Winter Journal
by Paul Auster
- Percentage of approved critics who have given this book a positive review.
Critic Rating
56%
Critic Reviews: 23
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- User rating from iDreamBooks & iTunes
Reader Rating
74%
Reader Ratings: 78
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Synopsis
From the bestselling novelist and author of The Invention of Solitude, a moving and highly personal meditation on the body, time, and language itself "That is where the story begins, in your body, and everything will end in the body as well. Facing his sixty-third winter, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster sits down to write a history of his body and its sensations—both pleasurable and painful. Thirty years after the publication of The Invention... more
About Paul Auster
Published: August 21, 2012 by Henry Holt and Co.
Genre: Biographies & Memoirs. Non-fiction. 240 pages
- All Critics: 23
- Positive: 14
- Negative: 9
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The New York Times | 7 Sep 2012
In the best moments in “Winter Journal,” he conveys with easy intimacy the way a mind moves over its life as it ages.
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The Telegraph | 18 Sep 2012
Unfortunately, there are too many passages in this meditation on ageing that divulge an embarrassing narcissism.
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Los Angeles Times | 26 Aug 2012
Auster cannot quite maintain his focus, falling instead into a pattern of meandering recollections about his life...moving and self-indulgent but never coalesce behind a larger point of view.
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The Guardian | 15 Aug 2012
Joyce, Moliére and Keats would never have employed the clichéd and imprecise language Auster seems satisfied with here
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Washington Post | 17 Aug 2012
This is, by story’s end, a profoundly beautiful book.
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Chicago Sun Times | 23 Aug 2012
He has a good eye, a long memory and an elegant way with words, and these skills, without all the gimmicks, often combine to produce memorable results.
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Time Out New York | 7 Sep 2012
Auster hands the reader 63 years of life and history; it’s a dance that’s still in motion, and he guides us through every step.
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San Francisco Chronicle | 3 Sep 2012
The book presents a paradoxical case of grandiose modesty, which makes a reader wonder why Auster took the trouble to write it.
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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | 26 Aug 2012
Winter Journal might contemplate the past, but it reinforces Paul Auster's status as a writer at the peak of his talents.
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The L Magazine | 26 Sep 2012
...this is a frailer Auster, more timid, weighted down by his fame.
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The Boston Globe | 20 Aug 2012
In lesser hands, this device could become tedious. But Auster’s are not lesser hands. “Winter Journal” is a mesmerizing meditation.
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BC Books | 29 Jul 2012
He takes the reader on a trip through a maze of scattered moments of his life, the people, places and events that played some part in turning him into the man he has become now that he has reached the winter of his content.
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Digital Journal. | 6 Sep 2012
Winter Journal is a book overflowing with potential, written by a writer of undoubted talent, but the brief passages of brilliance never coalesce into something more than Auster's self regarding indulgence.
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AV Club | 10 Sep 2012
...he doesn’t have the tools to bring his own memories to life in words. And he’s been doing what he does best for so long that he doesn’t seem to know how to stop.
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The Literateur | 4 Sep 2012
The toxin of Winter Journal is its lack of luminosity.
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Edmonton Journal | 13 Sep 2012
...it’s lovely and vivid, lyrical and funny, capricious and frank, and very personal.
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The Wall Street Journal | 23 Aug 2012
...in common with his later novels, it feels as though it has been pulled from the oven too soon.
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Star Tribune | 17 Aug 2012
...Auster's story is also suffused with reverence for moments of transcendent, poetic beauty, and these chapters are just about perfect.
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The Daily Free Press | 20 Sep 2012
...the anecdotes are both moving and funny, and the 64-year-old is passing judgement and sharing memories, not reveling and bragging, about his earlier years.
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The Globe and Mail | 17 Aug 2012
Some of these episodes will remain with the reader, like memories of one’s own.
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Dallas News | 24 Aug 2012
...Auster has given us a remarkable mosaic of his mother and his second wife... while, at the same time, allowing readers to catch glimpses of themselves in the expansive life that’s woven together in this stirring memoir.
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NPR | 21 Aug 2012
...a more relaxed and meanderingly anecdotal read, forms a sort of bookend to that earlier memoir, returning to many of its concerns and offering parallel, though warmer, portraits of his mother...
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The New York Times | 7 Sep 2012
In the best moments in “Winter Journal,” he conveys with easy intimacy the way a mind moves over its life as it ages.
Full ReviewWinter Journal