Austerisms

I interviewed Paul Auster at his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn today. Here are a few of his thoughts:

NR: Your latest novel, Man in the Dark feels so visual. Why is that?
PA: Good. I’ve always been striving to achieve that effect. I’ve always wanted to write a book whose language would be so transparent that the reader would forget that the medium is words and just be inside the story.

NR: Can you take a break from your work, say to travel?
PA: The problem with leaving a book is that you stop believing in it. There’s some kind of state that you get yourself into when you’re working where everything that is imaginary becomes real. But as soon as you step back from that, the illusion bursts, and you have to work yourself back into it and it takes time. When I traveled over the summer, I just clung desperately to what the next sentence was going to be, I tried to keep it in my head, but when I got back it took me a good ten days or so to feel the rhythm of it.

NR: Are you ever influenced by what you read while you write?
PA: I never read fiction while I write fiction. I just can’t. I find that living in my imaginary universe all day, I need to get into the real world. Somehow it’s a stabilizing force. When I’m reading I’m reading for the most part biography, history, books about science, politics but not fiction. Between novels I try to catch up.

NR: Who do you read?
PA: Well, there are certain people that I read faithfully and I suppose these are the ones that mean the most to me. He died recently but Ryszard Kapuscinski is a writer who I read faithfully. Everytime he published a book I would go out and buy it. JM Coetzee. Everytime he publishes a book, I go out and I read it. Don DeLillo, I read every one of his books. Peter Carey, I’ve read every one of his books.

NR: He's dead, but what about Hawthorne.
I’ve read all of Hawthorne. He’s…I don’t know why he’s so important to me but I just love his work. I love his mind. I love what he did for American literature. He is just a stupendously great writer. Did you ever see the little book I put together for New York Review Books, the Hawthorne. It’s called Twenty Days with Julie and Little Bunny by Papa. And it’s something from Hawthorne’s notebooks. But it’s a self-contained text. About 50 or 60 pages. I wrote along essay introducing it. It’s in my collected prose. Hawthorne at Home. It was when Hawthorne move to the Berkshires in 1861. He had published The Scarlett Letter the year before and House of the Seven Gables had just come out and so he was at the top moment of his life as a writer and as a father and a husband. He was about 47 years old and for the first time in his life he was making his living through writing. And he and his wife rented a house in Lennox and they had two children, Oona, a girl, and Julian, a boy. They were about 7 and 5 and then they had a baby not long after they moved in. Rose. When Rose was born, Hawthorne’s wife Sophia took the two girls to the outskirts of Boston to visit her parents for two weeks. And Hawthorne was left alone in the house with this 5-year-old boy. There was some cook who came into the house to do work but essentially he was in charge of taking care of the kid. And I think it’s the first account in history of a man taking care of a child alone. He kept a very meticulous diary, day by day, of what he and the boy did. And how annoying the boy was and how he never stopped pestering him with his questions and his antics and what’s very moving about this piece to is that this is when he and Melville became friends and now Mellville who was living just six miles down the road in Pittsfield, finishing Moby Dick. I mean it was quite a moment. And there’s a great passage of Melville coming to visit and the two of them sitting up late into the night, smoking cigars and drinking and just talking about everything. It’s a great moment in American literature that passage. That’s one element of Hawthorne. The part that nobody knows. The very droll and bemused person. He was a writer of tremendous depth and psychological acuity. And in a sense I think unlike Hemingway who said all American literature comes out of one book – Huckleberry Finn – I beg to differ. I think it’s The Scarlett Letter which was published 30-something years before Huckleberry Finn.


NR: Man in the Dark is your most political book since Leviathan. What are your political views?
PA: Can I say this in one sentence? One wants humanity to be better. I think it’s within our capabilities to do better, so I keep hoping. I’m ever in despair and yet I keep hoping that things will get better.

Man in the Dark is published August 19.

A Different Shoulder to Rub

I mingled with the literati at the National Arts Club last night where the finalists for the LA Times Book Award were announced. Made me think that I should get myself a job in book publishing (that's not to say I don't have a book in me). Thinking went like this: If magazine journalism has become just like selling thanks to the rampant consumerism of our time then I am nothing but a sales person. And if I'm nothing but a sales person, what is the one thing I wouldn't mind selling? Other people's novels. I'm looking into it.

By the way, the National Arts Club is a fascinating place. It is housed in the historic Tilden Mansion (15 Gramercy Park) and has been there since 1898.

Architect Philip Johnson called the mansion, "among the most beautiful in New York."

The awards will be announced in April.

And the nominees are....
Fiction

Junot Diaz, THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO (Riverhead)
Andrew O'Hagan, BE NEAR ME (Harcourt)
Stewart O'Nan, LAST NIGHT AT THE LOBSTER (Viking)
Per Petterson, OUT STEALING HORSES (Graywolf)
Marianne Wiggins, THE SHADOW CATCHER (Simon & Schuster)

ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION

Antonia Arslan (Translated by Geoffrey Brock), SKYLARK FARM (Knopf)
Rebecca Curtis, TWENTY GRAND AND OTHER TALES OF LOVE AND MONEY (Harper)
Pamela Erens, THE UNDERSTORY (Ironweed Press)
Ellen Litman, THE LAST CHICKEN IN AMERICA (W.W. Norton)
Dinaw Mengestu, THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS (Riverhead)


Biography

Nancy Isenberg, FALLEN FOUNDER: THE LIFE OF AARON BURR (Viking)
Tim Jeal, STANLEY: THE IMPOSSIBLE LIFE OF AFRICA'S GREATEST EXPLORER (Yale)
Simon Sebag Montefiore, YOUNG STALIN (Knopf)
Robert Morgan: BOONE: A BIOGRAPHY (Algonquin)
Michael J. Neufeld, VON BRAUN: DREAMER OF SPACE, ENGINEER OF WAR (Knopf)


Current Events

Ishmael Beah, A LONG WAY GONE; MEMOIRS OF A BOY SOLDIER (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Tom Bissell, THE FATHER OF ALL THINGS: A MARINE, HIS SON, AND THE LEGACY OF VIETNAM (Pantheon)
Ronald Brownstein, THE SECOND CIVIL WAR: HOW EXTREME PARTISANSHIP HAS PARALYZED WASHINGTON AND POLARIZED AMERICA (Penguin Press)
Naomi Klein, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM (Metropolitan)
Elizabeth D. Samet, SOLDIER'S HEART: READING LITERATURE THROUGH PEACE AND WAR AT WEST POINT (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

The Brooklyn Book Festival

I went to hear Dave Eggars, the editor of the literary journal McSweeney's Quarterly Concern in conversation with the Nigerian-born author, Chris Abani. Eggars most recently wrote What is the What, a novel based on the life story of a Sudanese Lost Boy, Valentino Achak Deng. All author proceeds to the Lost Boys of Sudan.
Achak Deng, 26, wasn’t at this talk – he’s studying international diplomacy at a college in Pennsylvania. “It’s strange for him,” said Eggars. “One day he’s a sophmore, but next week he’ll come to New York to speak at the Clinton’s Global Initiative.”
Eager to take any money made from the book to Marial Bai in Sudan to build a primary school, Achak Deng waited patiently for four years for Eggars to finish the book. Now he has started the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation in Sudan. He’ll take it over once he has completed his studies.
Eggars’ slide show showed the village of Marial Bai, razed to the ground during the war, now rebuilt as a returnee camp. “We went to see what could be done,” explained Eggars. “It was a listening tour.”
Achak Deng is particularly concerned with assisting young women in getting a secondary education. “Eventhough attitudes in Sudan are changing, it is still the tradition to marry off 13 and 14 year olds.”
One slide showed Achak Deng talking to two fourteen year old girls. One wanted to be a doctor; the second, a nurse. “Valentino who is usually very optimistic, told me that they will not reach their goals, not in this generation, but in the next,” said Eggars. “The men are becoming open to change and to women’s empowerment. The returnees like Val have brought with them a more progressive attitude from their time in the West.”
After taking in the needs of Marial Bai, Achak Deng has changed his original plan. “We realised that there are enough primary schools. So everything was adjusted according to the community’s needs,” explained Eggars. “Now he’ll set up a teacher training college, a secondary school, and a micro loan program for single mothers who are entrepreneurs.”
Eggars and Achak Deng are also working on another book that will form part of the McSweeney’s Oral Histories collection. They are telling the stories of women who survived the war. While listening to the stories, Eggars said that many times he and Achak Deng had to stop and ask the women if they were OK to continue. “They would say, ‘I’m not afraid. Let’s keep going’,” says Eggars. Many Sudanese girls were kidnapped and sold into slavery or to men who they would be forced to marry. They often endured horrific beatings and rape.

By Nadine Rubin. A version of this appeared as my Made in Manhattan column in the South African Sunday Times.