Brooklyn Follies

I learned that I still love Mr. Auster, however I feel as though I've read this before somehow, hmmmm

With Paul Auster so highly recommended, I looked forward to this, my first book.

it early delivered a complicated yet zipping along plot which soon delved into predictable Harry
and boring & improbable inaction with too many stupid choices and too much cliche crammed into one overlong story.

'Poe and Thoreau' was the highlight, with advice to "...read, write, think."

Rufus and Honey were the memorable characters.

It is never too late to restart your life. Nathan thought he will have a quiet retirement but it is not so. He reconnected with his nephew and niece, who both rebuilt their lives too. A fast and snappy read, I especially like the tone of the book. There were also musings about life, which I could identify with.

Paul Auster is one of my favourite authors. His unbridled fantasy enables him to create hope in every novel that starts out from misery.

Oi. The biggest problem with this book is the consistent use of very unlikely things to move the plot forward. It was, well, convenient. Also, mixing funny and sad things does not necessarily give depth. Also, the narrator's death wish is thoroughly unconvincing. You can skip it, though it will divert you for several hours on a bus.

After a divorce and a cancer scare, Nathan Glass, in search of "a quiet place to die", has moved into a bachelor apartment in Brooklyn. But cutting himself off in urban solitude doesn't seem to be all that easy - in no time at all he's bumped into his long-lost nephew Tom, who turns out to be living in the same neighbourhood, and, despite himself, becomes the centre of a new extended family network, part elective and part biological.

Like The music of chance, it's a fantasy, written in a style that's superficially realistic but turns out to be merrily skipping over all sorts of difficulties when you look at it more closely. Auster clearly doesn't care that there's a real world adjacent to that of his fiction in which Coca-Cola in the fuel-tank would not immediately disable a car, or in which the addition of an unexplained little girl to your household would set off alarm bells with school authorities, social workers, and the like, or in which an heir has to do a bit more than swan off to Jamaica saying he doesn't want the money before probate can be granted. That's our problem, not his. And of course that's part of the reason he can get away with writing such an upbeat book: it's a comedy, we're not meant to think that the world is actually like that, but we are meant to conclude something about human nature and the way we need other people's support to deal with the nasty stuff that is always lurking round the corner.

The Brooklyn Follies calls to mind Auster's early works. Back to New York, and loneliness, a bit of detective work, and a healthy dash of coincidence. It's one of those works that makes me wonder if I'm actually smart enough to read Auster (but I guess that's the case with most of his works).

This book should win Auster new admirers wrote the Sunday Telegraph on the jacket of my paperback copy. Faint praise indeed from the anonymous author, but more than this travesty deserves. I discovered Auster when his New York Trilogy was first published about twenty years ago and delighted in a new and interesting voice in world literature. Since then, sadly, the quality of his works has been very mixed, with none scaling the heady summits of The City of Glass. The recent Travels in the Scriptorium was a decent if imperfect effort. Not so this folly.

This one is told in the first person by Nathan Glass, a retired insurance salesman. The quality of the writing is about what I’d expect from an insurance salesman. Auster often packs his books with stories and this one is no exception. However, these tales are implausible, sentimental twaddle for the most part. The characters are among the cheesiest I’ve met. I shouldn’t have persevered to the end but I felt I owed it to Auster for his better work. Who knows? Maybe it was a big joke and the punchline would be revealed on the last page. Wrooong!! Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the last page arrived:

It was eight o’clock when I stepped out onto the street, eight o’clock on the morning of September 11, 2001 – just forty six minutes before the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre.

There wasn’t a dry seat in the house! Sorry Paul, I’ve been loyal and I’ve been patient, but when a publisher is screaming for the next book, don’t let him have it unless it’s really ready.

A coming-of-old-age, fuzzy-dog story, wandering thru several people's lives--most would be ok as somewhat distant friends.

With a miracle of semi-criminal death and something close to love thrown in.

This book starts out with the narrator 'looking for a place to die', one might expect it to be downbeat as a result of that. On the contrary, this is a very positive book, full of events made possible by the narrator's can-do attitude. Chat up a total stranger on behalf of his nephew who fancies her? No problem! Car all but written off in an act of vandalism? Let's put up at a local guest house and make lifelong friends out of the owners, not to mention getting on famously with the local mechanics into the bargain. I would still have been rolling around in the gutter bemoaning my appalling luck. It's all so relentlessly positive, if I was told this was A M Homes writing under a pseudonym I would believe it.

I just wrote what I think was a very thoughtful and insightful review of The Brooklyn Follies. Then by accident, just as I was tinkering with the last sentence, my browser skipped back to the previous site it had viewed. All my words winked out of existence. So fine. That seems like something that Paul Auster might build into a potentially meaningful error, illustrating the folly of human effort and invention in a world that is unambiguously destined for eradication.

I liked this book. I didn't love it, but it had some memorable moments. It was also different enough from Auster's other books that, despite my reservations, I find I've grown a little more fond of it since completing it. It also has some nice little anecdotes about literature. I like those.

I am really struggling to figure out where the many positive reviews for this novel are coming from. First of all, the writing is trite and the dialogue is riddled with cliches. Although the plot, at first, seems creative, it quickly dissolves into a mess of overused and predictable twists. A "feel good" novel of the worst kind.

There are already so many reivews, so I will just add that I enjoyed this book about a man who, upon retiring, divorcing and recovering from an illness, thinks his life is over and settles in to die. But, life is full of chance encounters and Nathan reunites with his family and establishes relationships with neighbours. Paul Auster brings us a story about belonging, family and uncertainty.

This was a really enjoyable read even though the premise is that the protagonist, an older man, moves to NYC to die. What makes this book thoroughly engaging is how many stories about writers and life in general are found here. I also really enjoyed some of the conflicts-a child that refuses to talk, a woman who needs to be freed from the Christian right wing husband and in the midst of everything is the protagonist who realizes his life is pretty full of people who need him just as he was getting ready to join the choir invisible.

Only Paul Auster could seamlessly stitch such diverse and fascinating stores and anecdotes together. Within a few pages, he tells the story of the Wittgenstein's abuse of his elementary school pupils and their refusal to forgive him twenty years later and then tell the tale of the main character, Nathan, tried to retrieve a buzzing Shick razor accidentally embedded in a toilel bowl.

Auster is known for delving into surrealistic meta-mysteries and mind-twisting tales of inner turmoil. But in contrast this is his most accessible book. Funny, warm, and as with all his novels‐‐
entertainingly philosophical.

Writing out and categorising the extent of human folly is not for everyone, but for Nathan Glass, ex-insurance salesman, ex-husband and apparently ex-father, it seems that is all there is left to do. Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster is a poignantly funny look at humans and their consistently inevitable way of stuffing up!

After surviving a cancer scare, our hero finds himself drawn back to his old neighbourhood of Brooklyn to live out the rest of his sorry life. He is happy to be left alone to enjoy lunch at the Cosmic Diner where he can flirt with Marina the Puerto Rican waitress, stroll the streets of Brooklyn in blissful anonymity and spend his evenings building The Book of Human Folly. But a chance meeting with his long lost nephew Tom, and the surprise appearance of Tom’s niece Lucy, brings Nathan’s family relations back into full swing. It is not what Nathan envisioned for his final days, but there it is. One never out-runs their past, or their relatives!

I enjoyed this book immensely. It’s like watching a feel-good movie, with all the variations of characters blending into a circus of human folly. We meet Harry Brightman, a gay, rare book seller who can’t control his urge to con, a Jamaican transvestite (in love with Harry), a BPM (Beautiful Perfect Mother) who makes jewelry, and Honey Chowder, a loud, over-bearing school teacher with her eyes firmly set on Tom. The whole story is a comedy of errors that Nathan manages to wrangle into some kind of order which brings us to an indubitably happy ending.

I only found myself scoffing at one chapter – where Nathan’s niece Aurora makes her appearance. Unlike the rest of the book, this episode has a weak storyline and plot which momentarily brought the whole novel plummeting to mediocrity. Grant it, there are some crazy people with some crazy schemes throughout the book, but Aurora’s experiences are just too silly to even contemplate. Why Auster did not (or was not advised to) rewrite this chapter is a mystery to me, for it is the only blight on a great little book.

This was a fun book, full of bizarre characters and improbable chance encounters engagingly written. Since truth is stranger than fiction, the story was even believable.

I started this book on a flight to New York City. I read it on the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan and sitting in Prospect Park while drinking coffee. I couldn’t have picked a better book to accompany me on my trip. From the first pages I realized it was set in the same neighborhood that I was staying in in Brooklyn. Much of it happens in a bookstore on Seventh Avenue and I had the chance to visit a bookstore on that very street. I tell you this because reading it in Brooklyn undoubtedly affected how I perceived the story.

Nathan Glass moves to Brooklyn after a health scare and a nasty divorce. He runs into his nephew Tom in a small bookstore run by an eccentric man named Harry. The three men find themselves caught in some sort of adult male limbo, each ending up somewhere he didn’t want to be. Their lives don’t kick start back into action until Tom’s 9-year-old niece Lucy appears, refusing to say a word.

I adored this story. I loved the beauty of the writing and the realistic characters. Some bad things happen, but that's life. As I read, I felt like I was in their world for awhile, walking down the streets in Brooklyn and perusing the shelves in Harry's shop. It was just a pleasure to read about these deeply flawed people and to part of their lives for a short while. They didn't all get a happy ending, but there were so many wonderful things that happened along the way.

There’s a thin line between being so realistic in a novel that it’s depressing and awful to read and being realistic, but still exuding a feeling of hope and letting the readers see the joy in your characters’ lives. Auster is firmly in the second camp. He’s able to introduce us to Harry, Tom, Nathan and Lucy and make us love them even though we think some of their decisions are stupid. We all screw up and this book celebrates second chances, without shoving sunshine down your throat.

On top of all that goodness, there’s a deep literary love rooted in every page of the book. They are all readers and their discussions are often idealistic and fascinating. I found myself writing down so many quotes I wanted to mention that I ran out of room on my bookmark. Here are a few...

“Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure please of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in your head.”

“Post-past?” “The now. And also the later. But no more dwelling on the then.”

“You can’t change the weather Tom.” Meaning that some things simply were what they were, and we had no choice but to accept them.”

“Asking forgiveness from someone is a complicated affair, a delicate balancing act between stiff-necked pride and tearful remorse, and unless you can truly open up to the other person, every apology sounds hollow and false.”

An interesting story which I only truly started appreciating after I finished the book.

 Absolutely brilliant - so much here that I loved.

The book is written from the point of view of Nathan Glass, an ex-insurance saleman, recovering from cancer and recently divorced with a bad relationship with his daughter. He moves back to Brooklyn, where he was born, with the intention of dying there, having all but given up on life. He occupies his time working on a book of Human Follies, a collection of mishaps he has witnessed in his life, then he bumps into his nephew Tom, with whom he had lost touch, and whose only life is in a slump, and this encounter leds to a series of events that gives new purpose to both their lives.

Less tricksy post-modern than some of Auster's other books, it nonetheless still has a rich tapestry of tangents, literary allusions and classic cinema references that are a feature of his work. Like the other books of his that I have really loved, the humanity really shines through here from a cast of unusual, but always believable characters.

Story about a man returning to Brooklyn "to die". He meets his nephew, who also lost interest in life. Through a series of unexpected events, and by sticking close to each other, they manage to see the good side of life once again.

As most of Auster's books, it's storytelling as it is supposed to be. Excellent story, and I really got into it. Before you know it, the book is finished (and that's a positive point:) ).

My first introduction to Auster's work is a good one. He has a wonderful way of writing and created a "story of survival" that might even make a cynic think that things can get better.

Follies is set around the time of Bush stealing his election and 9/11. But thankfully, not a lot of time is spent on national events. The majority of time is spent getting to know Nathan Glass, a 60ish year old man who comes to Brooklyn to find a quiet place to die. Recently divorced and a survivor of lung cancer, he's all but given up on himself. Enter Tom Wood, his nephew who he had lost touch with for years. Tom lives in Brooklyn as well and is in the same boat as his uncle, unhappy, feeling without redemption and unable to move forward.

Family is key to this novel, not just blood relatives but the strangers-turned-friends kind of family. Everyone is trying to survive and banding together, the motley crue in Follies does just that.

It has now been about ten years since the "ending" of this book---it's the perfect time for Paul Auster to write the sequel. I loved the audio version but I want to hear Nathan go on and on about what happens NEXT!!

I absolutely loved this book. It's not the sort of thing I'd normally go for so thank heavens for book club or I'd never have come across it. We meet our protagonist Nathan Glass as he moves back to Brooklyn, supposedly to die. He is a bit depressed, recently divorced and in remission from lung cancer. Here in Brooklyn he becomes reacquainted with his nephew and meets some other interesting characters along the way. It is the characters that really bring this book to life, not a lot really happens in this novel, but the characters really jump off the pages and there are some truly beautifully written lines. It swings from deeply sorrowful to almost laugh out loud funny. I'm keeping my eye out for more by this author and although it is something I do very rarely I'm looking forward to reading this again.

The Brooklyn Follies
by Paul Auster
Henry Holt and Company, New York (2005)
and
HarperAudio (2006), Audio CD

From Austen to Auster.

The characters: Nathan Glass, tha main character and the mirror of the others; Tom Wood, his nephew, from whom tree born a little brunch: Lucy (Tom's niece, 9-year-old); Harry Brightman, who (without knowing) lights new paths to follow.

Nathan has come to Brooklyn to die, in this city of follies he met Tom, who's working in a library owned by Harry. Others threads (people) run in this book crossing each other. From a background without hope and lives at the end of their days, give birth to a new order (a natural order).

Almost at the beginning Auster writes: 'All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.' p.125

From old Europe Auster takes the idea that there must be something beyond all the symbolic order we live in. The problem is we cannot translate this order like a project in our life. 'Aeschylus, Homer, Sophocles, Plato, the whole lot of them. Invented by some clever Italian poets during the Renaissance.' p. 128
Auster specially quotes just Casey Stengel, a baseball player.

So the new America helps Auster: a full back to the natural order. This natural order appears with the child Lucy: she prefers no to talk, we have already said all the words. Lucy is the cause of the not planned stop in Vermont's woods. Auster writes: 'I want to talk about happiness and well-being, about those rare, unexpected moments when the voice in your head goes silent and you feel at one with the world.' p. 167

Eventually Harry said: 'one of my dreams was to publish an encyclopedia in which all the information was false.' p. 127

A book that started off promisingly, but, ultimately, was a disappointment. Nathan Glass heads to Brooklyn to die and runs across a favorite nephew unexpectedly. The nephew, despite a strong start, is now working in a bookstore. I kept reading, with faith in Auster that he wouldn't lead me astray, but the characters felt thrown into the story randomly and the ending felt forced.

The Brooklyn Follies was a laid back book written by Paul Auster. He is an old man that writes as a hobby about Nathan,the main character who is pretty bored with life. This book is about little snippets in his life in Brooklyn. From reconnecting with his nephew, or saving his niece from physco husband. The Brooklyn Follies is a book you don't want to put down. In some ways, people would call this book a soap opera but in a man version with humor. Auster offers historical moments in history of America making the reader feel as if the characters are right down the street. Auster employs tough-guy situations in and funny upbeat way with believable stories of folly and search for hope. His writing is packed with surprises with a down-to-earth style. I loved it. I would recommend for just a fun read.

Classic Auster. A great reward for finishing my theory-based conference paper. Apparently slight, but packed with ideas, and, as a review on the cover suggests, "not a little wise". Possibly a fairytale of pre-9/11 New York.

I really enjoyed listening to this audio book, which was narrated by the author, Paul Auster, himself.

The characters were great and I found myself really rooting for little Lucy, who was such a mischievous little minx! The story was about Nathan and his nephew Tom and Tom's neice, Lucy who all end up living in Brooklyn. There are lots of little stories based around the various characters, and Auster skillfully weaves their lives together.

The book ends on a sad note, but ulitmately, Nathan finds happiness, pretty much after he stops looking for it.