En este breve a la par que intenso cuaderno repleto de casualidades, Paul Auster pormenoriza a través de algunos de los episodios más significativos, trascendentales y fortuitos de su vida (a veces, de la vida de otros) el que será el leit motiv de su extensa producción literaria. A medio camino entre biografía y confesión novelada, el escritor neoyorquino expone ante nosotros un auténtico mosaico de coincidencias prácticamente inverosímiles y diversos sucesos regidos por el azar para que nos maravillemos no solo a causa de la desconcertante imprevisibilidad de la vida, sino ante el hecho de que cada acto cotidiano, cada decisión que tomamos o dejamos de tomar, cada equívoco, cada nueva oportunidad pudiera tener consecuencias sencillamente descabelladas. ¿Historias verdaderas o realidad adulterada? Sea cual sea la respuesta, Paul Auster nos deja con el buen regusto de otra brillante novela.

3.5

Schreibt das Leben die besseren Geschichten als die Fantasie? Bei Paul Auster vermag man dies fast nicht zu glauben, aber trotzdem belehrt er uns mit seiner Kurztextensammlung "Das rote Notizbuch" immer wieder eines besseren. Denn die hier enthaltenen Anekdoten sind allesamt wahr und so passiert (sagt zumindest Herr Auster) und führen uns immer wieder vor Augen, wie unglaublich unser Dasein doch sein kann.

Zwar ist die Lektüre sehr kurz, aber dafür erhält man mit dieser Neuauflage endlich alle Teile des Buches in einem Band und kann sich immer wieder in diese herrlich ausformulierten Beschreibungen von Situationen stürzen. Und wer weiss, vielleicht wäre unser aller Leben ja geeignet für so etwas.

muito bom pequenos relatos.. fiquei com muita vontade de conhecer a obra de ficção do autor

Conjunto de ensaios trágicos e cômicos é o que compõe essa coletânea, em uma obra pequena, mas que tem o poder de revelar o escritor que Paul Auster é e como se moldou sua literatura; em especial acerca da temática das coincidências que sempre rondaram seus romances e sua vida. A quem gosta do escritor ou deseja conhecer sua escrita, certamente esse aqui é uma boa alternativa.

Vintage Auster: the man in miniature. Occasionally mawkish, occasionally so precise it takes your breath away, a kind of balancing act where every action is at once banal and loaded with meaning, like a sort of weird combination of Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant: O Henry stories without the trick endings, or as if the story was all trick. The back cover calls this "a singular kind of ars poetica, a literary manifesto without theory," which is true enough. Because the pieces in this book are so short -- the book itself is about the size of a mass-market paperback, but much thinner, and most of the stories vary in length from three or four pages to just one -- the dreamlike quality which in Auster's longer works can seem twee or forced works here to great effect. Dreams are the result of the mind struggling to make connections between seemingly random memories, images, perceptual chunks, wishes, God knows what thrown off by the brain as we lie physically paralyzed, beyond touch and sound, reduced to visions and the attempts to connect those visions (this is why dreams seem so choppy and surreal -- most of them are apparently three or four "mini-dreams" stitched together). Auster's thesis here is apparently that just as our minds try to do this in dream-time, so they do it with random, unconnected elements of life, at once as banal and loaded with meaning as a dream where you see a childhood friend and they offer you a candy bar you can't eat (because in a dream, you are cut off from taste; in your mind, you are cut off from the sweetness of childhood, the easy emotional connections of a child, you wake up with the memory of untasted, untastable chocolate in your mind and are moody until coffee).

In these stories, prison guards turn into father-in-laws, brothers into husbands, a dead child into a kind of sacrificial double. One man grows up with his mother, hearing her version of his childhood and his father; by utmost chance, he finds his father again, and hears the predictable reverse of his mother's story: in his father's narrative, she was the monster. Auster writes: "C.'s life had now become two lives. There was Version A and Version B, and both of them were his story. He had lived them both in equal measure, two truths that canceled each other out, and all along, without even knowing it, he had been stranded in the middle." As a child, Auster had rescued a friend of his sister's from being crushed under the wheels of his father's car: "For years afterward, I walked around feeling that this had been my finest moment. I had actually saved someone's life, and in retrospect I was always astonished by how quickly I had acted, by how sure my movements had been at the critical juncture. I saw the rescue in my mind again and again...." Inevitably, when he meets her again fifteen years later, "....it was clear that she remembered nothing....She hadn't even known that she was in danger. The whole incident had taken place in a flash: ten seconds of her life, an interval of no account, and none of it had left the slightest mark on her. For me, on the other hand, those seconds had been a defining experience, a singular event in my internal history."

But the final trick of that story, concealed from the audience by the misdirection of separate but equal perspectives, is its last paragraph, which has the same impact as realizing both that the childhood friend in your dream is eternally now, here with you in your mind, and that you will never see him again; that even the child who appears in the dream is not the child you knew, just as you could not taste the offered chocolate. "Most of all," Auster writes, "it stuns me to acknowledge that I am talking about something that happened in 1956 or 1957 -- and that the little girl of that night is now over forty years old." Time is the fifth dimension in which we live, and dream, and lose, against which we shore fragments of meaning to shield ourselves from the ceaseless rain of atoms: Then, the phone rang and it was her. They had grown up in the same building without knowing it. One second later, it would have been me.

Yazarın başından geçmiş tuhaf denilebilecek olayları anlatan kısa bir öykü kitabı.

In 1973, I was offered a job as caretaker of a farmhouse in the south of France

It turned out to be a curious year

The place was beautiful: a large, eighteenth-century stone house bordered by vineyards on one side and a national forest on the other. The nearest village was two kilometers away, but it was inhabited by no more than forty people

It was an ideal spot for two young writers to spend a year

On the other hand, we lived on the brink of permanent catastrophe

L. and I were married in 1974

Our son was born in 1977, but by the following year our marriage had ended

None of that is relevant now

All that remains is the open window and the image of a dime flying through the air

Three summers ago, a letter turned up in my mailbox

Various post office markings were stamped across the front: Not Deliverable, Unable to Forward, Return to Writer

It was the kind of letter I would never dream of writing to anyone

Someone was out there trying to impersonate me, and as far as I know he still is

I have not thrown away the letter, even though it continues to give me chills every time I look at it

I have kept it on my work table for the past three years

Perhaps I keep it there as a monument to my own folly

Perhaps it is a way to remind myself that I know nothing, that the world I live in will go on escaping me forever

One of my closest friends is a French poet by the name of C.

C. is a man of manifold contradictions

He had a rough childhood

It was at this moment that I first heard about the incredible reversals that had taken place in C.’s life

He wrote me a letter that sketched out the story of the past month

His handwriting reflected each jolt of the tracks, as if the speed of the train were an exact image of the thoughts racing through his head

As he put it somewhere in that letter: “I feel as if I’ve become a character in one of your novels

C.’s life had now become two lives

There was Version A and Version B, and both of them were his story

He had lived them both in equal measure, two truths that canceled each other out, and all along, without even knowing it, he had been stranded in the middle

The war had given him a chance to start all over again, and it seems that he had never looked back

A number of unlikely events occurred all at once

Those seconds had been a defining experience

My first novel was inspired by a wrong number

It was the spring of 1980

Little by little an entire world of possibilities opened up to me

The mistake that sets the whole story in motion

At that moment the madness begins

Books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author

I was eight years old. It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without making sure I had a pencil in my pocket

As I like to tell my children, that’s how I became a writer

When A. was a young woman in San Francisco and just starting out in life, she went through a desperate period in which she almost lost her mind

Her body was there, but her thoughts were somewhere else, and in the gap between them, in that small space that no one has fully explored but where we all sometimes live

A moment like that deserves to be prolonged, it seems to me—if only by a few seconds—for the thing that was about to happen was so improbable, so outlandish in its defiance of the odds, that one wants to savor it for a few extra seconds before letting go of it

She was real, but she was also imaginary

Last September, I had to go to Paris for a few days, and my publisher booked a room for me in a small hotel on the Left Bank

It’s the same hotel they use for all their authors, and I had already stayed there several times in the past

The Carlyle was F.’s hotel of choice, and he stayed there whenever he was in New York

More than that, the woman’s apartment was located directly above the room that F. always reserved for himself—just one floor up

Which meant that every time F. had gone to sleep at the Carlyle Hotel, wondering where the missing painting could have been, it had been hanging on a wall directly above his head

Like an image from a dream

short anthology

a short anthology that mainly focuses on amusing, bizarre, and sometimes astonishing anecdotes that truly occurred in the life of Paul Auster, his family, and friends. excellent writing. it was enjoyable.

Tycker Paul Auster sammanfattar den bäst själv:

"Vilket sammanträffande, tänkte jag. Mitt liv har varit fyllt av den sortens märkliga händelser, och hur jag än anstränger mig kan jag inte skaka av mig dem. Vad är det med den här världen som gör att jag ideligen dras in i de här tramsigheterna?"

En rad fantastiska sammanträffanden. Går att ta sig igenom på ett par timmar.

Foi a minha primeira experiência com um audiolivro e, mesmo ainda não sabendo se será para repetir, foi interessante. Acredito que o facto de este livro conter várias pequenas histórias contribuiu para que a experiência fosse mais agradável.

Quanto aos contos propriamente ditos, achei mais graça a uns do que a outros, mas no geral gostei.

fun