Do you like plotless books? Books where nothing happens, and yet you feel glued to their pages? Books after which you say to yourself, "Holy moly, I am not the only one who..."?
If your answer is "yes," then rejoice, my lovely readers, for I have something to offer you.
You all know Paul Auster, I believe. And if you don’t, which is A B S O L U T E L Y okay, I feel the urge to add, then I have the pleasure of introducing him to you.
So Paul Auster – if you want it to sound more Wikipedia-like-ish – is an American novelist whose books have been translated into more than forty languages. For me, he is the epitome of all things New York*.
*side note: we, my frivolous alter ego and I, are saddened to inform you that the author of this post has never been to New York, and thus everything she says about this city that never sleeps is a pure figment of their imagination.
So being the embodiment of all things New York, Paul Auster writes witty texts about our gloomy life that, after being spiced up with irony and sarcasm, turns out to be quite okay. Even bearable. Sometimes.
So – the third "so" in a row, I hear some of your saying or thinking out loud – his books are what the doctor ordered when you realize that you will never get an owl from Hogwarts and thus have to stay here with us, boring and bored 9-5 adults, forever.
The book that I want to talk about today is Winter Journal. And, as you may have already got it, this book is plotless. On the other hand, what else should we expect from a book whose title contains the word "journal"?
If your journal entries are not just a stream of consciousness, then hats off to you. Because the rest of us – if we keep journals, of course – tend to write everything that comes to our mind without bothering about any plot twist.
Now, let’s get to the word "winter." Here, of course, what we have is the winter of life, this fragile period when the main activity is to think back to the good old days. And that gives us Winter Journal – a collection of memories, written in the second person.
This book is very physical. We will be involved in different accidents, such as swallowing a fishbone in a Parisian restaurant or slipping on the floor at the work site, for example. We will feel what it means to grow up and get old. To fall in love and fall out of it. And most importantly, what it means to be a writer.
This book is very nostalgic. We will taste all childhood meals the author has ever eaten. We will play all his childhood games and visit THE places of his life. We will have a chance to take a 230-page walk down memory lane. Sometimes, there will be happy moments, sometimes — the saddest possible. But that’s what our life is all about, at end of the day, right?
This book is like a travel guide: France and the United States; Paris and New York; restaurants and rented apartments; trains and planes; accomplishments and failures.
This book is a reminder that you can be poor and happy. That you can be poor and make jokes about it. That you can be poor and then rich. That poverty is not the worst thing that can happen.
This book is a journey of a person that is not perfect (far from it). He is talented and masters his craft, that’s for sure. But, as we all do, sometimes he fails. And fails hard. And that’s what is great about this winter journal: the narrator doesn’t hide his fiascoes from us.
When to read this book?
When you crave simple prose.
When you have your tea prepared but it is too dark outside to see a thing from the window.
But you need to see it. To feel it. To know that it exists.
Life.
In all its beauty and ugliness.