Hello, today I want to talk about some improbable or not so improbable coincidences I found between two different writers (Paul Auster and VMS) and two different books (Winter Journal and SOT).
Paul Auster is an american author whose themes are identity, solitude and the struggles of a writer to do his work. He is also famous for his autobiographical writing style.
I was surprised he is not so famous in USA as he is in Europe (as far as I read). Also he is not so well received by the critics although is books sell huge.
Here I will be talking about particularly of one of his last autobiographical books called Winter Journal. Although most of his books have recurrent themes: identity, writers struggle, daily life problems and finding a meaning. It is also important to him the relation of things, coincidences, recurrences and so on. (ex. The Invention of Solitude)
VMS is... You know who he is. (Or maybe you don't yet) And to make his introduction short, lets say that he shares most of what I wrote above about Paul Auster.
He uses S. as a bibliographical characterization of his own struggles with the same themes.
Themes: identity, solitude, searching of love, compassion, understanding and respect. Writer struggles with his work and with a strange world that surrounds him. Autobiographical writing style. Books that sell huge but are not well received by some critics and so on.
Besides, both views of hegemony and tyranny are quite similar as far as I can tell.
Based on SOT and Winter Journal let's see some "coincidences":
(there are possibly more, tell me if you find some)
In the first chapter of SOT S. finds is way to a bar where he finds Sola reading. He is exhausted, totally wet and confused. Paul Auster enters a bar with his friends
after a long day of film making. He's wet since it was raining outside. He’s tired and he falls asleep. As for S. he is
shanghaied at the bar and passes out when his dragged out of it and recovers
conscience only inside the ship.
By the way, Paul Auster considers his wife an inspiration and he treats her like a muse. It recorded me of S. and Sola sometimes.
S. struggles constantly about his identity and the reasons
of his life. Paul Auster also debates constantly about his identity and he compares it’s
lacking to a time of voyage specially when you are inside a plane. As you fly
between two destinations you lose sight of who you are and get a sense of lost
of reality. Inside the ship, S. struggles with similar questions as he sails to
somewhere he doesn't know.
"... but nothing is more disconcerting to you than the ride in the plane itself, the strange sense of being nowhere that engulfs you each time you step in the cabin, the unreality of being propelled through space at five hundred miles an hour, so far off the ground that you begin to lose a sense of your own reality, as if the fact of your own existence were slowly being drained out of you, but such is the price you pay for leaving home, and as long as you continue to travel, the nowhere that lies between the here of home and the there of somewhere else will continue to be one of the places where you live."
Paul Auster, Winter Journal
If you substitute the plane for a ship (in that a plane is a kind of ship/vessel) and you imagine you are reading SOT, it could be something VMS could write himself.
After this S. has given a mission. He must kill by poison a
number of agents.
As for Paul Auster he describes a movie he once saw that he felt he
could relate with himself. It is a movie about a man that is poisoned. He finds
a doctor who tells him: “You have been murdered!”
In both books the coincidences of facts and the recurrences
of events appear quiet often an surge as a reason to justify the story.
The main theme of SOT is the struggles of a man belloging to
the labor movement against the power of capitalism and progress.
Paul Auster tells about his aversion to the ascension of the right, the
contemporary american culture and the end of the labor movement.
It seems to me that we are present with two very different books
that relate in many of their themes.
There is another similarity, in the narrator voice.
This is the first book by Paul Auster that I read where he uses the second-person narrator. I haven´t read everything from him though.
In SOT the only place this happens is in the description of agent 26 and FXC calls our attention to this fact in her footnote (SOT pg. 311).
Also, he mentions briefly being over a nazi concentration/labor camp that was now very different from what it looked before and he felt he heard the voices of the many Russian soldiers that had been buried at this site.
In SOT S. hears similar voices in the Vevodas cellar: "He hears the whispers of many thousands of restless souls and discerns the lost woman voice among them." (SOT pg. 411)
They both feel uncomfortable and dizzy about it. They both want to leave.
Also Paul Auster mentions suddenly about the Fall. As you know The Fall and the falling is a recurrent theme in SOT.
Telling us about a near fatal fall he gave himself, Paul Auster write: "Everyday, in every country around the world, people die from falls like that one." (WJ)
And he gets to fall two times in this book, one when he's still a boy and another time when he gets older.
And last but not least, if you were thinking about the birds that invade SOTs pages, you can also find an important bird in Winter Journal. It is a robin, and it is something Paul Auster expects the arrival with anticipation, since it will mean the arrival of Spring and the end of his winter.
By the way, he's winter is the winter he takes to write this journal/book. It is also the winter of his aging. And in that regard it is not so different from the S.'s winter in the Winter City.
