Paul Auster

U različitim diskurzima govor o identitetu poprima različite konotacije. Na jednoj sasvim svakidašnjoj razini, koja se nerijetko izjednačava s medijskom, govor o identitetima odnosi se na socijalnu dimenziju, odnosno na onu dimenziju koja čovjeka vidljivim i vanjskim pokazateljima pozicionira unutar društvene mreže. Tako se može govoriti o etničkim, nacionalnim, rodnim i rasnim identitetima koji u svojoj mnogostrukosti izražavanja pružaju kolažnu sliku koju tzv. postmoderno društvo forsira i eksploatira. Takvi identiteti su društveno konstruirani i nazivaju se socijalnim identitetima. U svakodnevnim društveno - političkim raspravama najviše se raspravlja upravo o tom vidu identiteta, dok se osobni identitet kao apstraktni teorijski koncept ostavlja za teorijsko filozofijske analize. Ovaj rad se bavi načinom na koji se osobni identitet stvara, ragrađuje i ponovno uspostavlja unutar fikcionalnog djela. Riječ je o romanu Newyjorška trilogija američkog pisca Paula Austera, koji je kod nas prošao nezapaženo, neoprezno se svrstavajući na police knjižara pod područje krimića, pridonoseći korpusu tzv. lake književnosti. S druge strane, jasno je da bi bilo pretenciozno i pomalo pompozno Newyoršku trilogiju svrstati u područje tzv. teške književnosti , no namjera ovog rada je da pokaže neke u nas zanemarene dimenzije romana, a koje će se ponajviše ticati načina konstruiranja identiteta likova i autora; implikacijama takve konstrukcije na romanesknu strukturu te dvojničkom konstrukcijom likova.
Teorijski korpus na koji se ovaj rad naslanja i s kojim se dovodi u vezu obuhvaća raznorodne tradicije, povezujući Wittgensteinovu kasniju fazu s nekim aspektima dekonstrukcijske filozofije jezika, te pogledom na dvojništvo Renate Lachmann. Osnovna namjera rada je da se, uz pomoć poredbenog teorijskog uporišta, pokaže kako je osobni identitet u Newyjorškoj trilogiji diskurzivno utemeljen, odnosno kako je on produkt načina funkcioniranja jezika, što nudi mogućnost antiesencijalističkog utemeljenja osobnog identiteta, čime se izbjegava metafizičko utemeljenje identiteta u konačnom označitelju. Kada govorimo o antiesencijalističkom utemeljenju osobnog identiteta, valja napomenuti da se taj koncept odnosi na osobni identitet likova unutar fikcionalnog djela. Kako će se pokazati, osobni identitet likova, zbog svoje zamjenjivosti i fragmentarnosti na nivou narativa romana, ne sadrži neko čvrsto uporište u vidu stabilne biti, nekog konačnog označitelja koji mu propisuje esenciju i određuje njegovo značenje. Konkretnije, rad će se baviti načinom na koji su identiteti likova i autora konstruirani u Newyorškoj trilogiji, s posebnim osvrtom na dvojničku strukturu likova.
Newyorška trilogija sastoji se od triju kratkih romana – Stakleni grad, Duhovi, Zaključana soba -  naizgled nepovezanih, no nakon što se pročita posljednja stranica knjige, otvara se mogućnost gledanja na trilogiju kao na cjelinu sastavljenu od dijelova jedne te iste priče, s jednakim identitetnim strukturama likova.

This research looked at specimens made of austenitic steel 316L by Selective Laser Melting (SLM) and designed for tensile testing in different directions (in relation to the growth direction during printing). A significant anisotropy of mechanical properties was found as a result of mechanical testing: anisotropy of the yield strength is 1.13; tensile strength-1.10; elongation-1.84. X-ray analysis of the texture helped understand how the crystallographic texture of the specimens changed under elongation in different directions. On the basis of strain-induced reorientation of grains it was established that the active deformation mechanism included crystallographic slip of type {111}<110>. Depending on the orientation of stress to the internal crystallographic axes, different texture components form as a result of elongation leading to the observed anisotropy of mechanical properties. To understand how changes in the crystallographic texture influence the mechanical properties of SLM products, a model has been developed for simulating anisotropy of mechanical properties on the basis of texture analysis data using DAMASK software. The input data include grain orientation, active deformation mechanism and parameters of the phenomenological law describing hardening of slip systems. A good correlation was found between the simulation data and the results of elongation obtained for experimental specimens printed at different orientation to the growth direction, in terms of both the yield strength anisotropy and the strain-induced changes in the crystallographic texture. Thus, knowing the difference in the crystallographic texture, the results of mechanical testing of standard shape specimens can be used to define the properties of specimens of a different shape.

The voice of conscience, in Heideggerian existentialism, stands for humanity's inherent potency to call himself into an authentic way of living. Heidegger, through this concept, calls us to acknowledge the range of our possibilities in life before death than regret what we have already done. Since authentic living is a process than an end-no salvation being possible in this world-being sensitive to the call is trying to be authentic throughout life. As such, the call acts like taking placebos which keep us hopeful while we are in bad health, although there might be no cure. Paul Auster's Mr Vertigo, being a novel filled with existential themes, can be read to concretise the existential intonation of Heideggerian conscience, following Auster's own existential outlook into the human condition. This paper, by applying an interdisciplinary approach, thus reads Mr Vertigo in the light of Heidegger's certain existential concepts and the implications they have concerning how our existential conscience has a placebo effect. As such, this paper is to argue that Auster's Yehudi in Mr Vertigo plays the role of Walt's voice of conscience to help him with an authentic life style, the novel meanwhile highlighting how the call of conscience can help Heidegger's "Dasein" with the infinity of possibilities it has before death in a world determined by contingency.

In tijden van klimaatopwarming, massa-extinctie, de dramatische afnames van biodiversiteit en andere ecologische crises ligt angst voor het einde op de loer. Maar over wat voor einde(s) hebben we het dan precies? Wiens eindtijd is het? Wat voor wereld eindigt er? Moeten we zowel ‘de wereld’ als ‘het einde’ niet veel minder alomvattend denken? Is het tijd voor het einde van het einde van de wereld?

Chapter 14: Postmodern cities. 5,000 words. This chapter discusses the two principal strands of the postmodern city novel: texts in which the city is presented as a verbal labyrinth,
simulacrum, or technoscape (e. g. the fiction of Auster, Borges, Calvino, Murakami, Pamuk), and texts that depict the city as conceived in postmodern urbanist discourse: the city defined by branded spaces – consumerist simulacra of properly historical urban spaces – existing amidst dilapidated interstitial spaces (e.g., Martin Amis, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, José Saramago, Iain Sinclair, but including novels of any comparable city wherever sited), and the entwining of the two strands as the city and the lives it sustains work out their entropic trajectories, primarily absent the sort of crisis that qualifies the fictional city as properly dystopian. The presentation of the subject locates the literature in relation to poststructuralist thought or theories of postmodern urban and social theory by citing relevant theorists. It identifies, as appropriate, the presence and force of redemptive energies in the literature, and highlights the engagements with, and critiques of the history and enabling ideologies of postwar urban (re)development to the extent that they present themselves in the content and the form of the texts discussed.

La novela gráfica Ciudad de cristal presenta un desafío importante en el campo de la novela gráfica, cuyos resultados probablemente se podrán medir hasta dentro de unos años. Ya lo escribe en el prólogo de la misma Art Spiegelman: "For all its playful references to pulp fiction, City of Glass is a surprisingly nonvisual work at its core[...]" 1 ¿Cómo trasladar una novela plagada de ideas y complejas "redes de palabras" 2 al lenguaje de la novela gráfica? Los recursos utilizados son múltiples y todos ellos resultado de una elección consciente por parte de Karasik y Mazzucchelli, quienes a partir de su propia lectura de la novela de Paul Auster realizan una impresionante traducción de lenguajes. En una novela que además tiene como tema la búsqueda del verdadero lenguaje del ser humano, el reto adquiere dimensiones barrocas, es como un espejo que se refleja en otros espejos.

Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction is about the appearance of the specter in the work of five major US authors, and argues from this work that every one of us is a ghost writing, haunting ourselves and others. The book’s innovative structure sees chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, author of Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter, that is, without ghost writing.

In adapting Paul Auster’s postmodern detective story City of Glass as a graphic novel, Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli succeeded in producing a visual translation of an often non-visual text. Focussing on Auster’s text rather than Auster’s story, it is argued, the artists make inventive use of visual metaphors, visual styles, and comic conventions to translate Auster’s words into pictures. The text’s investigation into, and interrogation of, language is brought to bear on the comic version’s own visual language, and City of Glass: The Graphic Novel emerges as valuable source material for a future poetics of comics.

Cette analyse ne sera pas l’analyse d’une analyse. Mais avec un point dedépart sur 2 romans des années 1900 et un livre du XVIe siècle je vaistenter de trouver le noyau dont la plupart des œuvres postmodernessont composées : c’est-à-dire la metafiction.

In this essay I explore the phenomenology and psychoanalysis of writer's block. My main thesis is that the experience of writer's block is fundamentally akin to moods like anxiety and boredom as analyzed by Heidegger, Sartre and Lacan. That is to say: in the experience of writer's block, notably the blank page in which the blocked writer falls as into an "abyss of meaninglessness" (Heidegger), we get a glimpse of what Lacan called the Real and what Heidegger called the Nothingness of Being as the abysmal ground of existence. The essay is divided into two parts. In Part 1 ("A clearing in a forest of text") I use Heidegger, Sartre and Lacan to elucidate the experience of writers block. In Part 2 ("Tumbling in white spaces: Reading Paul Auster") I corroborate this analysis of writer's block via a detailed reading of Paul Auster's poetry and in particular his prose poem White Spaces.

Paul Auster nació en 1947 en Nueva Jersey y estudió en la Universidad de Columbia. Tras un breve período como marino en un petrolero de la Esso, vivió tres años en Francia, donde trabajó como traductor, "negro" literario y cuidador de una finca; desde 1974 reside en Nueva York. Ha publicado la llamada "Trilogía de Nueva York" (que comprende las novelas Ciudad de cristal, Fantasmas y La habitación cerrada), El país de las últimas cosas, La invención de la soledad y El Palacio de la Luna. También es autor del libro de poemas Disappearances y del libro de artículos y ensayos The Art of Hunger.

This monograph aims to analyse how fate and chance play a major role in Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies, by focusing on the author’s creation of characters and plot which revolve around lucky coincidences and fortunate situations and examining whether they are led by destiny or luck. It will also be explored how these two notions operate in Auster’s fiction organising discourse and providing structures to give voice and meaning to his characters and their random existence. The influence of Kafka in Auster’s writing will also be examined, as well as the role the Kafkaesque plays in it. Understanding chance as an organizer of life experiences, Auster constructs a story in which the sense of community goes beyond the individualism typical of the contemporary American novel, in an attempt to deliver a literary medicine to a wounded nation struck by September 11, 2011 devastating facts, by looking back at their previous existence as a collective experience, thus processing fate and chance as important aspects of his literary aesthetic.

Il contributo discute dell'uso dei nomi nella narrativa di Paul Auster, soffermandosi sui romanzi contenuti nella "Trilogia di New York", che presentano interessanti aspetti sull'origine della lingua e sulla diatriba, inquadrata dal punto di vista linguistico, semiotico e letterario, concernente il NP e il significante considerato come un segno arbitrario, in opposizione alla convinzione che si trattasse di un segno motivato. Con la struttura aperta della "Trilogia", secondo David Lodge, Auster sembra voler riproporre allegoricamente l'idea che, dopo la "Caduta", sia impossibile ricostituire il legame fra significante e significato presupposto antecedentemente, propendendo per l'assoluta arbitrarietà nell'associazione del nome proprio con il senso al quale dovrebbe rinviare. Il testo del saggio (in maniera indiretta nella sua versione in inglese e diretta in quella italiana, successiva e ampliata) propone invece l'idea che in qualche modo tale legame esista ancora, anche se spesso mantenuto o evocato in maniera casuale, o imprevedibile, nella vita reale, mentre la medesima idea fa comunemente parte del processo di nominazione che sottende alle convenzioni letterarie, secondo un approccio al quale lo stesso Auster non si sottrae, seguendo l'esempio di ciò che racconta nell'ultimo dei romanzi della "Trilogia" ("The locked Room"), dove ricorda con quale criterio aveva associato dei nomi reali a individui fittizi per un lavoro di censimento svolto per il Governo.

Throughout history there have been many different cultural aspects which have been reflected directly in literature. For quite some time, many texts have contributed to the infrastructure for several unique revolutions, rebellions, and actions in previous and present times, nearly everywhere in the world. “Ghosts” by Paul Auster reveals the interworking’s of
the societal views in regards to the oppression of classes and their structure, all while contributing to the fall of capitalism in our society. This text asserts that one must be a “puppet” and follow the instruction of others in order to succeed in society. Therefore, “Ghosts” is a text
which promotes the demise of capitalism, which in turn allows the reader to examine the inconsistencies which perpetuate through the everyday lives of millions of people in a capitalist society.

The essay develops an analysis of the City of glass (1987) by Paul Auster in comparison with its comic
transposition created by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli (1994). The study aims at recognizing,
through the thick weave of linguistic and metanarrative refractions of the novel, the rules of a “literary
game” that is not self-referential. It instead corresponds to a structurally element of postmodern reality,
but also to an exegetical tool capable of giving back a readable image to the complex urban
architecture. By following, through the theory of the “walking rhetoric” proposed by de Certeau, the
wanderings of the main character Quinn on the streets of Manhattan, and observing the visual rehash
in the graphic novel, the essay recognizes a “spatial story” (de Certeau), a tactic action of “writing” the
postmodern city, interpreted as an infinite set of possible narratives, and readings.
The opportunity to compare the novel with its transcodification within the structurally chronotopical
language of comics, in which the time of the written world becomes complementary to the spatiality of
the images, suggests a “geocritical” approach to this work: the narrative styles of the spatial
representations, and also their graphic exploration, are interpreted to return, in a moving map, a visible
image of New York city.

Ciudad de Cristal, de Paul Auster, es un ejemplo en sí de literatura posmoderna. En este trabajo analizamos sus características que lo vinculan con este fenómeno, como la desintegración del ser en la posmodernidad, la ciudad de Nueva York como ejemplo de posmodernidad en sí y el lenguaje como eje constructor de la realidad.

In the excerpt from Paul Austers Brooklyn Follies, we are introduced to Tom. Tom works at Brightman's Attic, owned by Harry Brightman, and through Tom we are told of the fabricated Harry Brightman. The name and person Harry Brightman does not exist, but it comes with a prestigious history and résumé. Harry Brightman has worked high-end jobs in Paris, Rome and London. Tom doesn't have a clue who the real Harry is, and what kind of pas he has, until one day were Harrys deranged daughter bursts into the bookstore, and demands to see her father. !

This work aims at studying the thematic concerns and the narrative techniques presented in Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies. The work also aims at analyzing the common themes presented not only in the novel but also in other works done by the author. The work focuses on Nathan’s Book of Human Folly and the stories he tackles in relation to the stories found in The Brooklyn Follies.In other words, the work stresses on the similarities between Nathan’s project and Auster’s novel. More interestingly, the dissertation is also an attempt to highlight the notion of the shift carried out by the protagonist and the narrator of the novel, Nathan Glass. The element of the shift is elaborated in terms of the themes and the formal features found in the novel.This shift is a crucial element in this study because it enables the narrator to be a part not just as a character but as a story teller in the novel as well. In addition, the work analyses the element of “Autofiction” found in Auster’s works. Paul Auster is very famous for his technique of including versions of himself into his own novels. Whether it is a character named Paul Auster, Paul Benjamin or by real events that happened to him personally, the writer never hesitate to express his most cherished concerns. Indeed, in this study, some exceptional autobiographical elements
will appear, making it interesting for the readers to link the images to each other and make sense out of them.

The paper propounds to discuss Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance in reference to generic and spatial concerns. In its specificity, the novel may be regarded as belonging to American road fiction since it exhibits tenets of the genre, such as the protagonist’s automotive journey through the country as a consequence of a personal crisis, or exploration of the possibilities offered by the road. However, some of the fundamental elements of the genre are redefined by the author. Particular emphasis is laid on issues such as identity, randomness, disorientation, or axiological transformations within the spatial dimension. Hence, by relying on the tradition of the American road story and, at the same time, engaging in a dialogue with it, Auster proves the postmodern character of the novel.

Abstract
Il saggio analizza il rapporto tra individuo e tempo nella letteratura americana contemporanea attraverso una selezione di autori (Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut) che esplorano i modi in cui memoria, esperienza del presente e capacità di proiettare il futuro interagiscono tra loro e con i traumi individuali e collettivi della nostra epoca, determinando così la percezione della realtà. I loro romanzi testimoniano di come l’attività narrativa sia uno strumento fondamentale per osservare il processo di ricostruzione dell’io, un percorso a cui ho dato il nome di “wilderness of time experience”.
Abstract
My essay examines the relation between the self and time in contemporary American literature. I have selected four authors (Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut) whose works deal with the ways in which memory, experience of the present, and projection of the future interact with each other and with the personal and collective traumas of our times, thus crucially affecting the perception of reality. These novels testify to narrative’s ability of exploring the process of reconstruction of the self—a path that I named “wilderness of time experience.”

Seeking to free us from the clutches of our self-made rigid conventions, postmodernism criticizes the metanarratives of modern times, while metafiction seems a better spokesman of it. New York Trilogy, Paul Auster’s debut composition and a meta-detective novel, has secured its fame in the postmodern fiction. It uses and abuses the conventions of detective novel, and lays bare the conventions of objective historiography. In doing this, Auster has given a self-reflective and equally historical dimension to his oeuvre through the technique of “historiographic metafiction”. Linda Hutcheon sees “historiographic metafiction” as a way to rewrite history in postmodern fiction. Postmodernism seeks to embrace a plurality of truths, and history is no longer monolithic and objective. Hutcheon contends that the postmodernist fiction is characterized by intense self-reflexivity and overtly parodic intertextuality. Utilizing historical accounts as intertextual effects, the writers of postmodernist fiction distrust in history. The present article will attempt to analyze New York Trilogy as a “historiographic metafiction”. Firstly, and insofar as it is within the scope of the article, it will attempt to offer a critical analysis of “postmodernism”, “metafiction”, and “metaphysical detective fiction”. Then, it will examine Auster’s novel as a “historiographic metafiction” in the light of Hutcheon’s theories.

This collection of essays examines the contribution of the aesthetic of the sublime to the representation of the urban field. The corpus examined in these essay ranges from the late nineteenth century to the present. The collection focuses in turn on the turn-of-the-twentieth-century metropolis, the postmodern megalopolis, and the contemporary survival of local urban conviviality.

Since the 1940s, comics have played an important role in the American cultural
landscape, constantly reinterpreting, institutionalizing and reinventing former cultural experiences
such as non-graphic literature, cinema, and photography. Postmodernist fiction related to comics
not only through the appropriation of themes and characters, but also by re-adapting narrative
structures and textual strategies typical of comic books, such as the violent juxtaposition of scenes
and the use of stratified frames. On the other end, postmodernist techniques eventually contributed
to the evolution of comics into the graphic novel form, that added a degree of permanence to
an entertainment object which started and developed mainly as a disposable one. Far from being a
mere “translation” or a derivative work, Paul Karasik’s and David Mazzucchelli’s City of Glass:
The Graphic Novel shows how an allegedly “simple” medium such as comics is able to reinvent
the full narrative potential also of insistently language-oriented texts. The authors do not just
“translate” Auster’s text; they “adapt” the poetics of postmodernist fiction, inventing a “visual
poetics” for their medium. The graphic novel’s visual dimension adds further levels to the narrative
instability of the text, by inventing visual metaphors and emphasizing similarities and parallels
that in the original text remained underground.

Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (1987) is one of the most striking examples of the “anti-detective” or “metaphysical” detective story as described by Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney in Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (1999). City of Glass, its opening part, displays “an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps” (NYT 4) where the detective loses himself, fails to solve the mystery and is ultimately confronted with broader ontological and epistemological issues pertaining to the very nature of reality. Auster’s labyrinthine city thus appears as a liminal space which urges us to reconsider the mechanisms of cognition as well as of our ability to reflect upon the conditions which determine the acquisition of knowledge.
This essay aims to examine Auster’s obsessive quests and urban spaces in a way which exceeds accepted definitions of the postmodern, metafictional detective story. In doing so, my theoretical and methodological apparatus will comprise theories of space by Gaston Bachelard, Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel de Certeau alongside Petra Eckhard’s recent Chronotopes of the Uncanny. Special attention will also be given to the figure of the flâneur which is one of the missing links between Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” and Auster’s Trilogy.

В статье проведен сравнительный анализ творчества двух заметных фигур американского и русского постмодернизма – В.Пелевина и П. Остера.
Сделана попытка уточнить, опираясь на труды отечественных и зарубежных литературоведов, своеобразие трактовки понятия «деконструкция» в разных национальных литературах, прослежены формы практического использования приемов деконструкции в романах этих писателей.


The article contains a comparative analysis of the texts of the two outstanding figures of the American and Russian postmodernism – V.Pelevin and P. Auster.
Drawing on the works of Russian and foreign literary critics, the author attempts to trace through the forms of practical usage of deconstruction methods in the novels of these writers.

This study reads four contemporary novels as both responses to and engagements with the cultural climate of the late twentieth-century. Paul Auster’s Leviathan (1992), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama (1998), and J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes (2000) all gesture toward an interrogation of the value system of late-twentieth century life and an indictment of the cultural sphere. I employ the term ‘epochal anxiety’ to map the culturally specific phenomena that these novels internalise and reflect. Taking into account recent scholarly conversation on literature of the 1990s, this study will also consider the temporal significance of the texts in light of their proximity to the events of September 11.

"This thesis is concerned with the space of text, with the composition of that space, its form and substance, and also with the perception and experience of that space. The argument takes in existing theoretical attempts to explain the spatiality of texts, particularly Joseph Frank's 1945 essay "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," and tests their ideas against literary texts which, it will be argued, make a vital contribution to our comprehension of textual space. The keys texts studied are John Banville's Kepler, Paul Auster's City of Glass, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, and the works of Thomas Pynchon.

As an understanding of the space of text develops, the work of Henri Lefebvre, and especially his 1974 text The Production of Space, comes increasingly to the fore. Criticising traditional philosophical concepts of space, which tend to view space in either purely physical or mental terms, Lefebvre's work enables us to place the discussion on textual space within a wider context. Textual space is seen to emerge as a social space, and thus a social product, capable of being employed in different ways within society, as a representation of space, aligned with mental space, or as a representational space, allied to lived spaces. The final sections of the thesis explore the reader's experience of this lived textual space, and question the role and place of textual space in the social realm."

Nel suo ultimo libro, Report from the Interior (2013), Paul Auster compie un viaggio interiore che lo porta a scavare nella parte più lontana e ormai quasi estranea del suo pensiero, nel tentativo di ricostruire la traiettoria impossibile dell'evoluzione della sua mente. Come già accadeva nella rappresentazione della figura paterna in The Invention of Solitude, anche qui la parola si trova di fronte allo scacco di dire qualcosa che è andato perduto. Nonostante questa difficoltà sia dichiarata già nelle prime pagine, lo scrittore porta a termine la sua "ricognizione" approdando a quella che lui stesso definisce come una "time capsule": 1 pagine che si concentrano essenzialmente sui primi anni degli studi e della vocazione letteraria, passando in rassegna le lettere indirizzate alla prima moglie, la scrittrice e traduttrice Lydia Davis, incontrata verso la fine degli anni Sessanta. Si trovano qui nomi, idee e soprattutto un passionale amore per la letteratura e la poesia che segneranno profondamente l'opera di Auster. Insieme alle pagine del precedente Winter Journal (2012) dedicate alla situazione che ha ispirato la scrittura di White Spaces (1979) 2 Report from the Interior rappresenta quindi uno stimolo interessante per rileggere la produzione poetica e saggistica dello scrittore di Newark. Come nel caso di Hand to Mouth (1997), il dittico composto dagli ultimi due libri permette di assaporare l'atmosfera creativa respirata da Auster agli inizi della sua carriera, e presenta un itinerario culturale che si estende tra Europa e Stati Uniti. I due memoirs forniscono l'input per riflettere su alcuni incontri e influenze centrali per quella che si può definire come la "poetica" di Auster, e che si colloca in maniera piuttosto compiuta nella fase che precede la sua ben più vasta e nota opera narrativa. Debiti intellettuali, suggestioni e rimandi che popolano la sua scrittura sono sintomi evidenti di un interesse che si manifesta come un vero e proprio assorbimento della cultura letteraria e artistica del Novecento, dalle avanguardie fino allo sperimentalismo degli anni Sessanta e Settanta. Non è un caso che Auster non nasca come romanziere ma come poeta e traduttore di poeti francesi del secondo dopoguerra, nonché come attento lettore critico della poesia americana. Negli anni tra il 1970 e il 1976 viaggia spesso in Europa e soprattutto in Francia, dove vive per qualche anno. Qui ha modo di entrare in contatto con alcuni dei più interessanti poeti e scrittori del tempo, tra cui Jacques Dupin, André du Bouchet e Edmond Jabès, che diventano per lui dei fondamentali riferimenti culturali e letterari. È sempre in quegli anni che Auster si avvicina in modo più raffinato e elaborato all'opera dei più grandi scrittori europei del Novecento, da Kafka a Beckett, fino a Celan e anche Perec. 3 A quegli anni risalgono i volumi pubblicati come traduttore e curatore: A Little Anthology of Surrealist Poems (1972), Fits and Starts: Selected Poems of Jacques Dupin (1974), The Uninhabited: Selected Poems of André du Bouchet (1976), e il Random House SAGGI Book of 20th Century Poetry, uscito nel 1984, che raccoglie in traduzione le poesie di Antonin Artaud, Yves Bonnefoy, René Char e altri. 4