The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews

by Paul Auster

In this astonishingly acrobatic work, Paul Auster traces the compulsion to make literature--or art--through essays on Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, Laura Riding, Knut Hamsun, John Ashbury, and other seminal figures of our century.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Literature, Literary Criticism, Criticism, 20th Century, Collections

312 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1992

About the author

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Bloodbath Nation, Baumgartner, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012, he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of fiction. He was also a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN/Faulkner Award (The Music of Chance), the Edgar Award (City of Glass), and the Man Booker Prize (4 3 2 1). Auster was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He died at age seventy-seven in 2024.

Reviews

[Stephanie ~~ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I pulled this down off the bookcase and looked at my notes in the margins. Today we lost a literary icon, and amazing human. Rest in power, Paul Auster. 😢

[Valerie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished in the late evening. In the Paul Auster style, I picked up an indistinct proof from a second hand bookstore yesterday, titled 'The Red Notebook'. I don't know if this book that I have logged on Goodreads is the same as the book that I picked up (for example, it has an extremely different amount of pages), but it was the closest I could find. I don't know if the form that I read is the same as the one this one is.

For some reason, I challenged myself to read the whole of this thing today, despite having work and plans after work. I was successful. I read it during breakfast, waiting for the tram, I read it waiting for a coffee, and for thirty minutes in the court library at lunch. Then, waiting for the tram, or late in the evening. I am glad to have read it so quickly, in all of these cracks.

My version contains no blurb or description and so I went into it completely blind.

The book starts off with a series of fragments/ short chapters, constituting the eponymous ‘The Red Notebook’. I first presumed the fragments fictional, but on the ninth or tenth fragment, realised they were events (purportedly) from Paul Auster’s real life.

Then follow three prefaces to books that Auster has presumably taken a part: an anthology of French poems; a compilation of entries by the French writer Mallarme, of his son, Titus; a memoir by a high wire acrobat. The latter two translated by Auster into English. The former collated by him. The preface to the anthology was especially dense, I felt as if I were peering at the lid of a bottomless well (not even the opening of the well. The lid.) The Mallarme section I was moved and charmed by (although it references a Rembrandt painting that I cannot find anywhere online).

Then follow a series of interviews of Auster where he talks about his novels and his writing process.

Then, a brief finale – an ode to (or a prayer for) Salman Rushdie.

And so forms this Austerian puzzle.

Because I am an eternal Auster fan, the strangeness and unpredictability of this funny little book was all very pleasing to me. Some of the interviews tread the same ground, there is one anecdote that is repeated perhaps three or four times across the span of the book. There are references in the interviews to Mallarme, to the French acrobat. I felt as if I were on a fact-finding mission to uncover Auster’s person, of the events and the art that shaped his life. There was a scrapbook sense about it. Unsurprisingly there is no better way to understand Paul Auster than from a series of oblique and bewildering angles.

For future reference: In philosophical terms, I’m talking about the powers of contingency. Our lives don’t really belong to us, you see – they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.

[Katja Vartiainen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book, I've been carrying from country to country. A really delight to read, since Auster is an excellent writer and user of words. There are forwards, essays an introduction to modern French poetry anthology(which was a bit stiff to read, when you haven't read the poets).

It's interesting to get inside Auster's writing-head( if it can be separated from the personal one, even). I didn't know his almost obsession with coincidences, and the fact he has them in his books has led to criticism about the 'realistic' aspect of his work. Hah, but they do happen, and if one see so blind in life, I feel sorry for your sad life. It's also inspiring to read about Kafka from Auster's point of view. I learned some new things. The artist path, be it author or painter is always fascinating. To see how other creators struggled, questioned, and luckily in Auster's case used the moment that was given to share their talent.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate Auster's essays and nonfiction much more than the fiction for which he is famous. I love this book. Auster's insights into "outsider art" are spot-on. Most importantly, his essay on Hunger turned me on to Knut Hamsun, so that alone is worth the price of admission.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admire Paul Auster's fiction and its neo-allegorical explorations of the existential (I pulled that phrase from the Alphabet Soup I ate for lunch-- seriously), and while I've enjoyed the thematic tension and play of his novels, I've always had reservations about his prose style; for a major writer, his sentences are often as dulcet and graceful as cavemen playing a game of jacks. This collection of essays and prefaces on mainly avant-garde-ish writers (I'll ignore the interviews, which are mostly biographical and craft-related) is more informational than astute, and finds his writing sharpened, but dull: the architecture of the sentences and paragraphs is more adroit (with the exception of the titular essay, which reads like a slightly precocious undergrad paper-- it may well be), but the rhetoric is austere and unengaging. Despite having started his career as a poet, Auster displays limited flair for metaphor, simile, and lyricism (these may seem glamour qualms, but sometimes it's the eyeshadow in a writer's voice that catches your eye). And his observations and points, the meat of the book, are, while occasionally pungent, more often bland and regurgitated. Nonetheless, Auster is a vital mainstream contemporary author, and is to be commended for offering selections from his personal canon of influences, many of whom seem delicacies one would forego otherwise.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It is an art that begins with the knowledge that there are no right answers. For that reason it becomes essential to ask the right questions. One finds them by living them."

His essay on Knut Hamsun's Hunger is the best in the book. You can read it online here.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Step back David Foster Wallace, I think this guy knows more than you and I combined, byatch. Seriously, the man attacks literature voraciously and relays its pathos and stories in seamless essays and interviews. He even actually gives poetry more than a sidelong glance.

[Sofie · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an array of feeling. It is a very strange composition of pieces of writing. Even with some parts that nearly killed me, I am left unable to award it with less than four stars.

Some thoughts:
- Title essay, The Art of Hunger: The art of Auster (unputdownable)
- He makes poetry shine with such grace, yet it does not make me a poetry reader. I think I will never be. At times it is too academic and mysterious for me
- He explains the brilliance of plotless literature (I loved loved that piece)
- At times, it is totally lost on me. In fact, some of it reads like poetry (loop closed, if you know what I mean)
- I needed to take long breaks from this as I feared I would die from exposure (the chapter on twentieth century French poetry absolutely killed me!)
- ... But then we return to the Auster I adore, his real strange life experiences revealed, his fiction transformed into a very special mirror, in place of a fantasy

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Auster’s non-fiction is just as brilliant and compelling as his fiction. The interviews here dig deep and are pretty enlightening, and shed some interesting light on his process. The essays on Kafka and Resnikoff were great.

[John McNulty · Rating 2 out of 5]

As all things Auster, so eminently readable but the subject matter is a bit dry for me.

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hated this books to be honest. The concept was interesting, but that was it. Everything else was mind-numbingly boring. The writing wasn't engaging and I had to force my way through every page.

[Obetta Maurice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful volume of essays on art. Brilliant

[An]

on and on it goes

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm grateful to have read this not just because of Auster's excellent, excellent style, but also for the so many new writers and poets he's introduced me to, and the new ways of looking at those I already knew that he's likewise given me.

Auster's essay on Knut Hamsun's novel, "Hunger," wherein the protagonist intentionally starves himself (but only insofar as he doesn't kill himself) as a way of exploring the limits of reality and language, was a fucking trip. "New York Babel," in which Auster considers Louis Wolfson's "Le Schizo et les Langues", was downright amazing. Wolfson is a schizophrenic American who, finding English intolerable because it was the language of his bullies - most notably his unsympathetic mother, learned various foreign languages, constantly plugged his ears, or listened to foreign languages so as not to be "assaulted by English." "The Decisive Moment," which looks at the works of the Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff was a master study of how language's sparseness can be highly evocative.

Other essays that I enjoyed were on Beckett's relationship to the French language - "From Cakes to Stones"; Laura Ridings exploration of the limits of (her own, not tout court, says Auster) poetry; "The Poetry of Exile,"- an examination of Paul Celan's work; "Book of the Dead,"- a reading of "The Book of Questions by the French-Egyptian Jewish writer Edward Jabés; "Innocence and Memory" on Giussepe Ungaretti; "The Battlebooth Follies"- on the Oulipo writer Georges Perec, whose work - Life: A User's Manual (1978) - remains one of the most outstanding novels I have ever read; and perhaps most movingly, "Kafka's Letters," which wrung an involuntary tear out of me.

[Kathy Duffy]

Paul Auster's writing is so elegant, so concise, that I find it exceptionally beautiful on almost any subject. These essays are for the most part critical analysis on various poets, that were so incredibly well written that I have already inter-library loan requested two of them already. I found his pieces on Beckett to be excellent and the Preface to an anthology on Twentieth Century French Poetry to be absorbing.

He has made me excited to find and read Reznikoff, Laura Riding and John Ashberry. I actually enjoyed his writing so much, that I read several of these more than once. I will have to track down some of Paul Auster's poetry next...if his non-fiction is that elegant, I look forward to his poetry.

[Brent Legault · Rating 4 out of 5]

After recently rereading Hamsun's Hunger, I thought it only fitting to reread the Auster's essay. It was excellenter than I remembered and so are several others I dipped into. Auster was a busy young man, writing things that meant things. While I, well, while this is about the best I can come up with. Still, I never yet wrote a novel which had a dog as its main character. For that I am everproud.

[Jules Vilmur · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the "Red Notebook" and "Why Write" while sitting in the therapist's waiting room and it was well worth the co-pay I forked over. Oddly enough, I hadn't read Paul Auster's novels or other work, or the eassay upon which the collection is based. But having glimpsed these bits behind his pen, I suspect I will set out to do so now.

[Ji · Rating 4 out of 5]

A young folk struggling in Paris dreaming to live on his writing. For some reasons I remembered the title as "hand to mouth" where this book title could have been confused with the Kafka story "the hunger artist". Nonetheless, a fun and meaningful read as my memory told me.

[Éliane Lanovaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty enchanting book about what writing really is. It opened up new avenues to me as a writer, and I’m very glad I picked it up!
I only rated it 4 stars because it’s a bit obscure in places, and there are some lengthy sections that didn’t resonate for me, but it’s still very good!

[Kristie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think about The Red Notebook at least twice a week.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very inspiring collection of essays (literary critiques), personal reflections, and interview excerpts from this erudite author.

[Lisa]

very good

[Beatrice McDonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely brilliant book and one that I am entirely grateful toward for having lead me to certain other stars most notably Le Schizo et les Langues by Louis Wolfson.

[Maurizio Manco · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Se potessi scrivere il libro che porto dentro di me, sarebbe l’ultimo. Ma è impossibile. Se scrivo, è perché c’è sempre un libro da rifare." (Provvidenza. Conversazione con Edmond Jabès, p. 146)