Product Description

Paul Auster's Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure is a fascinating and often funny memoir about his early years as a writer struggling to be published, and to make enough money to survive. Leaving high school with 'itchy feet' and refusing to play it safe, Auster avoided convention and the double life of steady office employment while writing. From the streets of New York City, Dublin, and Paris to a surreal adventure in a dusty village in Mexico, Auster's account of living on next to nothing introduces an unforgettable cast of characters while examining what it means to be a writer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #714813 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780312422325
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Amazon.com Review
It's no wonder that Paul Auster (The Music of Chance, Leviathan, Mr. Vertigo) creates such singular characters. While his youth comprised a series of failures too unbelievable for fiction, it also equipped him with a range of experiences to draw from that most fiction writers only dream of. He worked with Bowery bums at a summer camp, had a childhood friend join the Weather Underground, and was a student at Columbia in 1968 at the height of the student uprisings there (and at which point, he boasts, he knew seven of the FBI's ten most wanted men). He worked on an oil tanker, for a French Mafia-style film producer in Paris, and for a rare-book organization in New York. He translated the North Vietnamese constitution from French into English (don't ask). His work brought him in contact to varying extents with Jean Genet, Mary McCarthy, Jerzy Kosinski, Sartre, Foucault, and John Lennon. The encounters and experiences must have been fascinating, failure aside, but Auster's prose here, sadly, lacks the tightness and luster of his fiction. The remainder--and major portion--of the volume consists of three plays, a baseball card game, and a detective novel, all written during this time.

From Library Journal
Coming upon this "chronicle of early failure," readers of translator, poet, screenwriter, and novelist Auster (Mr. Vertigo, LJ 6/15/94) may be charmed by his new publisher's presentation though left puzzled by the derivative offerings. The work consists of one original, down-beat essay, "Hand to Mouth," a flat record of Auster's inauspicious early years struggling to make money while writing (the essay was recently excerpted in Granta), and three appendixes: a medley of Beckett-inspired plays, an "action baseball" card game that Auster was convinced would make his fortune, and a Chandleresque detective novel, "Squeeze Play"?all of which failed in one way or another when first created. Auster's collection of essays and reviews, The Art of Hunger (Sun & Moon, 1991), develop more fully and satisfactorily the author's literary development, while the appendixes here will interest few but devoted literary archivists.
-?Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Auster's novels, from City of Glass (1985) to The Music of Chance (1990) and Mr. Vertigo (1994), are taut psychological dramas that revolve around odd and stressful relationships between mentor and student, con man and sucker, and seem dictated solely by randomness. Auster himself is camouflaged by the intricate patterns of his highly cerebral fiction, but readers of this meticulous memoir, an often alarming, unfailingly astonishing account of his long, frustrating journey into print, will find many anecdotes eerily familiar. Each interlude in Auster's willfully improvised life--from summer jobs that generated mismatched friendships with heavy-drinking drifters to his years at Columbia at the height of the sixties, the stints on board oil tankers, his desperately intuitive life in Paris, and his patchy freelance editing and translating gigs (endeavors that sound innocent but which, for Auster, were strangely dangerous)--is a template for scenes in his cunning novels. Profoundly complex and temperamentally unsuited for the nine-to-five world, Auster even tried to solve his financial difficulties by peddling an intricately designed card game he invented called Action Baseball, which is reproduced here as an appendix, along with three of his plays, and his first novel, a pseudonymous mystery. This fascinating volume of new and old works provides an extraordinary glimpse into the tough early years of a major literary figure, who now has two terrific films to his credit, Smoke and Blue in the Face, but it also proves the wiliness of Auster's talent: ever enigmatic and elusive, he leaves as much of his true self in shadow as in light. Donna Seaman

Customer Reviews

Not All Editions Include Game & Detective Novel Extras
Hand to Mouth, by itself, is a somewhat raw but not at all insensitive memoir of life before publishing. I found it engrossing at times.

Auster recounts his youthful rejection of middle class consumerism, his odd and fascinating encounters with all kinds of characters and life situations, his stay in Paris, his first marriage, his ...well... failures to make it big as a writer. His admirable sense of integrity (no jobs except ones literary) unfortunately kept the author wallowing in translation work to put food on the table, and the sense of pain, desperation and even a sort of starvation are palpable. Agonizingly, but rather fittingly, he tells only of his years BEFORE success. This is no rags to fame & riches story.

Hand to Mouth is basically a reality check. Of some value to anyone who wants to get published, but the only thing that keeps this from being totally depressing is our knowledge of Auster's eventual literary success.

Lovely sections about the wacky people he met on ships and on streets reveal inspiration for characters he brings alive in his humanistic fiction.

If you do buy an edition (check out the number of pages before you order) which contains "Action Baseball" and "Squeeze Play", you are in for a treat. The former is a complete card game and the latter is a detective novel. Squeeze Play was written under a pseudonym and features a Jewish private eye with a law degree from Columbia who has a taste for fine wine and music. Mickey Spillane gets urban Semitic spit & polish in this totally enjoyable bonus read.

For the true auster fan only
Like some obscure import record of your favourite band or musician, Hand To Mouth is really only going to appeal to the most die-hard fan. Auster's honest though somewhat uninteresting chronicle of his early failures may appeal to struggling 20-something wannabe writers, but generally the appeal is limited. One can't help but feel Auster should of held onto this material until later in his life - a complete autobiography in his later years would be more valuable.

The early previously unpublished works included in the book are a must for fans and Auster must be commended for being so brave as to include them here. Perhaps most entertaining is the publication of his 'action baseball' game.

Interesting autobiography, flat prose
This is a book for hardcore Auster fans only, I think. It has interesting tidbits that illuminate his prose and the 'chronicle of early failure' is indeed harrowing and interesting. yet, unlike most of Auster's prose, this account never trandescends itself; that is, it doesn't achieve the luminescence of the prose that Auster is capable of. There was a LOT of filler near the end of the book too (did we really need to see the Action Baseball game?) A far better account of the starving artist routine is Samuel Delany's _The Motion of Light in Water_