One of my goals in 2020 is to read more. See other books I've read or listened to here.
When creating my goodreads account, I couldn’t remember if I had read The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster yet. I had not so picked it up right away!
Nathan Glass moves to brooklyn to die. Instead he finds new reasons for living.
This novel hits all the Auster notes I look for in his later books; Brooklyn places I love and recognize, Vermont locations that I love and recognize, family connections, disconnections, and reconciliations, ruminations on death and the shortness of life, and the magic in the mundane of living. Not an overly short novel, this was extremely easy to read and flew by. I’m always slightly surprised when this is so for an Auster book, as the first book I read by him was so dense and confusing (City of Glass). Another theme of Auster’s that I enjoy is that of men who love women for their feminine qualities, their beauty and temperance, but who also understand that there is more to females than just that. They have this understanding, but they cannot fully understand the women themselves. Perhaps due to my age and upbringing, I understand the struggle that he depicts in his aging male characters. That of aging men, who love women, who want to understand them, but have outdated ideas of how to interact with them and how to love them. Glass, in this book, takes a more open minded approach to the women in his life than many of Auster’s heroes. This book also have a few side plots that I liked and were well developed, and could have led to full books themselves. A nicely complex view of one person’s life and how it intersects with all others. I would recommend this book to those who have read Auster before, those who like quiet books about people’s lives, those who live in Brooklyn or Southern Vermont, and people who like stories about second starts later in life.
Have you read this book? Would you call it a “quiet” book?
This review is part Wednesday of my Week of Books. Check out my new YouTube/BookTube Channel: Mad Cat Quilts for more book content (plus cats, garden, sewing, eating, asmr, etc…!).