Winter Journal: Summary and book reviews of Winter Journal by Paul Auster, plus links to an excerpt from Winter Journal and a biography of Paul Auster.
Winter Journal
by Paul Auster
Hardcover: Aug 2012,
240 pages.
Paperback: 5 Nov 2013,
240 pages.
That is where the story begins, in your body, and everything will end in the body as well.
Facing his sixty-third winter, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster sits down to write a history of his body and its sensations - both pleasurable and painful.
Thirty years after the publication of The Invention of Solitude, in which he wrote so movingly about fatherhood, Auster gives us a second unconventional memoir in which he writes about his mother's life and death. Winter Journal is a highly personal meditation on the body, time, and memory, by one of our most intellectually elegant writers.
Winter Journal is far more than a simple collection of lists, however; the memoir is strongest and most emotionally compelling when the reader can see Auster arriving at moments of revelation, such as the realization that his moments of periodic physical frailty coincide closely with episodes of emotional intensity, personal crisis, and loss. Once this pattern has been identified, it's fascinating to trace it through his life, to consider what this synthesis of mind and body means not only for Auster but also for the lives and bodies of others. (Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Library Journal
Auster has many readers across his fiction and nonfiction. This book makes him a flesh-and-blood person and thus should prove appealing to his fans.
Publisher's Weekly
Starred Review. This is the exquisitely wrought catalogue of a man's history through his body, a body that has felt pain and pleasure because 'body always knows what the mind doesn't know.'
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. A consummate professional explores the attic of his life, converting rumination to art.
Paul Auster is well-known as a Brooklyn writer. In Winter Journal, he writes of first moving to Brooklyn in 1980 after enduring stints in suburbia and an overpriced rental in Manhattan: "Why hadn't you thought of this in 1976? you wondered … but the fact was that Brooklyn had never ever crossed your mind back then, for New York was Manhattan and Manhattan only, and the outer boroughs were as alien to you as the distant countries of Oceania or the Arctic Circle." Auster, of course, never looked back, living in a series of homes in Brooklyn, including the house in Park Slope he has shared with his wife, fellow writer Siri Hustvedt, for the past twenty years.
Reading Auster's descriptions of Brooklyn's tough, almost ugly, underbelly in the 1980s and early 1990s is intriguing, given the borough's current reputation as a hotbed for hipster beekeepers and stroller-pushing young families. Brooklyn has also gained a reputation for its writers, which include Auster and Hustvedt, of course, but also people like Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jhumpa Lahiri,...
From the best-selling author of The Dew Breaker, a major work of nonfiction: a powerfully moving family story that centers around the men closest to Danticat's heart - her father, Mira, and his older brother, Joseph.
How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for more than nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, how and why does he stumble, how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir Rushdie tells that story for the first time; the story of...
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