Schavelzon Graham Agencia literaria Barcelona

Report from the Interior

NARRATIVE. BOOKET, 2015. 320 PAGES.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

Report From the Interior is a companion text to the 2012 Winter Journal. Where that book was a history of the author's body, this one is a history of his psychological development, from childhood through early adulthood. Both use second-person narration, which is easy to label a gimmick, but here it feels natural, inextricable from the rest of the prose.

"In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts."

From his baby's-eye view of the man in the moon, to his childhood worship of the movie cowboy Buster Crabbe, to the composition of his first poem at the age of nine, to his dawning awareness of the injustices of American life, Report from the Interior charts Auster's moral, political, and intellectual journey as he inches his way toward adulthood through the postwar 1950s and into the turbulent 1960s.

Auster evokes the sounds, smells, and tactile sensations that marked his early life and the many images that came at him. The final section of Report from the Interior recapitulates the first three parts, told in an album of pictures. At once a story of the times -which makes it everyone's story- and the story of the emerging consciousness of a renowned literary artist, this four-part work answers the challenge of autobiography in ways rarely, if ever, seen before.