"That is where the story begins, in your body and everything will end in the body as well." On January 3, 2011, exactly one month before his sixty-fourth birthday, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster sat down and wrote the first entry of Winter Journal , his unorthodox, beautifully wrought examination of his own life, as seen through the history of his body. Auster takes us from childhood to the brink of old age as he summons forth a universe of physical sensation, of pleasures and pains, moving from the awakening of sexual desire as an adolescent to the ever deepening bonds of married love, from meditations on eating and sleeping to the "scalding, epiphanic moment of clarity" in 1978 that set him on a new course as a writer. **
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, August 2012: At nearly 64, one of our greatest modern writers is feeling his age. In his quietly transfixing new memoir, Winter Journal , Paul Auster meditates on what it means for his mind, body, and creativity to experience the unforgiving passage of time. This should be--and is--an intensely personal chronicle, but Auster makes the journey equally ours by inviting us into its unfolding. "No doubt you are a flawed and wounded person," he cautions, and suddenly you are. You are the player in this story: running away from your pregnant mother in a department store; learning to wrangle your adolescent hormones; taking an "inventory of your scars, in particular the ones on your face"; marveling at the beauty of your wife as she sleeps; moving in and out of 21 homes, recalling their addresses and aesthetics in astonishing detail. "Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body," Auster notes. With Winter Journal , he reminds us that it is also the joyful, then melancholy, then reluctantly accepting soundtrack of our full and finite lives. -- Mia Lipman
Review
• "An incandescent memoir..... In turns contemplative, pugnacious, and achingly tender.... A profoundly beautiful book.... Unstinting passion ... consummate humanity... grace in the unexpected...." - Washington Post • "Brief episodes falling like snow outside his Brooklyn window, forming in a collage a portrait of the artist as a young, aging and now old man. Some of these episodes will remain with the reader, like memories of one's own." - Globe and Mail • "Auster's ruminations on death, family, memory, and marriage are both poignant and delightful." - The New Yorker
Description:
"That is where the story begins, in your body and everything will end in the body as well."
On January 3, 2011, exactly one month before his sixty-fourth birthday, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster sat down and wrote the first entry of Winter Journal , his unorthodox, beautifully wrought examination of his own life, as seen through the history of his body. Auster takes us from childhood to the brink of old age as he summons forth a universe of physical sensation, of pleasures and pains, moving from the awakening of sexual desire as an adolescent to the ever deepening bonds of married love, from meditations on eating and sleeping to the "scalding, epiphanic moment of clarity" in 1978 that set him on a new course as a writer. **
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, August 2012: At nearly 64, one of our greatest modern writers is feeling his age. In his quietly transfixing new memoir, Winter Journal , Paul Auster meditates on what it means for his mind, body, and creativity to experience the unforgiving passage of time. This should be--and is--an intensely personal chronicle, but Auster makes the journey equally ours by inviting us into its unfolding. "No doubt you are a flawed and wounded person," he cautions, and suddenly you are. You are the player in this story: running away from your pregnant mother in a department store; learning to wrangle your adolescent hormones; taking an "inventory of your scars, in particular the ones on your face"; marveling at the beauty of your wife as she sleeps; moving in and out of 21 homes, recalling their addresses and aesthetics in astonishing detail. "Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body," Auster notes. With Winter Journal , he reminds us that it is also the joyful, then melancholy, then reluctantly accepting soundtrack of our full and finite lives. -- Mia Lipman
Review
• "An incandescent memoir..... In turns contemplative, pugnacious, and achingly tender.... A profoundly beautiful book.... Unstinting passion ... consummate humanity... grace in the unexpected...." - Washington Post
• "Brief episodes falling like snow outside his Brooklyn window, forming in a collage a portrait of the artist as a young, aging and now old man. Some of these episodes will remain with the reader, like memories of one's own." - Globe and Mail
• "Auster's ruminations on death, family, memory, and marriage are both poignant and delightful." - The New Yorker