Paul Auster

Morris Heller, the protagonist’s father, is on an airplane watching an old Hollywood film (*The Best Years of Our Lives*), which deals with soldiers returning home from the Second World War and having to rebuild their lives; and what an old friend, a well-known writer, once told him comes to mind: > the idea he is toying with is to write an essay about things that do not happen, about the unlive

The protagonist is a writer slowly emerging from a serious illness. On his daily walks, he enters a stationery shop, run by a Chinese man, and buys a notebook. He begins writing once more, but above all, a sequence of events is set in motion—some actually lived, others imagined and the product of illusions. Is the notebook magical? Does it possess the power to reveal what the writer had not pre

The protagonist loses his wife and children in a plane crash. To escape despair, he writes the biography of a silent-film actor who had vanished without a trace. Tracked down by Alma, with whom he falls in love, he learns that the former actor lives on a farm, where he has continued to make films that he has resolved to destroy upon his death. The protagonist reaches the country house to witnes

This is a book about memory, which is like > a place, a sequence of columns, cornices, porticoes. The body inside the mind, going from one place to another, and the sound of our footsteps as we walk, moving from one place to the next . The occasion to address memory arises from the death of the author’s father (the first part of the book): a man who had always lived a solitary life, not physi