GatesyRead

I’m not sure that I would have sought out this book, but it was one the only one I was interested in from the few available in a small bookshop in the town of Crest, in the Drome region of France. It’s a curious book to have in stock when you have only a handful of works in English, and I wonder if I hadn’t bought it how long the book would have stayed on the shelf. Having said this, there are a few trendy types around Crest, so perhaps it would have been picked up by a Dutch hipster in search of 70s American cred. This is all to say, without saying much, that Charles Bukowski’s writing is for the sort of reader who wants something alternative to the mainstream, because that is what is celebrated in the novel – the same code of honour possessed by the beat poets to deliberately provoke and shock brain-dead urban workers and the powers-that-be (employers, politicians, police officers, parents). In a different reading, it’s about the spirit of American individualism, and the ability t

Paul Auster combines the picaresque novel and the metafictional novel in this engaging, and disturbing work, The Book of Illusions. Like Mr Vertigo , it is a story of an extraordinary life journey; that story is the tale of the fate of a one-time Hollywood star of the (silent) screen, Hector Mann. Through a series of echoes related to loss and death, the storyteller (Professor David Zimmer) researches the life of Mann. Along the way, Zimmer meets Mann’s biographer and thus Mann’s story is integrated neatly within Zimmer’s narrative. Writing about writers is Auster’s special talent and Auster’s chief technique of story-telling, introduced to us with The New York Trilogy so brilliantly, and continued with variations in (for example) the writer in Oracle Night . In this case, The Book of Illusions plays with text on a variety of levels, including the story of Zimmer’s life, the story of Mann’s life, the narratives of Mann’s films, and the biography of Mann as relayed to Zimmer by hi

To write thoughts on a book such as this is to court disaster. Hemingway may be in or out of fashion, but there is not a sentence out of place in A Moveable Feast and this makes the reviewer incredibly self-conscious – as if Hemingway’s ghost sits alongside and suggests, gruffly, ‘all you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know’ (p.12). Well, here it is: the only disappointing thing about this book is that I have damaged it by leaving a wet towel on top, travelling back from the pool in Nyons in France to the house in Piégon where I write this review. A Moveable Feast takes its name from the epigraph, and the idea that ends the book, that ‘there is never any ending to Paris’ (p.182). It opens, literally, mid-sentence to provide an early, subtle suggestion of this cycle of eating/feasting/drinking/writing/living: ‘Then there was the bad weather’ (p.3). Hemingway’s memoirs, fiction and fact, were written towards the end of his life, but are a