Motes v/s Nash

I promised to show my respects to Paul Auster, so here I go: I think he is a master story-teller and I would really enjoy to spend an afternoon sitting with him and listening to his stories like a little hobbit would (I would bring my pipe). What I like about his style is its charming simplicity: in The Red Notebook, for example, there are no sophisticated literary resources, no flashbacks, no inner voices; but just a plain story -told as you would tell it to a group of friends in a rainy afternoon over a cup of coffee-. If you can place books geographically The Red Notebook would be in the antipodes of the works of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce because there is nothing artificial or measured in it. It flows so naturally that the result is as charming as a medieval illuminated manuscript.

Having fulfilled this blog’s quota of flattery, I can now move on and say that, I think, he is wasting his talent.

Lancelot, Dante and Paul Auster

Some years ago an Irish friend of mine organized a seminar called “Ideas have Consequences”. I liked the title. It recently came back to my mind when I finished Inferno. Probably Dante would agree to tag the Comedy with something like “Actions have Consequences”: all the Comedy -and probably all medieval literature- rests on that idea. Think of Lancelot in The Quest of the Holy Grail. He cannot get to the grail because of his actions with Guinevere. But don’t understand the “because” as an arbitrary punishment.