From: jules
Category: Amis
Date: 6/21/99
Time: 1:43:06 AM
Remote Name: 152.163.197.74
"Now, coughing up blood, Willy is clearly headed for the next world, 'an oasis of spirits' where you become 'a speck of antimatter lodged in the brain of God.' He names that world Timbuktu, the colloquial site of the unimaginably exotic and distant. To his dog, the word alone seems 'a promise, a guarantee of better days ahead.' But will poor Mr. Bones take the trip too, when his time comes? Fans of Auster's work will recognize some familiar themes in 'Timbuktu': the nature of solitude and memory; the lost father and abandoned son; the power of contingency; the confrontation between the individual and the void. Here, as in his New York Trilogy, the forms of popular culture are enlisted in the service of the most weighty sorts of meditations. "
Thanks to James Murphy on this MAD page, I drove to Seattle to hear Paul Auster read from his new novel, TIMBUKTU. Thanks to James, too, I had to buy the book to ask Auster Jim's questions since he left the podium immediately after he closed his novel. But b/c I LOVE dogs, (I have two of the critters myself, in addition to my mother's dog—not the brightest on the planet) I didn't mind the purchase. A photo of a Weimereiner's head is on the cover jacket. Now it lies on my bedstand on top of "Lives of the Monster Dogs."
Auster came out after his introduction and I was surprised he is tall, but not that he is slim, good looking with a most refined, Jewish visage. He wore a good, dark shirt covered by a cloth windbreaker and Khakis (Must be a New York thing) and those old fashioned blacknwhite, laced sneakers that have come back in vogue.
Auster read, starting on p 26 for almost an hour in a basement room under The Elliott Bay Bookstore. The room was almost filled with a myriad of types of readers (but not overflowing as when Amis and McEwan read) and it smelt distinctly of old books, old wood, Torrofazione cappucino (note: NOT Starbucks!) and sweat. Mr Bones, the dog in the book, would've had a field day.
When Auster began reading I smiled to myself at James' calling his accent "a Brooklyn." It is perhaps Manhattan, but Auster has lost any Brooklynese he once may have sported. ( No offense, Jim, I could not decipher London accents either)
After depositing my plastic in my purse and giving Auster the novel to sign: Julie, please, I asked him if he remembered talking to a young man in London recently about DeLillo and that Don & he were surprised to find they were both writing about writers who left their desks to go out into the world (Mao2 and Leviathan). He said yes, and looked at me curiously. I asked him what kind of dog he had and crisply, he replied,"We have a Mutt,'" meaning he and his author wife, Siri, and turned to the next in line. I took it he's sick of the question.
Going back to the quote at the top of my post, I noticed Auster coughing with regularity during his reading. Listening to his audio interview from The New York Times today I heard this small cough again. I hope it's nothing.
julie Clinch