Report from the Interior

July 8, 2013
In this companion to an earlier memoir also written in the second person, Winter Journal, Auster returns to many of the concerns of his 1950s childhood in South Orange, N.J., that ran like leitmotivs through his young life and helped forge the writer’s identity he would embrace by age 22. While Winter Journal explored the “manifold knocks and pleasures” of aging as well as his parents’ unhappy marriage, this volume delves into what had nourished his young mind and heart as a child up until age 12 (he was born in 1947), such as infatuation with early TV characters like Felix the Cat, aviation miracles, the jolt of seeing The War of the Worlds for the first time, meeting Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford (then wondering if he was an imposter), and enduring long stretches of reverie-inducing boredom. Shadows were cast over his youthful obliviousness as he began to “catch on” to what it meant to be a Jew in America (an outsider, often induced to change his name), to understand the gulf between white and black, rich and poor, and to marvel at the horrors endured by Korean War veterans. Yet “Interior” serves as only part one of this work, complemented by “Two Blows to the Head,” elaborate delineation of the plots of two “cinematic earthquakes” of his youth, The Incredible Shrinking Man and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang; “Time Capsule,” a revisiting of the first self-consciously writerly letters Auster wrote as a young Columbia University student to his then girlfriend, Lydia Davis; and photos of the various themes in “Album.” This erratically episodic, somewhat puzzling compendium rounds out the edges to Auster’s oeuvre.

May 1, 2013
The interplay of memory, identity and the creative imagination informs this portrait of the artist as a young man, a memoir that the novelist's avid readership will find particularly compelling. Even by the standards of the distinctive literary stylist and his formal ingenuity, this is an unusual book. Auster introduces it as something of a companion piece to his previous Winter Journal (2012), as he compares the two: "It was one thing to write about your body, to catalogue the manifold knocks and pleasures experienced by your physical self, but exploring your mind as you remember it from childhood will no doubt be a more difficult task--perhaps an impossible one. Still, you feel compelled to give it a try." While writing throughout in the second person, inviting readers inside his head, Auster has divided the book into four distinct and very different parts. The first is a childhood psychobiography, to the age of 12, recognizing the distortions and holes in memory while discovering the magic of literature, "the mystifying process by which a person can leap into a mind that is not his own." The second consists of exhaustively detailed synopses of two movies that he saw in his midteens, The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), noteworthy for the way such a formative experience "burns itself into your heart forever." The third compiles college letters to his future (and now former) wife, the author/translator Lydia Davis, unearthed when she was compiling her archives--"you have lost contact with that person [he writes of his younger self], and as you listen to him speak on the page, you scarcely recognize him anymore." The fourth is a scrapbook, not of the author and his family, but of images from the era that remain emblazoned on his consciousness. Auster has long rendered life as something of a puzzle; here are some significant, illuminating pieces.

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October 1, 2013
Internationally revered novelist Auster follows Winter Journal (2012), his body-centric memoir, with a high-wire explication of his inner life, from his child's sense that everything was alive to the birth of self-consciousness to his first writing attempts. Auster's phenomenal literary powers are generated by his equal fluency in matters emotional and cerebral. Here the origins of that sustaining duality are revealed as he recounts his conscious efforts to toughen up and fend for himself as a boy in an unhappy Newark household. Auster nurtured himself with two great obsessions, baseball and books. He intricately chronicles his harsh awakenings to the world's cruelty, revisits his reading passions, and offers long, enrapturing disquisitions on movies that, for him, were blows to the head. A cache of his old letters demolishes his tenuous memories of his student years at Columbia University during the Vietnam War protests and solitary sojourns in Maine and Paris. Closing with an album of historic photographs, Auster's piquant self-portrait as a headstrong boy and floundering boy-man maps the internal geography of a hungry mind catalyzed and sustained by stories.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

June 15, 2013

At 63, celebrated novelist Auster wrote an account of his body and of physical sensation published last year as Winter Journal. Here he charts his intellectual growth, from childhood adulation of movie cowboy Buster Crabbe to passage through the 1950s and 1960s, which finally makes the book a coming-of-age mirror for many. Decidedly different, but, hey, People magazine raved about Winter Journal.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2013

Celebrated author Auster (Sunset Park) observes his own life in this engaging memoir. Written on the premise that his memories are not deception, Auster writes in the second person to offer the reader a bird's-eye view of his experience. Auster remembers his days as a child as "a constant plunge into the new"; he recalls that by the age of 12 "glimmers of adulthood" flickered in his brain as hormones and girls impacted his emotions and actions. Details of the novelist's college travels to Paris and the 1968 uprising by Columbia University students help portray his early adulthood. Underlying all his memories and adventures is Auster's love of reading and writing. A scrapbook of black-and-white photographs further illustrate the author's interests and heroes, from Hopalong Cassidy and Edgar Allan Poe to Sandy Koufax and Buddy Holly. VERDICT Auster presents a fascinating take on the memoir. Students and fans will appreciate his original examination of his interior self. [See Prepub Alert, 5/20/13.]--Joyce Sparrow, Kenneth City, FL

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2013

Celebrated author Auster (Sunset Park) observes his own life in this engaging memoir. Written on the premise that his memories are not deception, Auster writes in the second person to offer the reader a bird's-eye view of his experience. Auster remembers his days as a child as "a constant plunge into the new"; he recalls that by the age of 12 "glimmers of adulthood" flickered in his brain as hormones and girls impacted his emotions and actions. Details of the novelist's college travels to Paris and the 1968 uprising by Columbia University students help portray his early adulthood. Underlying all his memories and adventures is Auster's love of reading and writing. A scrapbook of black-and-white photographs further illustrate the author's interests and heroes, from Hopalong Cassidy and Edgar Allan Poe to Sandy Koufax and Buddy Holly. VERDICT Auster presents a fascinating take on the memoir. Students and fans will appreciate his original examination of his interior self. [See Prepub Alert, 5/20/13.]--Joyce Sparrow, Kenneth City, FL

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.