title: Winter Journal by: Auster, Paul published: 2012-08-21 read: 2021-03 preview

I made this review months after reading it, as for the abovementioned. So I’m flipping through the book to refresh my memory. I recognise every passage I read…but I get no coherent picture. So I must have gone through all 300 or 400 pages or so, but… why?

I’m going through public reviews to help myself, and find, in the Guardian, that it is a “rambling, informal collection of memories, musings, and minutiae, presented in the second person and loosely connected by the themes of ageing and the body”.
There you have it.

Winter Journal is a memoir written by Paul Auster that was published in 2012. Why was it written? A book about mortality, baked into triviality.

The book is a meditation on the physicality of life and the body’s relationship to memory, time, and identity. Auster reflects on his own experiences of ageing and the changes that come with it, such as the loss of hair, teeth, and other bodily functions. He also explores the idea of the body as a repository of memory, and how our physical experiences shape our sense of self.

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.

I think I love all of Auster’s work. That rule is fortified by this exception.