In spite of not having felt as "connected" to these rather exquisite "novellas" as I have with other Paul Auster's books, I still must admit the whole exploration of the fragility of one's identity and the randomness of one's life has had me hooked onto their reading, with "Ghosts" and "The locked room" having been the ones I liked the most.
I have once more written down some of the sentences that have impacted me and which have surfaced several times already since I have finished reading the book last night.
"We exist for ourselves, perhaps at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another - for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself."
"Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge - none of that tells us much."
"He was there for you, and yet at the same time he was inaccessible. You felt there was a secret core in him that could never be penetrated, a mysterious centre of hiddenness."
"What I had done so far amounted to a mere fraction of nothing at all. It was so much dust, and the slightest wind would blow it away."
"I have been struggling to say goodbye to something for a long time now, and this struggle is all that really matters. The story is not in the words; it is in the struggle."
Still worth being read.
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