The Book Show

Coincidence is a strong theme in Paul Auster's screenplays and fiction.

In his novel, The Brooklyn Follies, we follow the lonely character Nathan Glass as he writes a book about human follies. As a life insurance salesman, he's certainly been exposed to many examples of folly.

While he's collecting the material for his book, he wanders the streets of Brooklyn and he bumps into his beloved nephew. And through a series of coincidences his life takes a new shape.

The novel begins with Nathan Glass saying he was looking for a place to die and someone recommended Brooklyn. But he doesn't die there, in fact he finds life.

The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Paul Auster when he was in Melbourne recently, and asked him what it is about Brooklyn that helps Nathan rediscover life.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Ramona Koval: Serendipity, deja vu and synchronicity are all siblings of coincidence, and Paul Auster regularly takes these siblings out to exercise in the playground of his writerly mind.

Coincidence is a strong theme in his screenplays and fiction. In his novel, The Brooklyn Follies, we follow the lonely character Nathan Glass as he writes a book about human follies. He's certainly been exposed to enough examples of folly as a life insurance salesman.

While he's collecting the material for his book, he wanders the streets of Brooklyn and he bumps into his beloved nephew. And through a series of coincidences his life takes a new shape. The novel begins with Nathan Glass saying he was looking for a place to die and someone recommended Brooklyn. But he doesn't die there, in fact he finds life.

The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Paul Auster when he was in Melbourne recently, and asked him what it is about Brooklyn that helps Nathan rediscover life.

Paul Auster: Nathan is a man who has been very ill, he's recovering from cancer, he's divorced, he's disgusted with himself and the entire life he's lived. He's about to turn 60, and he was born in Brooklyn but his family moved away when he was three, so he really hadn't been back in 56 years. What happens to him is he gets involved with other people and because of this involvement he begins to wake up and understand that indeed his life isn't over, but a new chapter is beginning.

Sarah L'Estrange: And part of this reengagement with society happens when he has an encounter with his nephew Tom, his favourite nephew. Tom is also floating around a bit, very unsure of himself, so I kind of found it interesting that these characters who are very unsure of themselves are kind of propping each other up to help each other find their place in the world.

Paul Auster: Yes, definitely. They're almost kind of a latter-day version of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. They need each other. And I think the fact that Nathan pops up in Tom's life...Tom, the brilliant Tom who's made a botch of his life up to this point, his mother is dead, his father is absent, his sister is vanished, the fact that he can reconnect with his uncle revives him, I think.

Sarah L'Estrange: And his uncle is quite a curious character. He's got quite a big personality, Nathan, and I found it really interesting that he used to be a life insurance man because I guess I've got a real stereotype about life insurance people from probably movies and other books as being a little bit staid and boring, but he isn't. And he worked for the Mid Atlantic Accident and Life Insurance place.

Paul Auster: Yes. Well, about ten years ago or so I bought life insurance for myself and I had never talked to a life insurance man before. This person came to my house, and I found him absolutely brilliant. He was a smart as a philosopher. We were talking about the contingencies of life and death, and he understood exactly what he was doing, and he was not some clichéd character running after money, he was a human being who was trying to connect with his clients, and I was very moved by this. I think that's why I gave Nathan the job I did.

Sarah L'Estrange: All of the characters in The Brooklyn Follies are quite flawed and, like Nathan, they're looking for a place in the world. One way Nathan deals with his loneliness is to start writing what he called the Book of Human Follies. Paul Auster reads from his novel about Nathan's book.

Paul Auster: [reading from I called the project a book, but in fact it wasn't a book at all... to ...those are just some examples.]

Sarah L'Estrange: This is a very affectionate book about people's flaws and crookedness, isn't it.

Paul Auster: Yes. Well, I did look at this book as a comedy, and it's a book about the struggles and pains and joys of everyday life. It's a book written in the shadow of 9/11, about the world we all had before that terrible day. I think even though this book had been brewing within me for many years, it changed its shape as I wrote it and as the historical context changed. It was a dark time for me, and I remembered something that Billy Wilder, the film director, had said, which was, 'When you're feeling really on top of the world and very happy with your life, that's the time to write a tragedy. And when you're down in the depths, try to do a comedy.' And I think just in the darkness of the era we're living in right now, it's important to remember that there are the ordinary joys that we still cling to and survive on. This book helped me keep my feet on the ground and maintain some sort of overall perspective about what it is to be alive.

Sarah L'Estrange: You're a New Yorker, a lot of your books are set in New York, your films are set in New York; are you writing for New Yorkers?

Paul Auster: No, it just happens to the be place where I live, so I know it the best, but not all my books are set there, not all my films either. But it's only natural that I would tend to focus on it because it's my place.

Sarah L'Estrange: So you feel like you're a repository for stories, do you find yourself collecting these stories to put them away for the next one?

Paul Auster: Well, it's true, it's true. You keep hearing things, you keep experiencing things, and one thing leads to another. And it's strange, when I started writing I thought, well, maybe I'll be able to write one novel or two. I never thought I'd be able to keep going this long. But it seems that words generate more words.

Sarah L'Estrange: And stories generate stories. One of the stories he collected for Nathan's Book of Human Follies was the story of Jonas Weinberg.

Paul Auster: Somebody told it to me years and years ago and it stuck with me. I have no idea if it's true or not, but I thought it could be true, and it's so wrenchingly strange and impossible and terrible that I wanted to put it in the book. It was the story of WWII, a Jewish family in Germany, and the mother who is an actress sends her young son off to America to be out of danger. But she herself defiantly remains, taking on a non-Jewish identity, and survives the war. So, many years have gone by and finally when the war is over, Jonas Weinberg, who has grown up to become a doctor, invites his mother to come to New York to see him.

He was planning to pick her up at the airport but since he's a doctor he has his obligation to his patients and his job and there's an emergency that he's called away to attend to, so he has to go to the hospital. In the meantime he hires a cab to pick up the mother and drive her into the city. The driver picks up the mother, he drives in and during this trip he gets into an accident and the mother is very badly injured, and she is wheeled into the hospital where her son is working, and he sees his mother dead on a gurney as he walks in. And that's the story. Whether true to not, amazing no?

Sarah L'Estrange: And heartbreaking. Paul Auster revels in the circumstantial coincidence in stories like this, but also with language. Language is his play pen, of course, and he likes to play with the names of his characters. In his novel Travels in the Scriptorium, all the characters from his pervious works turn up as characters in this book. And in his new film The Inner Life of Martin Frost, which he writes, narrates and directs, he is very playful with names too.

[Excerpt from The Inner Life of Martin Frost]

Paul Auster: Almost in every case...and I've, I suppose, invented hundreds of characters in the novels and films that I've written...almost in every case the character springs to life with his or her name already attached. It's out of my unconscious. I don't really grope for the name, it's there. I've very, very rarely changed the name of a character in a book.

Sarah L'Estrange: But then you play with it, like in The Inner Life of Martin Frost, the main character is Martin Frost and then his muse is Claire Martin, so you take delight in the fact that his first name is her surname, for instance.

Paul Auster: Yes, part of the story hinges on this fact. I think it's that you come up with the name and then you start to explore it, you can start pulling it apart and examining what it all means. But it's not as though these reflections precede the fact that I've used the name, they come after the name exists.

Sarah L'Estrange: In The Brooklyn Follies Paul Auster makes up a place called the Hotel Existence. It's where one of the characters, Harry Brightman, goes for inner refuge and to play out his hero fantasies and his sexual desires. Does Paul have an inner refuge, a Hotel Existence?

Paul Auster: If I do it's probably the notebook I write my books in, one after the other. I think that's my little paradise, that place that is in the world and yet apart from the world, where my imagination can wander and flourish. In the original thinking about this book I was going to call it Dream Days at the Hotel Existence but that was an earlier incarnation and it eventually turned out to be The Brooklyn Follies. But the name of that chapter, the title is Dream Days at the Hotel Existence.

Sarah L'Estrange: And leading on from that, a theme that comes up in your work is about the inner life of the novelist as well. Are you particularly fascinated by the workings of your own brain but by other novelists as well, because they pop up in your works?

Paul Auster: I'm interested in that very fuzzy borderline between the real and the imaginary, because if everything that happens to us is part of reality then you have to assert that thoughts are part of reality, even thoughts about unreal things are part of reality. And it becomes very murky. Sometimes as you get lost inside the composition of a novel, you don't know where you are, whether you are in the world of flesh and blood human beings or living with spectres and whether these spectres are actually real. And I think that's something I'm addressing in Travels in the Scriptorium, the relation between an author and the characters he creates and how finally you never get rid of them and they live their own independent lives beyond you. And if the books you've written are any good these people are going to outlive you as well, these figments that don't exist are finally more real than you are.

[Excerpt from The Inner Life of Martin Frost]

Ramona Koval: Paul Auster there from the film the Inner Life of Martin Frost which he writes, directs and narrates, and it's showing in Sydney this weekend. His next literary pirouette is a story called Man in the Dark which is out later this year. The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange was speaking to Paul Auster about his novel The Brooklyn Follies. It's published by Faber and distributed here by Allen & Unwin.

Guests

Paul Auster
New York based novelist, director and screen writer

Further Information

Paul Auster writes, directs and narrates The Inner Life of Martin Frost

Publications

Title: The Brooklyn Follies
Author: Paul Auster
Publisher: Faber and distributed in Australia by Allen and Unwin
ISBN-13 9780571234554

Presenter

Sarah L'Estrange