Sunset Park by Paul Auster

It's been quiet here lately. There have been concerts, alt J and Leonard Cohen namely, but they both failed to move me, for different reasons. One concert entirely lacked feeling and pathos while the other one had too much of it, with sugar on top (also, when people next to you do the cryptic crossword waiting for the concert to begin, you kinda start to wonder if you're not too young for this).

I've been just so busy with... life, I guess. The kids and school runs and groceries and cooking and friends and a job that occupies a large part of my mind in a good way. So I've been doing a lot of thinking and researching policies and politics, ideas and abstract concepts, but not much immersing myself in a good story.

And then I came across this on Rozelle markets. I've loved Paul Auster for a long time, since reading the amazing and disturbing City of Glass, first part of his New York Trilogy. And just now I've discovered that he has also written the screenplay for two movies I loved, Smoke and its follow-up Blue in the Face.

I'm not going to reveal much of the plot of Sunset Park, just that it is about twenty-eight year old Miles who has fled New York and his family after a tragic event he has caused seven years ago. Now he lives in sweltering Florida, taking photos of abandoned houses. He stays because he has fallen in love with a teenage girl, Pilar. When he is blackmailed by Pilar's sister, he is forced to return to New York. There, he settles in an illegal squat with two women and a man and prepares himself to face his father and the past he has been avoiding for years.

Sunset Park is the seventh novel from Paul Auster I've read. Reading it feels like coming home, recognising a kindred spirit on an almost instinctive level. It is a book about loss and forgiveness, about love and loneliness. It is intelligent, it is tragic, it is articulate like all of Auster's work, and it has the immediacy of living inside the protagonists heads, even more so as Auster switches perspectives in each chapter. And then there's the clarity and beauty of his prose, the simple elegance and rhythmic cadence of his sentences.

It all just reminds me why I love books so much. No matter how busy life gets, there is always enough time to lose oneself in a good story.

Autumn Laing by Alex Miller

A while ago I wrote about the satisfaction of putting things into order, of quantifying and labelling them. Well, here I will attempt something that I have meant to do for a very long time: I will choose one book every month that I loved reading and will try to explain why I did love it. And thus I will hopefully save it from disappearing in that big pile of all the other books and movies and newspaper articles and websites that I really wanted to remember; the ones that moved and inspired me and that somehow fell between the cracks in the mysterious landscape of my mind...

This is a book about being old. It is a book about being young and immortal. It is a book about art, about jealousy and passion, about women and about Australia. Autumn Laing tells her story, beginning, 'They are all dead, and I am old and skeleton-gaunt. This is where it began fifty-three years ago.' Doesn't this alone make you want to sit back and read on? Oh, the power of words, drawing you in and creating a world just for you to discover!

Autumn Laing is young and beautiful. It is the late 1930s in Melbourne, and she is married to kind and gentle Arthur. Theirs is a quiet and comfortable marriage. They have a circle of artistic, bohemien friends who come to their house to eat, drink copious amounts of red wine and discuss art and poetry. They are trying to invent an Australian version of the European modernism and argue about aesthetics, philosophy and ethics. Their lifes change when Autumn meets and subsequently seduces Pat Donlon, a promising and hot-headed young artist. He is married to lovely and innocent Edith, who is pregnant with their first child. The book shifts between the unfolding story and the present, where Autumn is dying, bad-tempered and armed with a sharp tongue. She is looking back with regret and longing and eventually is able to find some kind of peace and closure.

Alex Miller is an amazingly skilled writer. His style seems effortless, but is so confident and elegant in providing first only glimpses of the story and the characters that inhabit it and subsequently weaving all the threads together into a rich and colourful tapestry. Miller lets Autumn talk and gives her a truly unique voice. I tried to slow down my reading towards the end, and I really missed her after finishing the story. In fact, I'm still thinking of her as someone I knew and who has recently died. The power of words...