The world is ruled by chaos

“The world is ruled by chaos. The unforeseeable lies forever in ambush” (publisher’s note). It is only after suffering great pain and distress following on an unexpected discovery beneath the blue cover of a notebook or experiencing great fear after a hearty laugh elicited by a scene in a silent movie has faded away that the lives of the leading characters in Paul Auster’s previous two novels, “Oracle Night” and ”The Book of Illusions”, undergo a deep change.

In his latest novel, “Brooklyn Follies”, a man seeking a quiet place where to silently put an end to a sad and ridiculous life sparks off a series of highly consequential events. To fill in the time apparently still left to him after a serious illness and a divorce, he starts making a record of the trifle daily accidents he recalls having befallen him in his long career as a person, such as the times he fell or tripped over, the embarrassing statements he had made, his slips of the tongue (“if I don’t believe it I don’t see it”). Life’s taught him that “nothing should ever be taken for granted”. Yet finding a long-lost and cherished nephew once more is something he hadn’t banked on; nor the fact of becoming deeply involved in the life of his neighbours; or of becoming acquainted with the strange owner of a bookshop; or of getting to know a young and bizarrely introverted grandchild and a woman. In the last lines, as he walks under a blue sky, he declares he is the happiest man alive. Trouble is it’s eight o’clock in the morning of that fraught day in September when yet another tragedy is about to strike.

Story-wise, it’s an open ending, in the usual Auster style. They’re the sort of endings he prefers, when things are still on the move, with still another page to be written, a new possible turn of events, another discovery to be made. Auster is an extraordinary poet of chance, and chance is effectively inexhaustible. His stories are built up around this acute awareness. That’s the way he’s always approached his craft as a writer, starting from his earliest poems right up to the fifth line of “New York Trilogy”, the astonishing novel that in the mid-nineties brought celebrity to the man who is today considered to be one of the greatest contemporary American writers.

Born in New Jersey in 1947, for several years Auster lived in France, writing poetry, interviewing famous writers, and eking out a living through all sorts of trades. The fifth line of the “Trilogy”, then, runs as follows: “… he would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

But that was much later. In the beginning there was simply the event and its consequences”. In “Experiment in truth”, published in Italy, as all his other works, by Einaudi, the writer states that the idea for his first novel came from dialling a wrong number. A phone call to the wrong subscriber and a whole new world opens up. Writing and words are mean and medium to him for exploring the world. But then again, of course, the meaning potential of words is the ignition factor sparking off new events leading to unexpected and engrossing discoveries Auster has this to say about Quinn, the key character in “City of Glass”, the first part of the Trilogy: “What interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories”. Like a never ending thread weaving a never ending fabric. Quick and keen at spotting coincidences and seeing where they may lead. Quick to catch onto any snag in the works, for there’s invariably a snag. The author always refrains from coming to any conclusion, from positing any explanation, from drawing any moral; such considerations and conceits are in fact quite irrelevant to him. What matters is the pleasure of the story and its telling. It’s about the unadulterated pleasure of feeling a sense of astonishment at how events may be more or less in or out of synch with one another, at how they jostle and jog with and overlay each other (who can say whether only apparently, seeing them one way or the other depending on what the listener perceives as relevant, on her experience, on how keenly attentive and boldly scrutinising she is).

That’s at least the impression one gets reading the works of this skilful storyteller. Being open- and sharp-eyed as to what goes on about us inevitably stirs up words, words which may lead us, if we’re willing and game enough to follow them through, to any place other than the one we’re in at the time. In a poem written many years ago, Auster claims that “there is no escape from the word that is born in the eye”. In another collection dated 1978 called “White space”, he writes: “Something happens, and from the moment it begins to happen, nothing can ever be the same again”.