Below, read the preface to Buybook's edition of The Red Notebook by Paul Auster, signed by Semezdin Mehmedinović.
In his early twenties, Paul Auster wrote poetry. Then he mostly lived in France and earned money as a translator. Particularly successful were his translations of poets from the surrealist circle, Breton, Tzar, Eliard, Robert Desnos, which the new left updated in Paris after 1968 and made them globally popular. I think the influence of the poetry of Robert Desnos is visible in Auster's early lyrical works. He published his verses in low-circulation magazines, and as plaques at small publishing houses. These works were quite removed from the dominant poetic currents in American literature of the time. Perhaps because of this difference, he was friends with an important American poet, George Oppen, a writer with a very unique voice, whose poems were characterized by cerebrality and philosophy.
In the book Selected Letters of George Oppen, I was particularly interested in the correspondence with the young Auster, because these letters show how seriously and dedicatedly the future novelist pursued poetry. But then, in 1979, Auster decided to stop writing poetry, and he adhered to that decision for the rest of his life. To stop writing poetry then meant to stop writing.
Very soon after that, a tragic event happened, his father died and Auster wrote a memoir about this interesting man. The sudden loss of his father, unexpected because it was a man too young to die, confronted him with the frustrating feeling that there was much left unsaid between the two of them, which was a strong inner urge to write about it. So he returned to writing. The memoir will be the first part of the autobiographical book The Invention of Solitude , extremely important for its author because it will present the tone and narrative model of all his future books. A kind of found voice that he will not give up in time. All the important narratives of that prose, including themes of memory, solitude, and a pronounced interest in ways of being in the world, among other things, are present here. The title of this autobiographical prose about the father is Portrait of an Invisible Man .
So he returned to writing.
He soon finished his novel The Glass City , but faced a problem: 17 publishing houses refused to publish the book. He had to go through a short period of getting used to and accepting his narrative model, which was completely new and different from what was being published in America at the time. The Glass City is part of the now famous New York Trilogy , his most famous work.
Auster is an extremely productive writer, he wrote a decent number of novels, as well as autobiographical and memoir books. Since, as I said, the narrative model of his fiction and non‑fiction books is quite similar, critics have not distinguished between them from the beginning. When studies began to appear in which Auster's autobiographical prose was classified as fiction, he felt the need to publicly draw the line. He insisted that, unlike his novels, his autobiographical books were not fiction. Making that difference was important to him.
Among his other memoirs, the small, now with cult status, Red Notebook stands out. It is fragmented prose, and each fragment is a precisely executed story. It is no coincidence that its subtitle is "True stories". It is conceivable to me that a chapter from this book ends up in an anthology of short stories, in other words, to be attributed to fiction. Auster calls these fragments anecdotes. But that is not the specifics of the Red Notebook , because he calls the anecdote his ars poetica , an important narrative tool.
Fragments from The Red Notebook are a collection of interesting events that happened to the author or someone he knows. In these stories, he – according to his own testimony – tried to indirectly present his view of what he calls “the mechanics of reality”. There is no theology or philosophy in them, they are simple observations of how events in the world intersect in strange ways. So, coincidental events, synchronicities that happen to us in life, those small miracles in reality that seem to go beyond our imagination, are what primarily interests Auster in The Red Notebook .
Among dedicated readers of his books, the most mentioned fragment from the chapter "Why write?" in which Auster tells an anecdote from his childhood: as an eight-year-old in the company of his father, he went to a baseball game, and after it was over, he met Willie Mays, the most important baseball player to him, in front of the New York Giants stadium and gave him a paper to sign. The player asked for a pen which the boy did not have. There was no pen, and he did not get a signature. ( "Sorry, kid," he said. "Ain't got no pencil, can't give no autograph." ) That's the answer to why he writes, because after that tragic event for the boy, he always carries a pencil in his pocket, and its proximity was a persuasion to write something down.
Some stories here are happy, some tragic. One chapter is entitled " Accident Report ". In this book - and not only in this one - Auster moves between what is in English accident (an unexpected thing that usually happens with an unfortunate consequence) and accidental (by chance). The interest in researching tragic events comes from the feeling that every accident is something that does not necessarily happen. It happens because of a combination of circumstances. A small loss of attention, the slightest distraction and life will change forever.
In one story he describes an event where lightning killed a boy next to him, and a few moments earlier he was in his place and the same could have happened to him. Some of the stories here describe events that did not happen. They should have happened, but they didn't. It is an important topic for Auster. In the novel Sunset Park , the novelist character, Renzo, is thinking of writing a book "about things that didn't happen."
When it comes to coincidences, they dominate these stories, but they also go beyond the book, so that some anecdotes published here, according to Auster's testimony, have their extension in real life. Forty years after that encounter outside the New York Giants stadium, the Red Notebook reached the old and retired player Willie Mays and after reading a story in which he was mentioned, he signed the baseball the writer received as a present for his sixtieth birthday.
To share a lively, interesting story with others, I guess that is the essence of literature. The need to tell stories. The need to describe a fascinating event to the reader. Nothing less than that.
Semezdin Mehmedinovic