Results tagged “Paul Auster”

The only connection that I could quickly find between screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and novelist Paul Auster is that they had a public “conversation” earlier this year. (The promised subjects suggest at best a superficial relationship: “the art of filmmaking, writing, and — yes — Hollywood.” How pedestrian.)

This is curious to me, because Arriaga’s script for the Tommy Lee Jones-directed The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is classic Auster.

And I don’t mean that it bears a resemblance to Auster. If you’ve ever experienced The Music of Chance (either the book or the faithful film adaptation), Moon Palace, Mr. Vertigo, or any number of the author’s other works, you could be forgiven for thinking that Auster was behind Three Burials, and perhaps was engaging in the ecologically sound but creatively deficient practice of recycling.

The movie begins in Auggie Wren’s cigar shop with omniscient chatter about the Mets and ends in a deli with a made-up tale about how Auggie got his first camera. Almost everything in between is also bullshit, in the sense that its relationship with objective reality is utilitarian. We speak the truth when it suits our needs, but we shouldn’t let it get in the way of the story we’re trying to spin.

Smoke, the 1995 collaboration between director Wayne Wang and author Paul Auster, isn’t judgmental about lies and half-truths. It pays respect to and finds value in narratives of all sorts, from an anecdote about Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh and the weight of smoke to the construction of identity through fibs.

But that doesn’t really become clear until the deli scene, in which Auggie tells about how he had Christmas dinner with the blind grandma of a kid who shoplifted from his store and ended up taking a brand-new camera from her apartment. Auggie’s audience, a novelist named Paul Benjamin, gently summarizes the movie:

“Bullshit is a real talent, Auggie. To make up a good story, a person has to know how to push all the right buttons. I’d say you’re up there among the masters.”“What do you mean?”“It’s a good story.”

It is a good story. And Smoke won’t let you forget it.

2007 will be the year of reading.

Having read exactly zero books from cover to cover in 2006, I decided that I would read two books a month this year.

I am a slow reader. I will choose short books.

Much like the Boston Red Sox, the movie Game 6 hauls so much baggage that triumph seems nearly impossible. It’s akin to being down three games to none to the Yankees in a best-of-seven series. Lo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ong odds. But somehow ... .

The blog “Notes from Classy’s Kitchen” recently cited my essay on Stone Reader.

Lulu on the Bridge stands proudly in the realm of fictions that mine the rich territory of what might have been: the classic short stories “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (by Ambrose Bierce) and “The Garden of Forking Paths” (by Jorge Luis Borges), and the more recent films Jacob’s Ladder, Sliding Doors, and Run Lola Run. What makes Lulu interesting — and difficult — is that it doesn’t try to sell fantasy as reality; Paul Auster offers a story with the logic of dreams — that is to say, no real logic at all.

There is the sneaking suspicion reading The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster’s collection of short novels, that the works are related. The hunch is not only that the stories are related thematically or in their ultimate message or outcomes — they most certainly are — but that they represent a single, cohesive work rather than three repetitive novellas.

When Smoke was released in 1995, it received generally good notices as an intriguing but slight art-house film. Critics noted the literary sensibility of novelist Paul Auster, but they didn’t appear to understand how the movie fit into his body of work.