Report from the Interior by Paul Auster

Abstract

Rodrigo Rey Rosa The African Shore Jeffrey Gray, tr. Yale University Press A Colombian tourist in Tangier who has lost his passport carries an owl through crowded city streets. A young shepherd, whose heart is set on finding his fortune in Spain, sees the owl and decides to steal it. A curious tale of the violence, mistrust, and destruction one inevitably finds near borders, Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s latest novel is a dark and intriguing travelogue. Clare Pollard Ovid’s Heroines Bloodaxe Books This breezily modern take on Heroides is a delight. Though criticized and overlooked, Ovid’s transvestic, lovelorn letters from Greek heroines to their absent heroes give an enlightening perspective to the well-known stories. With fresh language and form, Clare Pollard effortlessly brings legendary Greek and Roman characters like Penelope, Dido, and Medea, and their sorrows, out of myth and into the twenty-first century. Nota Bene Later poems are less formally structured and more readily accessible, certainly to people facing the task of “Tidying up after the Dead” and facing their own mortality. Novak does look back with a certain regret to “The Poet I Was” when, looking at everyday things, he sees “the glowing sign of the miraculous ” without needing to write actual poems. Now “I see only things. . . . But the poet, / the poet I was then, when I floated above the earth.” The collection ends with his fear that while he will never find the truth, “I must give a final account of my research.” Novak’s poems can stand on their own, but those who need information about the history of Slovenian language and literature as well as the political and cultural worlds in which Novak writes should turn to Aleš Debeljak’s useful introduction . Ultimately, Novak’s selection is far richer than a brief review can indicate, but perhaps the Dalkey Archive’s Slovenian Literature Series will bring to Novak and other writers the wider attention they deserve. Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma Miscellaneous Paul Auster. Report from the Interior. New York. Henry Holt. 2013. isbn 9780805098570 His success as a novelist notwithstanding , autobiographical writing has been at the forefront of Paul Auster’s work from the time of his debut, The Invention of Solitude (1982). In the case of this latest offering, the only thing one might find surprising, then, is that it’s published so soon after last year’s excellent Winter Journal. Indeed, the two volumes have much in common, even though the publisher—and presumably Auster himself—is promoting the books as different. In the former, Auster chronicles his travels, mostly, including a tour de force of physical addresses that have served him as both house and home throughout his life, whereas in the Report Auster charts “his intellectual, political, and moral journey.” But their ostensibly divergent themes—the physical self versus the interior self—are very much two sides of the same coin. In his autobiographical prose, Auster comes across as a man teetering on the edge of an existential precipice , where the process of remembering is not so much a winner-take-all way out but rather a momentary staving off of the inevitable. The decline that comes with the passing of time has propelled many a writer —not to mention countless ordinary folk—into recalling people and places, events and happenings; but in Auster’s case, the project derives its strength and beauty from the author’s tonal trepidation. Writing about himself in the second person, he sets out after “exploring his mind,” sorting and sieving through scores of victories and defeats, including the now-obsolete belief that “God [is] everywhere.” Exhibitionist though some of it may be, the details soften the blow that comes with the realization that then as now, “the real is so defiantly at odds with the imagined.” The things that have helped shape Auster the man into the internationally renowned writer we know, like the movie The War of the Worlds, which he saw as a kid, or French poetry, or the failure of his first marriage, are here presented as parts of a larger whole, one that’s also much larger than Auster himself. It is the humble...