Thank you | Paul Auster

A novel is the only place where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. The reader and the writer make the book together. No other art can capture the essential inwardness of human life.

Paul Auster

Thank you, thank you, thank you

Gratitude in midst of numbness. Of emptiness. Yes, gratitude. Countless hours of joyful reading, of smiles generated by unexpected (and with the years expected) brilliance and wit. Very few writers possess a style so authentic and peculiar that their loyal readers immediately recognise it and, grinning with satisfaction, find comfort in it. In Auster’s case, we all felt at home after only a page or two.

I’ve always said that I’d love to spend a few hours inside Auster’s head and like a tiny fly on the wall observe the machinery, the clockwork. I guess that particular wish is not more impossible today than it was before, but I don’t feel prepared to abandon it just yet.

Auster’s Baumgartner & Bowie’s Blackstar

The New York Trilogy marked a before and after in me, like a door that opens to a world so special that once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. With Baumgartner (and I can’t help but see parallels with Bowie and his last album Blackstar here) the circle has been closed –but the door will remain open.