REPORT FROM THE INTERIOR by Paul Auster (Faber & Faber, 2013).
Given that this is the fifth autobiographical work Paul Auster has written, he is surely being a tad disingenuous when, in a recent NPR interview, he said: “I really have no interest in myself, I find it a very boring topic”.
He sought to explain this paradox by saying “what I’m interested in is trying to remember things from my life that will somehow connect with things that other people have experienced”.
In the first, and best, section of this book Auster, who was born in 1947, takes a mental journey back to his early years up to the age of 12. This cut off point is chosen because after that age, he maintains, you are no longer a child but moving, albeit tentatively, into the world of adulthood.
A curiosity is that Auster writes in the second person singular as though to distance himself from the person he once was as he attempts to “explore the internal geography of your boyhood”. His aim is to dredge up some notion of when his own personality was forged. This includes trying to locate the moment when he first realized that he was American and how this knowledge affected his character. The growing awareness that he was also Jewish was another crucial and uncomfortable part of his identity.
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Do writers have real lives?
