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Around Town

Around the horn

By Frank Kuznik
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
June 11th, 2008 issue

Literature, literature, literature. American author Paul Auster (The Book of Illusions, Timbuktu, screenplays for Smoke and Blue in the Face) was gracious enough to take a break from heavy lifting at the Prague Writers’ Festival last week to talk politics, Prague and baseball.

Though this was Auster’s first visit to the Golden City, he’s spent a lot of time in Europe, starting with a three and a half year stint in Paris after grad school in 1971. “I wanted to find out if I could become a writer or not, which I couldn’t do in the States, because I was so distracted by politics and the war,” he said over Mattonis at the Hotel Josef. Living abroad gave him the conviction that he could write, and something else.
“It was very helpful in giving me a new perspective on the United States,” he said. “You understand what’s good about America — and not good about it.”
Auster missed some of the bloodiest years of the Vietnam War and nastiest years of Richard Nixon, but he’s made up for it recently. “The Bush administration has been the ugliest period I can remember in public life, even more than the Vietnam era and Nixon, crook that he was,” he said.
Like a lot of visiting Americans these days, Auster is excited about the historic candidacy of Senator Barack Obama, but cautious. “He’s exciting, he’s brilliant, but will America vote for him, given its deep-seated racial prejudices? I’ll be fascinated to find out. Symbolically, it would change a lot. And this is the optimist talking, but I think it would help our standing in the world.”
In between readings, interviews and book signings, Auster walked around the city and became entranced by the architecture. Even the interiors cast a spell. “I was sitting in a chair at that reception at the Mayor’s Residence, just trying to imagine what the Habsburg Empire was like at its peak,” he said.
A Kafka fan, he also felt the vicarious thrill of walking the same streets as his literary hero. But his most moving experience was visiting the Old Jewish Cemetery and adjacent Pinkas Synagogue, where the names of 80,000 concentration camp victims are inscribed on the walls. “I found an Auster family, a father, mother and a 12-year-old child,” he said. “I nearly broke down in tears. I couldn’t take it; I had to walk out.”
In Auster’s Hand to Mouth, a memoir of his early days as a struggling writer, he writes about a card game he invented that simulated a baseball game, and his repeated attempts to market it as a way to make ends meet. Fortunately for the literary world, he never succeeded. But baseball is still in his blood. As a 28-year resident of Brooklyn, he’s a diehard Mets fan.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said when asked about the Mets’ breathtaking collapse last fall. “I was in Europe, a juror at the San Sebastian Film Festival, when I picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune and saw they were in free fall.”
But, like every good fan, he has his theories. “Their offense depends on José Reyes, and he lost his focus in the second half last year,” he said. “Carlos Delgado, who’s supposed to be their big guy, is at the end of his career and can’t hit anymore.” And this year? “I don’t know if they have enough pitching and hitting.”
Auster has hit on a great idea to combine his literary and sports interests. One of his baseball buddies is a New England poet who is a Red Sox fan, and they’ve come up with a dream publication that takes its inspiration from Manny Ramirez, the outrageously talented but spaced-out Red Sox slugger. “We’re going to call it the Manny Ramirez Journal of Philosophical Inquiry.”

Frank Kuznik can be reached at fkuznik@praguepost.com


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