N° 144 - Buenos Aires, 22 December 2004

BOOK REVIEWS

El cuento de Navidad de Auggie Wren

Paul Auster

Ilustrated by Isol.

Edition and translation by Mariana Vera.

Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 2003.

Also published as El cuento de Auggie Wren (Barcelona, Editorial Lumen, 2003).

byGrisel Pires dos Barros

"He was right, of course.

If you don’t take the time to look,

you’ll never get to see anything."

Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story was first a text appeared in an American newspaper, The New York Times. The story goes that it was there that filmmaker Wayne Wang saw it, and he phoned Paul Auster at once and told him he intended to make a movie out of it.

In the film, that was called Smoke in English and Cigarros in Spanish, Paul (1) must write a Christmas tale as a commission for a newspaper, and that’s why Auggie Wren tells him a storyin which he also happens to be a leading role.

In that story, Auggie gets to the house of a shop-lifter who has lost his wallet while running away after trying to steal a few pocket books from the tobacco-shop where Auggie works. Auggie wants to give the wallet back, his Cristmas’ good deed. But when the door opens, it is not the shop-lifter who appears there, but his blind grandmother, who mistakes Aughgie for his grandson. Auggie doesn’t contradict her. From that moment on, they both decide to sep playing the grandson and granny game and spend Christmas together. Auggie exchanges Paul this story for a lunch.

El cuento de Navidad de Auggie Wren, now published in Buenos Aires by Sudamericana, tells the story that Auggie told Paul, and it also tells the story of how Auggie got to tell Paul his story.

The book I hold in my hands is marked by a series of encounters: Auggie and Paul, Auster and Wang, and Isol meeting Auster’s text and Wang’s film (2). This is the tale that Auggie told Paul, that Auster told The New York Timesand Wang, that Wang and Auster told Isol, and that they alltell us.

So far it all looks like pure tangle, one of those thread entanglements that our grannies made us unravel. (3). Bt if you look at it from the right angle, entanglements can have their fun, if you take the time to look for one end and follow the thread.

Let’s see, then, why is Auggie in the list of those telling stories? Is he a character? Is he an author? And what about Paul? Is he author or character?

El cuento de Navidad de Auggie Wrendeliberately erases the barriers which would letus easily make out those differences. The newspaper in which Paul Auster published his tale for the first time actually exists in real life, but it is also the paper which is sold to Paul (the character) in the story, and in that sense it belongs to the territory of fiction. So, is The New York Times prior or posterior to the story which it is publishing (and to Auggie Wren, who tells it)? Was it the chickenor theegg?

But resides, right at the beginning of El cuento de Navidad de Auggie Wren, we are warned that Auggie has asked that his real name shouldn’t be used because "Auggie doesn’t come out too well"… But then, is it his name, or is he just being called Auggie? Once again, there’s no way to know. The more we are told that the story is true, the more we doubt. It is not a matter of reader’s disbelief, it is rather a blurred frontier between reality (outside) and fiction (inside) the book.

Isol’s work, based on Auster’s text, confirms this approach.

Articulation between different sorts of perspective in a single image, with spatial constructions which are logically impossible, stresses this confusing interconnection of planes. This happens, for one thing, in the image corresponding to the beginning of Auggie Wren’s narration within the tale told by Paul. In the right inferior angle we recognize the bar where we know they are having lunch, i.e: where Auggie is telling the story. A little bit more towards the left, above, the narration of the thief’s chasing becomes image. Farther back, farther above, farther below, it all appears packed with buildings and bridges and rail road tracks, inhabited by toy cars and trucks; buildings are seen from above, from the front, from the sides; just like the cars, and one of them even drives through the boundary between the whole scene and the edge (here gigantic) of the typewriter on the desk. All these viewpoints, which would logically imply a spectator who would move about in space and time, one who could see successively from different points, are here presented simultaneously. A few pages before, the huge typewriter is the space where Paul settles down to battle “against Dickens’s ghosts, O. Henry’s, and other masters of Christmas spirit." (4); even prior to that, Auggie is lost behind a huge photographic camera.

Proportions of the depicted objects keep no relation with reality as we know it. One could think that elements are bigger when they take part of the plane of the framing tale where Auggie and Paul chat, and smaller when they are part of the framed tale. But proportions do not correspond to this logic either. In the contrary: they deliberately fracture it.

The fact that Isol has worked on many images by basing on photographed settings at scale stresses the blurring of the limits between what’s real and fictional. Is this a pipe on a desk or a fireplace in Auggie’s house?

It is, precisely, both. (5).

And that’s where the main point in this story and its main nucleus lie, because the point is in our believing the story or not:

"I stopped for a moment and studied Auggie while a malicious smile extended over his face. I couldn’t be sure, but in that moment he had such a mysterious look, so filled with deep joy, that I suddenly thought he had made it all up. I was about to ask him if he had deceived me, but I realized immediately he would never tell me. I had believed him and that was the only thing that mattered. As long as there is a single person who relieves it, no store can not be true." (6)

Clocks are another important element in Isol’s images, since another key in the store is the matter of time, as we explained above. We already said that El cuento de Navidad de Auggie Wren tells that tale and tells also another tale. Auggie is an artist. He has been photographing the same spot for years, from the same angle and at the same time. Every parameter remains constant, except time. It is time which intervenes to tell the story, which causes that space to get inhabited by diverse people, of all colours. Each photo is barely a particle; the total meaning is made up by the sum of those instants. Time is likewise present in each of Auggie’s "photographs" (7) also as movement (stressed by the driving cars, and spectacularly marked by the visual rides in the composition of images), but also in most of Isol’s illustrations, who masterfully exploits the visual resources in the interpretation she offers here(8). Auster’s prose, as in other of his novels, is agile and intense, and -while the narrative keeps going forward- it compels to contemplatively stop at each point of it, taking time to watch and not miss any detail.

Isol has said she does not work bearing in mind a child’s mind because she can’t know what they think; instead, she works from her own child. Nevertheless, for some people it is precisely her participation that determines a young addressee for this book (9). For others, the text by Auster —an adult literature writer (10)— makes this tale lie decidedly out of reach for children.

The story told in El cuento de Navidad de Auggie Wren proves them wrong. How does Auggie become an artist? From the moment he steals a camera. How does a child accede to books? By stealing them from a tobacco-shop in Brooklyn. At the beginning of the store, Paul does not consider Auggie an equal. Not even when he sees his photos. Only when he takes the time to look is he able to see, and to see him. That border between those who can and can’t acceed to art, those who can and can’t read this book, might be marked by social class, by age. But when one reads, when one constitutes himself as a reader, one stretches and arm precisely to the shelves that are more distant. Just the way I do, being 30, when I reach for Isol’s The balloon, or the way Mateo does, at 6, when he asks me to read him this "Christmas tale where there is no white of snow". Certain borders, says this book, deserve to be crossed.

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Notes

(1) In the printed versión, the carácter has no surname, and his name is the same of Auster. In the film, Paul’s surname is Benjamin, just like Walter Benjamin, whose ideas on narration and experience seem to have left their mark in Auster and in this tale.

(2) There appear some references to Wayne Wang film in Isol’s images. To begin with, the looks of the characters: Isol’s Paul and Auggie seem to correspond to the actors William Hurt and Harvey Keitel, who lent their bodies to these characters in Smoke. We can even see those references in the book in the images representing Auggie’s tobacco shop, as taken in Auggie’s photographs, it is possible to recognize the urban landscape of heights and distances in overlapping planes that in the movie are associated to the building where supposedly Auggie’s daughter lives.

(3) If we follow Isol, in the illustration on page 25 we’ll see that –behind the grandmother with whom Auggie talks- there is the key to the book, precisely.

(4) El cuento de Navidad de Auggie Wren, page14.

(5) It is also interesting to observe the way the doubt repeats itself out of the repetition of images on pages 8 and 9: Are Auggie and Paul looking at the text that floats over their heads or at the photos in the box holding them?

(6) El cuento de Navidad de Auggie Wren, page 30.

(7) The series of three images on pages 10 and 11. These are among the most “painted” images, in a book where many illustrations are backed upon photography.

(8) The use of the pointed line to signal the run of the character in the illustration on page 23 is an example of this.

(9) Thanks to Isol’s illustrations, El cuento de Navidad de Auggie Wren has been awarded the "Destacados de ALIJA” Prize (period August 2002 / December 2003), in the category: "Special Outstanding".

(10) Some of his most wellknown books in this line are The New York Trilogy (Barcelona, Anagrama, 1987), The moon palace (Barcelona, Anagrama, 1994), Mr. Vertigo (Barcelona, Anagrama, 1995) andThe book of illusions (Barcelona, Anagrama, 2003).

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Grisel Pires dos Barros () is a Professor and Master in Literature (UBA), and has a Post-degree on Infant and Youth Literature (CePA). She works as a teacher in high-schools and universities, and in capacitating courses for teachers in the city of Buenos Aires. She’s the editor to the printed page of literary diffusion No Quiero Ser Tu Beto and has taken part of investigation projects on literature and film.

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