I've decided to start here with one of my most favorite authors who is Paul Auster. Many of you who know me would have for sure expected a SF author I bet, but Paul Auster really is one of my top 10 authors and I think we can even make the top thinner easily.
This is mainly because Paul Auster is one of the very very rare author who has never disappointed me. I've not read all of his work yet but far more than half of it and if today I don't remember of all these books as precisely and some of them are now nothing more but very foggy memories; I do remember that I've never once argue with myself to continue the reading. Each time I've read a book from Paul Auster, I've enjoyed the journey.
Like many I've discovered him with his New York Trilogy about 10 years ago, and that is a typical example of what I said earlier: I really don't remember much of these books but the fact is I've read more from him and I've discovered one of the book I've loved most till now: Mr Vertigo
For now It's the only book of Auster I'm sure I'll re-read one of these days as I've been really … which word to use …. enchanted by this book, part historical, part fantastic, very rich and absurd. And that is the secret of Paul Auster's books: when you start them you never know what you're about to discover, where you're about to be taken to.
Paul Auster is a wonderful writer. First, the reading is enjoyable because of his style, rich but not too sophisticated. It took me a long time to feel enough confident in reading his books in their original language and I was happy to discover that it wasn't hard at all. Of course if the English is not your mother tongue you need to have a minimum vocabulary cause the book's prose ain't poor, but I've never been stuck in my reading for a serious misunderstanding which required the help of a dictionary. On the contrary I've always felt myself driven by the words without any obstacle to stop the reading, except of course, realizing that I had missed my correspondence with the subway !
If you also feel caught by the reading it is also because the books are really elaborated traps. Really ! More than a simple writer, Paul Auster appears to be a real storyteller, an architect who masters both the spirit (the story itself) and the letter (how to tell the story). An easy way Auster involves you in his fantasies comes through the way he writes them. To illustrate this complicated wording (forgive me to not have the talent of Auster
), let's take for example one of the last books I've read from Auster: Oracle Night.
In this book Oracle Night is the title of a novel which inspires an author, principal character of a novel written by a writer, himself being the main character of the book you have in your hands. So you follow three very imprecated stories reading one book. This cannot be done without your intellectual involvement in the process of reading and … then you are caught !
Talking about that book in my blog I referred to the Herald critic displayed on the cover of my edition (the one pictured up here) : "If you have never read Auster before ... this is the place to start". I agreed with it as if this book is a very good introduction to how Auster tells his stories, it is also a very good introduction to Auster's world : a contemporaneous and urban world so close and so far from our everyday world because of its very thin frontiers with a world of magic and fantasy. In this little text I compared Paul Auster's world to Neil Gaiman's one finally finding that they were quite close.
Since then, the author of the wonderfull Neverland has sadly disappointed me with other of his works while Auster is still in the head of my personal top. Last month, on the 3rd of February, Auster blew out his 62nd candle. I do hope many other great books are coming from Mr. Auster and urge you to discover this wonderful author if it's not already done. You won't be disappointed !
You can also discover the world of Auster in some of these different movies:
- The Music of Chance (1993)
- Smoke (1995)
- Blue in the Face (1995)
- Lulu on the Bridge (1998)
- The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007)
But don't miss the books !!!
