Report from the Interior by Paul Auster (EPUB)

Description

Paul Auster’s most intimate autobiographical work to dateIn the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts . . .Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter Journal, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster now remembers the experience of his development from within through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world in Report from the Interior.From his baby’s-eye view of the man in the moon, to his childhood worship of the movie cowboy Buster Crabbe, to the composition of his first poem at the age of nine, to his dawning awareness of the injustices of American life, Report from the Interior charts Auster’s moral, political, and intellectual journey as he inches his way toward adulthood through the postwar 1950s and into the turbulent 1960s. Auster evokes the sounds, smells, and tactile sensations that marked his early life—and the many images that came at him, including moving images (he adored cartoons, he was in love with films), until, at its unique climax, the book breaks away from prose into pure imagery: The final section of Report from the Interior recapitulates the first three parts, told in an album of pictures. At once a story of the times—which makes it everyone’s story—and the story of the emerging consciousness of a renowned literary artist, this four-part work answers the challenge of autobiography in ways rarely, if ever, seen before. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐An interesting work. I agree with most of the reviews here. If you are reading this as a fan, as someone who has already read the novels and is very familiar with Auster, you’ll probably enjoy this. It would be difficult to recommend this as an example of why you appreciate the genius of Paul Auster, however. For that, you still need to go back to his fiction. But I was pleasantly surprised that he could present his early childhood in such an interesting manner. That first section stands out as the best of this, for me.If you’ve never seen The Incredible Shrinking Man or Fugitive From a Chain Gang (I’ve seen both films several times), you may enjoy those stories being told to you, in great detail. However, it seems altogether a better idea to simply watch those great films, rather than having Auster describe them to you. A meticulous retelling of the narrative of these films might have been more effective (for me) if balanced with an equal amount of “interior” musings about why these films had such a profound effect on him. They made a strong impression on me, as well, so I share his enthusiasm to talk about these films.It’s an eclectic mix of writing here that succeeds by being not quite like anything else, and that’s always been Auster’s greatest gift, I think. It may also inform the way we look at modern memoir.

⭐This book is for Auster fans. He digs and delves deep into his childhood years; and since he and I are the same age, I found it a time for personal reflection too. As with all of his books, one is mesmirized and taken into another world, which is what all fine writers do. Paul Auster is a part of my life, as has been Proust, Javier Marias, and other creative geniuses. I can’t imagine a world without them.

⭐Throughout the work, those who are peers in age, understand clearly what is ,Paul Auster, talking about .A vivid account of a time in human history. Those events that marked our brain and personality in a strong way, especially if those events are penned by a great author.( Who I admire profoundly).The views of a kid, an adolescent and a young adult. His perspective as a man after his sixties. A fresh recount of a colourful life.Don’t miss…

⭐As usual, Paul Auster bares his soul to his readers in an unpretentious way, in a clear, flowing style that directly reflects his integrity and intellectual honesty. In exploring the development of his mind and system of beliefs he once again proves to be a universal writer. The reader cannot but identify with him at every turn of the page. A great read!

⭐Auster is a very experienced and successful writer, but this is a bit odd. Protagonist is a writer-to-be, he hopes, and uses his longtime girlfriend’s return of his letters to her to provide date about his youth, following a lengthy review of his childhood mainly thru review of two movies exhaustively. A bit depressing, ending ion same place.

⭐On reading this memoir, I remain captivated by the language, the brilliant choice of second person narrative and the lucid perception through a distant child’s eyes. As though re-imagining the past and re-constructing it through the informed retrospection of middle to late adulthood. The reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald who shall remain nameless just doesn’t get it. Blinded by a preconceived, falsely constructed and borrowed dislike for Auster’s writing, I await a response, far more eloquent than mine, from Coetzee, in defence of his learned friend.

⭐This was really insightful, entertaining and interesting during Paul’s younger years but when he went to college he became self absorbed and boring and so is the story.

⭐Paul Auster belongs up with the best ever in my opinion. This is another example of what is truly a great book. Read it and you will be hooked forever on Paul Auster and will hasten to buy and read all the rest of his incredible output.

⭐Everything is related to everything else. A universe… I live in my writing – it consumes my thoughts.I love Paul Auster, he’s one of my all-time favourite writers. I love the variety of his work, the way there’s always something new to be learned from a second or third reading of any of his novels, as well as the sheer pleasure to be taken in immersing oneself in his rich, mesmeric narrative voice all over again. This, however, is the first strictly autobiographical work of his I’ve delved into; it’s part of a trilogy, and, perhaps perversely, I’ve started with the third instalment (I began the first, The Invention of Solitude, some time ago, but managed to misplace it) I don’t think that matters, however. Like everything else by Auster, it stands alone.While The Invention of Solitude details the external, physical world of Auster’s childhood, various ailments he experienced as a child, Report from the Interior – as the title suggests – goes deeper and inward, and is expressed throughout in the second person (you are doing this, you are saying that), in an almost-stream-of-consciousness in which sentences sometimes go on for pages. This might seem ostensibly exhausting or laborious, but it really isn’t, and the reader will soon find themselves swept along, surfing the tsunami of his deeply involving, hypnotic narrative, sucked languidly into the author’s rich inner life.Report from the Interior divides itself into three major chunks, and is therefore – appropriately for a writer of meta-fiction – a trilogy within a trilogy (although there is a fourth and final section, an album of images, but we won’t concern ourselves with that here). The first part details Auster’s childhood proper, up to and including high school, his passion for and immersion in reading from an early age, a recurring dissociative experience that somehow went away and yet in a wider sense didn’t, his sense of separation and his empathy for the underdog and the excluded, and his love of and aptitude for baseball and other sports. This is great, but it’s the second chunk that’s really the most striking, and it takes the form of a detailed breakdown of two films that had a profound effect on him as a child (entitled Two Blows to the Head), The Incredible Shrinking Man and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Both films, viewed by Auster on a small black and white television set, embody the theme of the outsider cast adrift, the loneliness of the perennial outcast, the stranger in a strange land, and this would have reified his sense of isolation and otherness. The Incredible Shrinking Man had a similar effect on me at a young age: I too viewed it on public television (albeit on a different continent and in a different decade – both the film and the novel really are both placeless and timeless), I felt shattered and dislocated by it , as if the scales had fallen from my eyes, and I would go seek it out and watch it again now, were it not for the spider. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang I haven’t seen, although the title is familiar, and the detailed dissection here reads a little like the Cliff Notes for any great work of literature; set just after the first world war, it tells the story of a combatant returning from the carnage with high hopes for the future, only to have those hopes dashed over and again by terrible luck and the ravages of unfettered capitalism and a cruel and corrupt legal system. Released in 1932, Auster asserts that I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is really about the great depression, and it’s impossible to disagree with this. It’s also reasonable to assume that it informed his later political outlook, just as The Incredible Shrinking Man informed his personal perspective on the world.The third part of Report from the Interior is harvested from a series of letters written to Auster’s first wife, the writer Lydia Davis. Davis told him in later life, long after their divorce, that she was thinking of donating their interpersonal correspondence from when they were both in their twenties to an academic library. Only she wondered if he might like to look through the letters first, in case there were anything contained therein that he might not want to be made public – he’d quickly given up on keeping a journal as a young man, seeing it as rather pointless. There was no auditor, he’d argued to himself, and what was the point in telling yourself things you already knew? This later left him with something of an enormous blank space from his young adulthood, vague and foggy notions and memories of what might have happened, and moreover, what he might or might not have feeling at that time. This is, for me and others, the weaker part of the volume, and yet there is still much to be learned here, Pinter’s famous quote that any memory more than twenty years old is fiction, the idea that you are not remembering something that happened back then, but instead remembering the last time you remembered it, the memory changing a little each time, like the proverbial Chinese whisper, like an incrementally decaying jpeg. So there is a slight philosophical backdrop to this last chapter in that sense, taking the reader beyond what is essentially eavesdropping on private conversations, and it really is the portrait of the artist as a young man. There is also his time spent in Paris in the 1960s, his fleeing the city just before les enragés of May 1968, only to encounter what was essentially the same phenomenon soon after with the Columba University strike in New York City, and his near nervous breakdown of the same time. Four stars then, because and I don’t particularly like reading my heroes’ diaries, Charles Bukowski’s collected letters being a case in point, but an essential read nonetheless.

⭐At his best, Auster is one of the very best. But this one isn’t in that league. It has followed quickly on from Winter Journal, which (for this reader) was superb – insightful, and additive to Auster’s body of work. But ‘Interior’ seems not to move the corpus forward. Sorry Paul!

⭐Bought as gift

⭐I’m an Auster loyal reader, but his last two books (“Here & Now” and “Report…”) seem to me to be publisher decisions in order to keep readers attention. Not important in his production to my regret.

⭐I think I’ll have to re-read it a number of times to really get the full picture….but I love Paul Auster, and he is always amazing! In this work sometimes he gives a little too much depht….that means a little boredom…

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