Winter Journal
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
A deeply personal and moving memoir from the acclaimed author of The New York Trilogy and The Invention of Solitude
"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. In this intimate and introspective work, Auster reflects on his childhood in Brooklyn, his coming of age in New York City, and the profound impact of family life. A poignant exploration of aging and the complex relationship between mother and son, Winter Journal showcases Auster's singular voice and extraordinary insight into the human condition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"You think," begins Auster in this quietly moving meditation on death and life, "it will never happen to you." But because this is not fiction and Auster (Sunset Park) is as human as the rest of us, "one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else." The things that happen and which he chronicles are both momentous and mundane, the stuff of everyday life the childhood baseball games, the succession of New York and Paris apartments (21 in total), even the women longed for, two of whom became wives and the events that shook and shaped him. From the vantage point of the winter preceding his 64th birthday, Auster lets his body and its sensations guide his memories. There is no set chronology; time and place bleed from one year to another, between childhood and adulthood. His mother's death in May 2002 is one of the most deeply resonant sections, drawing on childhood memories of her as a Cub Scout den mother though she'd entered the "Land of Work" along with her slow decline after the death of her second husband, made all the more painful as Auster relays it in retrospect, after the reader knows his mother is dead. 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."
