The Red Notebook. [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

This is going to sound really odd, almost like I am aping one the stories in the Mr. Auster's book, but I have to tell it, because it really is true and I think it bespeaks the delight of this small book. The night I read this book, I was helping my friend, Therese, with a short film she was shooting. The final scene in the film centered around a dinner party the main character throws, bringing together a number of ex-lovers.

Like most New Yorkers, Therese's apartment could barely handle eating dinner, much less filming the eating of dinner. So we were filming at Therese's friend Leah's apartment, a jaw-droppingly big loft. I'd never met Leah, or the several other people recruited for the shoot. This I suppose lent an air of authenticity to the awkwardness of having ex-lovers at a dinner party.

All through the dinner, Leah, our host, appeared mildly distracted, her laughter always coming a moment too late. Her boyfriend, with whom she lived was away in Mexico and I simply assumed that she missed him.

On the subway up to the dinner, I read the first forty pages of the "Red Notebook". Like all of Mr. Auster's books it reads marvelously well. The plainness of his prose masks how quickly he draws you into his world of coincidences and meta-fictions. As I set the book down when I arrived, I mentioned how wonderful the little stories it contained were.

When I arrived at dinner, after first being struck by the size of the apartment, I was taken aback by Leah's cat, Felix. Even at first glance, you could tell Felix was no ordinary house cat, she was too long and slightly too tall. After innocently reaching my fingers down, offering my scent to Felix, Leah warned, "Oh, I wouldn't pet her, she's not really friendly." Nevertheless, Felix licked my fingers and walked away. Both Therese and Leah commented on how unusually friendly the cat had just been. For a moment I swelled with the odd pride of being judged by a fickle animal and found acceptable.

Leah explained that Felix was a leopard cat, some odd breed concocted no doubt to exoticize the common house cat.

After the shoot, after cleaning up, after most of the guests had left, Therese and Leah retreated into another room to fetch a pirated DVD Therese wished to borrow. I was alone. Felix he sat perched on the top of bookshelf, staring down at me. I stared back. Finally, I reached up to offer my fingers once again to the cat. Silently she swiped at them, catching her claws on the skin just between the knuckles of my pointer and index finger. A light scratch, just barely enough to break the skin and let leak a spot of blood. I looked at the burgeoning red line and then stared back at the cat. The pride of acceptance vanished, replaced by something closer to mutual respect. I didn't mention the swipe to either Therese or Leah.

On the way home, I finished the "The Red Notebook." Mr. Auster's books read quickly. And the short ones, like this read even more quickly. But for a day or two they coat the world with an odd sense of pattern. Suddenly every event has purpose, if not clear meaning.

I never saw Leah again. But her cat stayed in my mind, perched on that bookshelf staring down at me.

Six months later, I came across a listing on the Internet. A beautiful leopard cat looking for a new home. Before I realized what I was doing, I called the number. The man, Carlos, told me the cat was still available. Later that day when he dropped the cat by, he said that he and his girlfriend were having a baby and they wanted to take no chances with allergies. He wouldn't tell me the cats name, saying he simply called her gato. I would have to find the right name for her.

As Carlos was leaving, he glanced at my bookshelf in that instinctual act of sizing people up. He stopped in the A's and pointed to "The Red Notebook". "I love this book. We're actually naming our child Siri after one of the characters he mentions. My wife bought it on someones recommendation at a dinner party the day after she found out she was pregnant."

I told Carlos that I too enjoyed the book; that while I found the quality of the anecdotes wildly uneven, certain ones struck a chord; that I thought some of the stories skirt around cliche, but that skirting is the brilliance of the Paul Auster project: to rescue coincidence from its damnation as clumsy plot device and elevate to the status of plot itself.

I also told him how much a I loved the some of Auster's observations, particularly the insightful realization, "that I know nothing, that the world I live in will go on escaping me forever."

I call the cat Felix.

In "The Red Notebook" Auster does something that is both whimsical and tremendously captivating. Most readers remember when they first read Charles Dickens and found his 'Deus Ex Machina' technique and his coincidences just too ridiculous to believe they actually happen in real life. However, they do. Everyone has some incredible coincidences that are basically one in a million chances, but just happen to take place.

Auster seems to have noted these incidents through his entire life, and then compiled them in this book. The coincidences are extraordinary, but not things that are impossible, just things that are extremely improbable. Auster enhances his style, by the use of "Kafkaesque" elements. His use of initial names is something that Kafka did all the time. And his ironic twists are also in the vein of Kafka, but instead of being novelistic, they are real and true stories.

The book is sure to captivate virtually any reader, and its conciseness both in writing and in length makes it an easily absorbed and quickly read piece of literature.

This short little book is a collection of two-to-four page stories about coincidences Auster has experienced or heard about. It sounded kind of intriguing when I first read about it, but in reality, I found this book kind of, well, I guess the best word for it would be the most simple one: just plain ol' dumb. Had it been written by anyone but Auster, a well-known and highly esteemed author, I can't imagine it ever having been published. Because, honestly, these stories are just laughably lame. For example, there's one that essentially goes like this: one day, I lost a dime. A few hours later, I was walking down the street and, gasp!, there was a dime on the sidewalk! And here's another one: one day my wife and I were really, really hungry, and the next thing we knew, a friend came and took us out to dinner! Whoaaaa! How exciting! How curious! How philosophically intriguing! How . . . utterly inane!

If there was supposed to be a point to this collection of stories, some kind of deeper meaning to it all, I sure didn't get it. It either went way, WAY over my head, or else. . . borrrrrrrring! But go ahead -- give it a try yourself. And then you can let me know which one you think is the bigger idiot -- me or the guy who told Auster he'd love to publish this brilliant, insightful book. I know which one my money's on: one, two, three, NOT IT!