I really enjoy Auster's voice in this memoir. ( )

Von der Sicht seines Babys auf den Mann im Mond über die Anbetung des Filmcowboys Buster Crabbe in seiner Kindheit über die Komposition seines ersten Gedichts im Alter von neun Jahren bis hin zu seinem erwachenden Bewusstsein für die Ungerechtigkeiten des amerikanischen Lebens zeichnet Bericht aus dem Inneren Esters moralische, politische und intellektuelle Reise auf seinem Weg ins Erwachsenenalter durch die Nachkriegsfünfzigerjahre bis in die turbulenten 1960er Jahre nach.

>Auster evoziert die Geräusche, Gerüche und taktilen Empfindungen, die sein frühes Leben prägten - und die vielen Bilder, die auf ihn zukamen, darunter auch bewegte Bilder (er liebte Zeichentrickfilme, er war verliebt in Filme), bis das Buch auf seinem einzigartigen Höhepunkt von der Prosa zur reinen Bildsprache übergeht: Der letzte Abschnitt von Bericht aus dem Inneren rekapituliert die ersten drei Teile, die in einem Album mit Bildern erzählt werden.

Das vierteilige Werk ist zugleich eine Geschichte der Zeit und die Geschichte des aufkommenden Bewusstseins eines bekannten literarischen Künstlers und beantwortet die Herausforderung der Autobiographie auf eine Weise, wie sie selten, wenn überhaupt, zuvor gesehen wurde.

I had given up on Auster in recent years. The novels were becoming too repetitive in style and substance. (It pains me to say that, since I still think of The New York Trilogy all the time.) I picked this up when I saw it at the library for old times' sake and began it that day. The first two thirds are very good, and the middle third--where Auster describes two movies that affected him as a kid--is fantastic. Anyone who has ever been affected by a movie when he or she was a kid should read this section. He describes The Incredible Shrinking Man as if it were Citizen Kane, which is the whole idea--to a kid, this was like Citizen Kane. Granted, after that he tackles I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, a much better movie, but the intensity remains. In both cases, he reduces the films to their lowest terms, arguing through the urgency of his writing that their protagonists are Everyman figures. I've been watching the original episodes of The Fugitive recently and often find myself thinking of them in the manner Auster uses when he writes of his favorite films: A man is accused of a crime he did not commit. By a chance occurrence, he escapes and assumes a new identity. However, he soon learns that his cover as a bartender will be threatened by . . . etc. Reading this part of the book actually made me want to try to do the same thing with my favorite movies.

The last third, however, is a falling off. Auster presents a series of letters he wrote while a student at Columbia and their scope is very narrow. He comes across as a whining, self-important graduate student, wringing his hands about French translations. Perhaps that was the point--I was naive enough to think that poetry mattered while the Vietnam War was occurring--but it doesn't make for good reading. I wish he would do a whole book of film synopses. ( )

What a sublime pleasure to get a glimpse into the personal fragments of one the quintessential American writers of our times. This might not be Auster at his best, but who cares, it is Auster after all: flowing sentences wrapped up in a psychology that some of us might know only too well.

The book is like a time capsule, with messages that are ready to be decoded differently by different readers, hopefully not first-time-Auster-readers, just to enhance the pleasure a little more. For me, it is impossible not to relate to my childhood memories, necessarily reconstructed, again and again, always imperfect and dependent on the context: Some of the pages sounding and smelling almost like home, some of them pretty alien. His childhood imagination of the great wars replaced with my remembering of horrors of the smaller ones.

The references to his other books trigger many other memories: this is Auster reshaping my memories of reading them; in an apartment flat that had been the location to so many weird adventures, on a airplane with full of passengers and false hopes. Memories of giving Auster books as gifts. Memories of talking about those books. Memories of remembering those conversations.

"There is nothing so depressing as to watch an uninspired stripper", and there's nothing like reading Auster, reporting from the past and the interior, after having tasted already this strong and beautiful spirit of literature, not only to be read but also savoured. ( )

I'm always intrigued with Paul Auster, and I admit he is one of my favorite writers (though there have been some duds over the years, like Timbuktu, or Brooklyn Follies). This one reminded me of the Hunger Artist or Winter Journal. I disagree with the negative reviews, particularly on the second section of the book, with the retelling of The incredible Shrinking Man and other film plots. The act of retelling a movie is not so much ekphrasis as revealing the particular subjectivity of Auster that was formed in having seen a film. I also didn't find the letters indulgent, and what's so irritating about the use of second person? A pronoun is merely rhetorical. The second person creates distance and mirroring. Auster here is indulging in memoir, but he's doing it in fresh experimental ways. ( )