Customer Reviews

Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Hand to Mouth, by itself, is a somewhat raw but not at all insensitive memoir of life before publishing. I found it engrossing at times.

Auster recounts his youthful rejection of middle class consumerism, his odd and fascinating encounters with all kinds of characters and life situations, his stay in Paris, his first marriage, his ...well... failures to make it big as a writer. His admirable sense of integrity (no jobs except ones literary) unfortunately kept the author wallowing in translation work to put food on the table, and the sense of pain, desperation and even a sort of starvation are palpable. Agonizingly, but rather fittingly, he tells only of his years BEFORE success. This is no rags to fame & riches story.

Hand to Mouth is basically a reality check. Of some value to anyone who wants to get published, but the only thing that keeps this from being totally depressing is our knowledge of Auster's eventual literary success.

Lovely sections about the wacky people he met on ships and on streets reveal inspiration for characters he brings alive in his humanistic fiction.

If you do buy an edition (check out the number of pages before you order) which contains "Action Baseball" and "Squeeze Play", you are in for a treat. The former is a complete card game and the latter is a detective novel. Squeeze Play was written under a pseudonym and features a Jewish private eye with a law degree from Columbia who has a taste for fine wine and music. Mickey Spillane gets urban Semitic spit & polish in this totally enjoyable bonus read.

Like some obscure import record of your favourite band or musician, Hand To Mouth is really only going to appeal to the most die-hard fan. Auster's honest though somewhat uninteresting chronicle of his early failures may appeal to struggling 20-something wannabe writers, but generally the appeal is limited. One can't help but feel Auster should of held onto this material until later in his life - a complete autobiography in his later years would be more valuable.

The early previously unpublished works included in the book are a must for fans and Auster must be commended for being so brave as to include them here. Perhaps most entertaining is the publication of his 'action baseball' game.

This is a book for hardcore Auster fans only, I think. It has interesting tidbits that illuminate his prose and the 'chronicle of early failure' is indeed harrowing and interesting. yet, unlike most of Auster's prose, this account never trandescends itself; that is, it doesn't achieve the luminescence of the prose that Auster is capable of. There was a LOT of filler near the end of the book too (did we really need to see the Action Baseball game?) A far better account of the starving artist routine is Samuel Delany's _The Motion of Light in Water_

Paul Auster's autobiographical account spanning about 12 years or so after he finished college, is an excellent exposition of a young writer's search for meaning, and then the translation of that meaning into money, to provide for further existence, to allow the writer to keep producing work, representative of his desires, but also able to be sold for money to continue the quest.

The appeal to almost all people is hidden in the fact, that at anytime, any person, can be living a "hand to mouth" existence. This feeling of abject poverty and financial ruin is not uncommon today, in an economy that has lost over 2 million jobs, and forced hundreds of thousands to start their own businesses because work was not available. Those in America who have had to do this, can relate directly to Auster's feelings, especially the salient concept of when will I ever get to the point when I am making a living again, even a somewhat less luxurious one than before, just any living.

As usual, Auster uses his incredible incisiveness and truly exceptional clarity in his construction of this book. It is of special interest to Auster readers, as it gives the reader some very interesting information about the author's early days when he was still struggling to become known. But Auster's story is one that every actor, every writer, every lawyer, every doctor, or most of them anyway, have to go through at the beginning, including every new entrepreneur. Becoming established is very hard work. And more people fail, than succeed. This high failure rate is generated by the need to be able to sustain high levels of suffering in bad times, to get to the good times. Most of us are just not up to the task.

The early, unending attempts of Paul Auster to become a writer, in both the wordly and literary sense. The monumental quantity of his failures is an example to all would-be artists, of any genre, of the need to persevere in one's creative efforts. He includes three samples of his early and unsuccessful attempts, and through these examples the reader sees Auster's beginning efforts at expressing themes which he later developed fully. Not too many people are willing to expose their awkward early attempts, but by including these early examples, it gives us the extraordinary chance to compare them to their later, final form in his published works. An unusually honest and intimate look at the struggle to create, and the mindboggling tenacity it requires.

Paul Auster's latest book disappointingly contains no significant work of new fiction. Although Auster gives an intriguing insight into his early years as a struggling writer in and around New York and Paris, it seems to be more about bringing an era to an end, rather than the new beginning I'd hoped for. One would have thought that after "Smoke" and "Blue in the Face" Auster would be ready to try something new. But for someone familiar with "Squeeze Play" Auster's latest book contains little in the way of new material - and could almost be regarded as an appendix to "The Red Notebook". Ultimately I was very disappointed that Auster should breeze back into the literary frame with such a low-key piece of work. It's been a long while (too long) since "MR Vertio"; and although the films "Smoke" and "Blue In the Face" gave us something new, I'd like to see one of America's most prominent literary writers taking more chances if he is to maintain his current high profile. This is unfortunately not a significant return to fiction and more a book for dedicated followers.

By and large, this book will be of interest to Auster fans only. The first section is a brief autobiography, which may be boiled down to this: "How I Tried to Avoid Having a Regular Job." It's all about the crazy schemes Auster had to make money while not working 9-5. The stories are good, though nothing amazing. As he chronicles his early life, he references his "Appendices" -- a couple of one-act plays, a card-based baseball game he'd invented, and his first novel. I'd say of the entire book, the novel may be the best part. It's strictly a by-the-numbers noir novel (the unwilling detective, the femme fatale, a larger-than-life victim), but it's executed very nicely. It's funny how Auster thinks nothing of his work -- according to the memoir, he churned this out in three months (June-August), which to me is pretty impressive, but I suppose Auster thinks it's just pulp... I don't think it is, though because he stays so within the confines of the genre, it almost comes off as parody. Still, it's an enjoyable read.

3 stars

This book recounts Paul Auster's youth: from his childhood to his early adulthood when struggling to earn his means. Before becoming a full-time writer, Auster had tried his luck in different walks of life. The whimsical tone of these experiences also explain those frequent motifs and themes representing again and again in his novels.

I love Auster and when I first started reading this memoir about his early days of struggle as a writer, I was throughly engrossed. There was something open and honest about his early years, and although it runs parallel to many of the struggles writers go through, his was particularly interesting because of the wonderful people he meets along the way and the interesting situations and work environments he finds himself. But something happens halfway in and the work just comes to a halt. It loses its momentum and becomes trite and even boring. Auster fans will enjoy the early play and detective novel included, but even those seem thrown in, as if Auster knew that what he was publishing was not worth the money.

Auster writes from the position of not having money to live, money to enable him to write, to pursue his art. Those who felt he was writing in the "pursuit" of money misinterpreted his honesty. If one really struggles just to pay the rent, or to buy food, writing or any other form of art would take an immediate backseat. Here, it seems, is where Auster is really suffering. He cannot pursue this calling. The prose, as usual, is very good, honest. Very underrated.