's mind without ever really pinning anything down. For me, Auster's trademark is the juxtaposition of a set of complex themes about what it means to be human with a straightforwardly written narrative about the day to day activities of a central character. On one hand, his books are very entertaining and earthy, and on the other, it's never quite clear what exactly he is getting at. In the case of Oracle Night, Auster refers to "the power of the random, purely accidental forces that mold our destinies", and the motif of abandoning your life and starting again afresh is an attempt to embrace the randomness of life.

Paul Auster

Auster also writes about writing. Many or most of his protagonists are writers, and I noted one very nice passage in Oracle Night about the process of writing which may evoke feelings familiar to anyone who has searched in vain for inspiration:

"I put down the book and started pacing around the apartment, walking in and out of rooms, scanning the titles of the books on the shelves, parting the curtains and looking through the window at the wet street below, accomplishing nothing for several hours.

Now I'm off to do some reading about Auster online...

* PS: I just learned it's actually Dashiel Hammet rather than Chandler...

Orwellian reading

I recently finished George Orwell's Coming Up For Air, which I bought on the street in Syria for about €0.70. Good to get back to some Orwell. He's one of my favourite writers, to the extent that I can say that he has had a formative effect on my thinking. I would recommend anyone to check out some of his essays, such as 'Politics and the English Language', which are available online. I love his simple, clear writing style. He seems to really hold to the belief that you shouldn't use a big word where a smaller word will do, and that sentences should be short. A big problem with a lot of writing - and particularly academic writing, I'd hazard - is that people like to use very complicated sentence structures. Clarity suffers as a result.

Eric Blair aka George McOrwell

Coming Up For Air is the story of 45-year-old George Bowling, a man who is pissed off with his lot. It is set in the run-up to World War II. Bowling has a wife and family and a job that is unexciting, and he goes back to his village of origin to try to capture something about himself. However, the trip is entirely disillusioning and deflating because his village has been swallowed up by the march of the urban.

The book has been referenced as a forerunner to 1984, and I can see the similarity, although the society depicted in Coming Up For Air is less extreme and the story less intense. Politics are to the forefront however, and the novel deals with a newly emerged middle class of sorts in inter-war England, evoking the misery and defeat of the capitulation to wage slavery. This is my take on it, at least. There isn't really much hopeful coming out of the narrative that I can recall. But maybe there's some hope in the protagonist's vague realisation (which is far from epiphany) that the human experience contains the potential for a more meaningful existence. So there is hope but not redemption methinks.

World War II looms large over the plot, and Bowling's memories of his service in World War I colour his pessimism and apathy.


Listening to Charles Mingus Fables of Faubus in my favourite cafe... Beautiful.