Not only books live, but also bookcases. Online I found pictures on which the street book box in Venlo only consisted of two open compartments with drawers (and in good weather a basket underneath). A shelter was added to protect the words against the elements. A second cupboard popped up and finally, to finish it, a small facing brick of an elderly woman in a mountain landscape.
In the left drawer Brooklyn foolishness From Paul Auster, in whose work sometimes also seems to be a healing effect from the physical book. Auster, dead for ten months, gave Brooklyn foolishness (Ton Heuvelman’s translation of Brooklyn Follies2005) A dying pregnant starting sentence: “I was looking for a place to die quietly.” But dying Nathan Glass does not: he recovers after lung cancer – something his creator was not given. Glass is not a writer, but a retired seller of life insurance policies that lets his latent literary desires run free in his Book of human foolishnessan inventory of human flaters, blunders and other uselessness, recorded in bloc notes and on the back of envelopes and other paper that a person has available.
In the meantime, Glass is also the Ik figure of the novel, a capacity in which he turns out to be a real Austerman. Take his ability to give meaning to apparently meaningless coincidences. Then he writes full of wonder about how a piece of paper, in this case a Boarding Passat the top of an airplane staircase slips out of the fingers: “That I saw flutter down in the direction of the crack between the plane staircase and the aircraft itself – the narrowest opening, less than two millimeters wide […]”You guess how this ends. What is more difficult to guess is that this passage advocates the end of the novel (that I will soon betray). One of the most beautiful descriptions of Austers Oeuvre is one of his book titles: The Music Of Chance.
Glass is a false storyteller who likes to wander from the main line of his story. The latter consists of the Brooklyn weather of three men. They find each other, of course, after a casual encounter in the shadow of world literature. In an antiquarian bookshop, after years, Glass affects his adult cousin Tom Wood, who dreamed of a grand career in the literature study, but eventually got stuck in it. The owner of the bookstore, the convicted scammer Harry Brightman, also hooks for a new start in life.
As befits a book of follies, it becomes Brooklyn Follies Told with lightness and swier. Between the rules it appears that Glass quickly develops warm feelings for the male outcasts in his life, but that he looks forward to quite a few women (his ex, his daughter, the waitress he thinks he is in love with) Meter can look outside his own perspective.
The circumstances clear in the city, which is going to stand more and more pleasant against the Buiten-Brooklyn world, where the neoconservatism of George W. Bush seemed to threaten the most beautiful American values. This is how the desire for a shelter to hide for the geopolitical elements plays a role in the novel. It ends with Glass, “as happy as a person can feel” on the early morning of September 11, 2001.