Paul Auster

:00:04. > :00:14.European Union. That is the summary of the headlines. Now, on BBC News,

:00:14. > :00:15.

:00:15. > :00:19.it is time for talking Books USA. I M Razia Iqbal, and my guest on

:00:19. > :00:24.Talking Books USA is the novelist Paul Aster. He is in London to

:00:24. > :00:27.promote his latest book, an autobiographical worhical wor

:00:27. > :00:31.known for the New York Trilogy, three this they connected stories

:00:31. > :00:34.based on the detective form, but an examination of identity and

:00:34. > :00:38.existentialism. He is also continually drawn to the themes of

:00:38. > :00:42.chance and fate. From his very first memoir, the invention of

:00:42. > :00:52.father, father, to his latest witty journal,

:00:52. > :00:52.

:00:52. > :01:02.an exposition on age and mortality. -- went to a journal.

:01:02. > :01:03.

:01:03. > :01:07.The port Paul Auster, welcome to Talking Books. Your latest book,

:01:07. > :01:13.Winter Journal, is written in the winter of your life. I hope you

:01:13. > :01:19.don't mind me pointing that out. I made that point myself. It is set

:01:19. > :01:22.on New York. It is about ageing and the physicality of the body in

:01:23. > :01:27.decline. It is written in second person, which is unusual, because

:01:27. > :01:33.you tend to write very much in the first person. It is not the first

:01:33. > :01:37.wanted to ask you why you would draw Timman war again. Well, I will

:01:37. > :01:40.tell you. I don't think of this book as a memoir at all. It is an

:01:40. > :01:47.autobiographical book, a book of fragments, as you know, having read

:01:47. > :01:52.it. To me, and then why is to continue the story. And narrative

:01:52. > :01:57.that moves chronologically to retire. This book jumps around. I

:01:57. > :02:05.think a bit more as music, actually. Composed of little

:02:05. > :02:09.pieces. Now, the second person was an instinctive decision. I did not

:02:09. > :02:15.question it. But then, as I got into the book, I began reflecting

:02:15. > :02:20.on why I was writing it in that way. I came to these conclusions. 1, my

:02:20. > :02:29.life is not interesting at all. I have got nothing momentous to tell

:02:29. > :02:34.anybody about. Therefore, I think of this book as a way of sharing

:02:34. > :02:41.with others simply what it means to be alive, in the body, in space.

:02:41. > :02:47.What it feels like to be alive. The first person, therefore, seems to

:02:47. > :02:52.if I was announcing a story to the world. But that truly does not

:02:52. > :02:59.interest me very much. Third person would have been too distant. I have

:02:59. > :03:03.used to third person, in the Invention of Solitude. It can be

:03:03. > :03:09.very effective in the right place. But this was not the right place.

:03:09. > :03:16.What is left his second person, which establishes, I think, a kind

:03:16. > :03:21.of distance, and at the same time, intimacy. It gave me a chance to

:03:22. > :03:27.enter into some quiet dialogue with myself. Then I think there is a

:03:27. > :03:36.subsidiary effect. The in the hands of the reader, second person

:03:36. > :03:39.automatically draws that person in. It makes him or her feel that it is

:03:39. > :03:44.a two-way street. Both the Ryder and the read-out participate in

:03:44. > :03:48.making this book. -- the writer. want to talk to you about intimacy,

:03:48. > :03:51.and water are trying to do in the book. You look at your body and you

:03:51. > :03:56.are thinking about the physical body. You are sharing the stories

:03:56. > :04:00.of your life. But you are also same, this is a quote from the book, but

:04:00. > :04:03.we are aliens to ourselves. If we have any sense of who we are, it is

:04:03. > :04:08.only because we live inside the eyes of others. What do you mean by

:04:08. > :04:11.that? Well, we don't look at ourselves. Except in mirrors, we

:04:11. > :04:17.almost never see ourselves. We certainly never see ourselves from

:04:17. > :04:23.behind, except in photographs. We are not in constant touch with how

:04:23. > :04:26.we look to other people. It is only by my booking into your eyes, and

:04:26. > :04:30.you are looking into my eyes, that I had the sense that I am here,

:04:30. > :04:35.really. I can see my legs. I can see my hands. But I certainly

:04:35. > :04:39.cannot see my face. And the faces what identify as us. So it is

:04:39. > :04:44.curious. You bought through life not knowing what to look like. You

:04:44. > :04:48.certainly don't know what to affect his when you're with other people.

:04:48. > :04:53.Another quote from the book which actually shocked me, even though I

:04:53. > :04:56.had read a lot of you are the works, no doubt you are flawed and wounded

:04:56. > :04:59.person, a man who has carried a went with him from the very

:04:59. > :05:06.beginning. Why else would you spend the whole of your adult life

:05:06. > :05:11.leading your words onto the page? - - bleeding. That sounds like the

:05:11. > :05:15.classic tortured writer speaking to himself. My feeling is that all

:05:15. > :05:19.artists are damaged people. I have slowly come to this conclusion over

:05:19. > :05:23.many years of experience, not only my own experience but the

:05:23. > :05:30.experiences of writers and painters and artists that I know. We are the

:05:30. > :05:35.people for whom the World Is Not live in and Swindin reality as we

:05:35. > :05:42.know what. -- swimming in a reality. But artists have to create other

:05:42. > :05:45.worlds. But two in their right mind wants to spend 50 years of a

:05:45. > :05:54.lifetime sitting alone in a room? Most people don't want to do this,

:05:54. > :06:00.but writers do. So I think truly happy successful people don't need

:06:00. > :06:07.to make art. I think the ones to a damaged in one way or another are

:06:07. > :06:11.the ones who feel the necessity. Your very first book, The Invention

:06:11. > :06:16.of Solitude, which watched your career, was written in the

:06:16. > :06:19.aftermath of your father's death. It -- all watched your career. It

:06:19. > :06:23.is an incredibly difficult book to forget. You had been writing poetry

:06:23. > :06:32.before that, and I wondered why you felt the need to write that book.

:06:32. > :06:37.Was it Qatada us -- was it catharsis? My father's death was so

:06:38. > :06:43.sudden and unexpected. He was only 66, and in perfect health. He never

:06:43. > :06:49.smoke or drink, he played tennis every day. I thought he would live

:06:49. > :06:55.to be 90. And we had, it was not a difficult relationship, it was a

:06:55. > :06:59.strange relationship. A distant one. I describe him in the book. He was

:06:59. > :07:03.somebody she was not quite there. And it was hard to make connections

:07:03. > :07:13.with him. There was no hostility towards me at all. And I certainly

:07:13. > :07:14.

:07:14. > :07:20.did love him. But he was dense, opaque. Losing him like that, so

:07:20. > :07:25.unexpectedly, filled me with an immense regret. I regret that I

:07:25. > :07:29.would never be able to talk to him again. All of the things I had been

:07:29. > :07:33.saving up to speak to him about were born. Thinking that one day

:07:33. > :07:37.you would have been able to, despite his remoteness? Exactly. I

:07:37. > :07:43.thought I had to write about him, Elsie would disappear completely.

:07:43. > :07:47.It was a way to keep him alive a little longer. And that is why I

:07:47. > :07:52.did it. When I started writing, I had no idea it would be a book. I

:07:52. > :07:55.was just writing for myself. But it turned into something longer, full

:07:56. > :08:00.board, and it seemed to be publishable. So I eventually

:08:00. > :08:04.published it. Your agent, who has represented due since the beginning

:08:04. > :08:08.of your career, says that the beginning of all your novels are in

:08:08. > :08:14.that autobiographical work, The Invention of Solitude. Do you think

:08:14. > :08:20.that is true? No, I don't think that is true at all. But I do think

:08:20. > :08:25.that is the foundation will work for me. -- Foundation off. The

:08:25. > :08:28.fiction I have written since these emerging out of a lot of the

:08:29. > :08:32.preoccupations that are articulated in that book. I picked that book

:08:32. > :08:35.out of the pile my shop, which I knew I had to read it to prepare

:08:35. > :08:40.for this interview, a few days after my father died. Oh my

:08:40. > :08:44.goodness. And I had no idea the book was a meditation on your

:08:44. > :08:47.relationship with your father. After I finished it, I was thinking

:08:47. > :08:51.about some things in your work, such as the nature of chance and,

:08:51. > :08:56.incidents. It really spooked me that that was the first book that I

:08:56. > :09:03.picked up. I wondered why you were continually drawn to the themes of

:09:03. > :09:08.chants? It is an indisputable fact that chance is part of what I call

:09:08. > :09:18.the mechanics of reality. Unexpected things happen all the

:09:18. > :09:19.

:09:19. > :09:23.time, to everybody. Much of life is about chance. There are very few

:09:23. > :09:27.necessary facts. I suppose the only one is that once we are born and we

:09:27. > :09:33.are destined to die. Pretty much everything in between is up for

:09:33. > :09:39.grabs. I think the thing that I read about in the Red Notebook,

:09:39. > :09:46.years ago, which I referred to it in a Winter of Journal, is the

:09:46. > :09:50.experience at the age of 14 of being in a summer camp and going on

:09:50. > :09:55.a hike the 20 buyers -- 20 boys. We got caught in a lightning and

:09:55. > :10:00.thunder storm. I was right next to a boy who was killed by a bolt of

:10:00. > :10:09.lightning. This absolute be changed my life. I think about it every day.

:10:09. > :10:14.It never goes away. It was my first big lesson in the capriciousness of

:10:14. > :10:22.life. How unstable everything is. How quickly everything can change,

:10:22. > :10:26.from one eye blink to another. Here was a 14-year-old boy, happy and

:10:26. > :10:31.alive, and an instant later he was dead. I have not lived through wars,

:10:31. > :10:36.pestilence, but this is my war experience. This is, I think, the

:10:36. > :10:40.kind of thing that saw just go through all the time. I was very

:10:40. > :10:45.young and it made an enormous impression on me. So if you want to

:10:45. > :10:51.talk about my philosophy, that is the kernel of the whole thing. That

:10:52. > :10:57.experience. The idea that you continually go back to looking at

:10:57. > :11:00.fate, and the route not taken, the whimsy of chance, places you come

:11:00. > :11:04.up for a lot of people, in the context of being much more of the

:11:04. > :11:10.European writer. They said you have a European sensibility, more than

:11:10. > :11:13.an American one. I wonder whether you accept that, at that judgement

:11:13. > :11:19.imposed on you from the outside? don't really know what people are

:11:19. > :11:23.talking about, to tell the truth. LAUGHTER. It is better to stop up

:11:23. > :11:28.your ears and not listen to it. I have always written about America.

:11:28. > :11:32.America is my country and my subject. I think that the American

:11:32. > :11:37.writers I'm closest to are the ones from the 19th century, not the 20th

:11:37. > :11:44.century. People like Hawthorne and Melville are very important to me.

:11:44. > :11:50.I think that if I work more in line with their eyes, it is more in line

:11:50. > :11:53.with the questions I am asking. They are the quintessential

:11:53. > :11:58.American writers. I suppose today they look bizarre, in the context

:11:58. > :12:03.of contemporary life. I do not know. Tell me what it is about somebody

:12:03. > :12:09.like Hawthorne, that really makes an impact on you. Is it to do with

:12:09. > :12:13.the idea of the illusion of writing that is interesting to? I am

:12:13. > :12:18.thinking about the scarlet letter now, in particular. Why is it that

:12:18. > :12:24.to trace your own profile, if you like, in terms of writing back to

:12:24. > :12:28.him? Hawthorne, you see, is involved in philosophical questions.

:12:28. > :12:35.He is a master psychologist at the same time. These are the things

:12:35. > :12:39.that strongly to him. His best stories are utterly captivating.

:12:39. > :12:49.But they always have a kind of philosophical question that they

:12:49. > :12:49.

:12:49. > :12:53.are examining. Novel, even more. -- Melville. That is a truly

:12:53. > :12:59.philosophical novel, or the level of Shakespeare. Melville comes out

:12:59. > :13:05.of the Bible and Shakespeare. And he was so derided during his

:13:05. > :13:12.lifetime, so ignored, so absolutely considered and nobody, that when he

:13:12. > :13:15.died people thought he was already dead. He died in 1891. And he was

:13:15. > :13:22.utterly, utterly erased from the history of American literature. It

:13:22. > :13:26.was not until 1920 that a critic, a professor from Harvard, discovered

:13:26. > :13:29.Moby Dick in a second-hand bookstore. He picked it up,

:13:29. > :13:33.remembering the name Melville, and readied, and understood that this

:13:33. > :13:38.was the great American masterpiece. Since then, his reputation has

:13:38. > :13:45.grown and grown. But isn't it curious, that he could be eclipsed

:13:45. > :13:49.for literally half a century, and now he is fundamental? It is like a

:13:49. > :13:59.case of Bach, in music. Just to be raced, and then suddenly everybody

:13:59. > :14:04.How about something that occurs with all starting with the main

:14:04. > :14:11.character having lost something, maybe the wife for the child, and

:14:11. > :14:17.you seem to be so interested in the alternative path that the person

:14:17. > :14:23.may take in life. White is that the starting point for your stories of

:14:23. > :14:27.so much interest? I somehow like to do this because it comes

:14:27. > :14:35.instinctively. I don't just sit down and think about that way to

:14:35. > :14:40.write the novel. It seems we're in point where it some major event has

:14:40. > :14:50.happened. Often, a tragic event or a loss of some kind. The character

:14:50. > :14:52.

:14:52. > :14:57.is thrown back and the ground opens reconstitute himself or Bjorn? How

:14:57. > :15:02.does he fit around how to keep living? These are the questions

:15:02. > :15:07.that fascinate me. We only find out who we are at a moment of crisis.

:15:07. > :15:10.When things go along easily, you don't really know who you are and

:15:10. > :15:17.you are never tested. I am interested in people being tested.

:15:17. > :15:22.At the same time, all walks work that way. I have written many

:15:22. > :15:29.novels now. I think up things about Mr Vertigo, that's completely

:15:29. > :15:34.different. Timbuktu is different in the country of Last Things is

:15:34. > :15:38.different. They don't follow that pattern I understand what you are

:15:38. > :15:42.talking about. I was intrigued about the distinction between the

:15:42. > :15:48.description of the Winter Journal as a memoir and use it it's

:15:48. > :15:52.autobiographical. But like to ask about those things that you draw

:15:52. > :16:00.upon your eyed my that end up in your fictional works. For example,

:16:00. > :16:04.Oracle Nights, it's an anagram about Forster and many of them are

:16:04. > :16:11.writers living in ruckman. The relationship between fiction and

:16:11. > :16:16.fact and the elements of your own life. Is it just about identity, is

:16:16. > :16:24.that the only thing you tried to explore? I in his things that are

:16:24. > :16:29.close to me. Once in the novel they are fictional. You mentioned

:16:29. > :16:33.leviathan, that's a great example. I wrote that book in New York and

:16:33. > :16:37.also of the Mont where I went every summer and for reasons that had

:16:37. > :16:44.nothing to do with anything and the reader would not here to include

:16:44. > :16:49.this house in the book and the table that I was writing upon.

:16:49. > :16:53.That's also when the book. It was a way of making everything immediate

:16:53. > :17:01.for me and at the same time I felt I was dwelling in a completely

:17:01. > :17:06.fictional universe. It's kind of strange, it's a strange stone that

:17:07. > :17:15.I was in writing the novel. Having written all of the biographical

:17:15. > :17:21.works, that was strictly fact as they say. No invention. Let's look

:17:21. > :17:26.at the works associated with your profound interest in New York, The

:17:26. > :17:29.New York Trilogy connecting detective stories in which you use

:17:29. > :17:35.a detective form addressing existential issues and questions of

:17:35. > :17:42.identity and the annihilation of identity against the kind of urban

:17:42. > :17:48.setting. You have been seen as it modern post-modern writer. As you

:17:48. > :17:57.explain, the view of yourself as a right it is traditional rigid in

:17:57. > :18:05.19th century writing, off on, Edward Allan Poe, -- Edgar Allan

:18:05. > :18:10.Poe. The first writer I fell in love with, Edgar Allan Poe, he had

:18:10. > :18:14.a big influence on me. Do you reject the post-modern label?

:18:14. > :18:20.don't think about it. It does not interest me interest meelf

:18:20. > :18:27.from the app side. I just write, I did the best they can. Every book I

:18:27. > :18:33.do is a new project. I feel I start from scratch every time. Each ball

:18:33. > :18:40.and a story somehow imposes its own form and I find the way to tell the

:18:40. > :18:44.story out of the material. Many people would be a way. They have

:18:44. > :18:51.something in mind, they may write this on it. They have only 14 lines.

:18:51. > :18:56.I never think about those terms. The big question is, is it in the

:18:56. > :19:03.first person or third person or second person? Is at the present

:19:03. > :19:08.tense? Is it the past tense? Is the dialogue? No dialogue? On and on,

:19:08. > :19:14.all the things he me to figure out when you work on a new project. The

:19:14. > :19:19.solution is different every time according to the type of story.

:19:19. > :19:24.Reflect a little bit on New York. The city that you have chronicled

:19:24. > :19:30.time and again as the backdrop to your books. The city that you

:19:30. > :19:37.Chronicle mentally, it's quite different to the one that you

:19:37. > :19:43.inhabit physically. How far does back or alienated is that? Well,

:19:43. > :19:48.you see, there are many New York's. I cannot put myself down. The New

:19:48. > :19:53.York Trilogy captures an era of New York that's now gone. It's really a

:19:53. > :20:00.book about the late 70s or early 80s when New York was a complete

:20:00. > :20:07.disarray. Crumbling, a dirty Third World city. It is not like that

:20:07. > :20:14.anymore. It's a book about isolation. It's about loneliness. I

:20:14. > :20:21.write about New York in different ways. Smoke is about people forming

:20:21. > :20:27.friendships and inventing families for themselves. The book and

:20:27. > :20:36.follies -- Roman Follies is about and neighbourhood in Brooklyn. The

:20:36. > :20:45.Brooklyn Follies. It's a comedy. I feel that's another side at New

:20:45. > :20:49.York. The New York of Oracle Nights is a grim moment of New York. As

:20:49. > :20:58.many types of New York and I keep them happening in different ways or

:20:58. > :21:04.simultaneously. How about the process of writing. Been several

:21:04. > :21:10.novels notebooks are the key to the character. City of Glass, The Book

:21:10. > :21:17.of Illusions, Oracle Nights, what's all that about? The right in his

:21:18. > :21:24.kind of a fetish. A paper palace. The Magic Notebook, maybe, he

:21:24. > :21:29.thinks. Are you interested in the process of writing? Exactly, I

:21:29. > :21:35.worked in notebooks. Notebooks is a kind of house of words wet every

:21:35. > :21:40.match will think that the language can do resides in the air. It's

:21:41. > :21:50.also about the physicality of writing and scratching the pencil

:21:50. > :21:55.on to that page in the notebook. It's a weigh into thinking about

:21:55. > :22:03.the world through a sandwich. It's a fixation on the notebook. You go

:22:03. > :22:08.from the notebook to an old fashioned type writer. Yes, I have

:22:08. > :22:14.an old typewriter, it will outlive us all, it's built for another 100

:22:14. > :22:20.years. It's an Olympia Portable, a wonderful machine. I'm not against

:22:20. > :22:25.computers and I have used them. I don't like the touch of the

:22:25. > :22:32.keyboard compared to the resistance that like many will play begins. It

:22:32. > :22:38.couple tunnel syndrome. reflecting on writing and notebooks,

:22:38. > :22:45.it reflects again in the structure of your novels, the interest within

:22:45. > :22:52.the story within the novel, What is it that its most obvious in Oracle

:22:52. > :22:58.Nights and Lovatt and, you get to the end and you are told it's

:22:58. > :23:03.double that you walk are constantly saying its post-modernism but what

:23:03. > :23:13.are you St by constantly doing this, a story within a story that never

:23:13. > :23:15.

:23:16. > :23:22.In the. -- never ends. As I have developed as a writer I went

:23:22. > :23:27.further and further into this realising that there's a certain

:23:27. > :23:33.power in what I call it art of collage. That's when you have more

:23:33. > :23:40.than one been in the frame and the space in between. Some of the

:23:40. > :23:45.novel's had to walk three stories which intersect but a somewhat

:23:45. > :23:50.distinct at the same time. I feel that this energy created within the

:23:50. > :23:59.space between the elements. They create something greater than this

:23:59. > :24:04.arm of its parts. Again, it's all by feeling this. It's not making

:24:04. > :24:09.philosophical statements about anything. Figuring out how to tell

:24:10. > :24:14.the story in the most powerful and immediate way, no hot and it seems