Van Paul Auster is net een nieuw boek verschenen, Winter journal. De Nederlandse vertaling was eigenaardig genoeg al een half jaar eerder uit. Maar ik verkies de Amerikaanse uitgave, die is weliswaar gelumbeckt (gelijmd in de rug) maar de katernen zijn op de ouderwetse manier opengesneden. Je hebt dus geen gladde voorkant van de vellen maar een gekartelde. Oudere mensen zullen zich nog herinneren dat je vroeger de katernen van boeken vaak nog moest opensnijden. Ik vind het prettig om zo'n boek in handen te hebben.
Dit boek is een soort verzameling van korte memoires. Hij werd geboren in 1947. Hieronder een klein fragment.
“You have no use for the good old days. Whenever you find yourself slipping into a nostalgic frame of mind, mourning the loss of the things that seemed to make life better then than it is now, you tell yourself to stop and think carefully, to look back at Then with the same scrutiny you apply to looking at Now, and before long you come to the conclusion that there is little difference between them, that the Now and the Then are essentially the same. Of course you have manifold grievances against the evils and stupidities of contemporary American life, not a day goes by when you are not wailing forth your harangues against the ascendency of the right, the injustices of the economy, the neglect of the environment, the collapsing infrastructure, the senseless wars, the barbarism of legalized torture and extraordinary rendition, the disintegration of impoverished cities like Buffalo and Detroit, the erosion of the labor movement, the debt we saddle our children with in order to attend our too-expensive colleges, the ever-growing crevasse that divides the rich from the poor, not to speak of the junk films we are making, the junk food we are eating, the junk thoughts we are thinking. It is enough to make one want to start a revolution – or live as a hermit in the Maine woods, feeding off berries and the roots of trees. And yet, go back to the year of your birth and try to remember what America looked like in its golden age of postwar prosperity. Jim Crow laws in full force throughout the South, anti-Semitic quota restrictions, back-alley abortions, Truman’s executive order to establish a loyalty oath for all government workers, the trials of the Hollywood Ten, the Cold War, the Red Scare, the Bomb. Every moment in history is fraught with its own problems, its own injustices, and every period manufactures its own legends and pieties.”
Hier kun je Paul Auster horen terwijl hij voorleest.