Product Description

Paul Auster's Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure is a fascinating and often funny memoir about his early years as a writer struggling to be published, and to make enough money to survive. Leaving high school with 'itchy feet' and refusing to play it safe, Auster avoided convention and the double life of steady office employment while writing. From the streets of New York City, Dublin, and Paris to a surreal adventure in a dusty village in Mexico, Auster's account of living on next to nothing introduces an unforgettable cast of characters while examining what it means to be a writer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #587315 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From Amazon.com
It's no wonder that Paul Auster (The Music of Chance, Leviathan, Mr. Vertigo) creates such singular characters. While his youth comprised a series of failures too unbelievable for fiction, it also equipped him with a range of experiences to draw from that most fiction writers only dream of. He worked with Bowery bums at a summer camp, had a childhood friend join the Weather Underground, and was a student at Columbia in 1968 at the height of the student uprisings there (and at which point, he boasts, he knew seven of the FBI's ten most wanted men). He worked on an oil tanker, for a French Mafia-style film producer in Paris, and for a rare-book organization in New York. He translated the North Vietnamese constitution from French into English (don't ask). His work brought him in contact to varying extents with Jean Genet, Mary McCarthy, Jerzy Kosinski, Sartre, Foucault, and John Lennon. The encounters and experiences must have been fascinating, failure aside, but Auster's prose here, sadly, lacks the tightness and luster of his fiction. The remainder--and major portion--of the volume consists of three plays, a baseball card game, and a detective novel, all written during this time.

From Library Journal
Coming upon this "chronicle of early failure," readers of translator, poet, screenwriter, and novelist Auster (Mr. Vertigo, LJ 6/15/94) may be charmed by his new publisher's presentation though left puzzled by the derivative offerings. The work consists of one original, down-beat essay, "Hand to Mouth," a flat record of Auster's inauspicious early years struggling to make money while writing (the essay was recently excerpted in Granta), and three appendixes: a medley of Beckett-inspired plays, an "action baseball" card game that Auster was convinced would make his fortune, and a Chandleresque detective novel, "Squeeze Play"?all of which failed in one way or another when first created. Auster's collection of essays and reviews, The Art of Hunger (Sun & Moon, 1991), develop more fully and satisfactorily the author's literary development, while the appendixes here will interest few but devoted literary archivists.
-?Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Auster's novels, from City of Glass (1985) to The Music of Chance (1990) and Mr. Vertigo (1994), are taut psychological dramas that revolve around odd and stressful relationships between mentor and student, con man and sucker, and seem dictated solely by randomness. Auster himself is camouflaged by the intricate patterns of his highly cerebral fiction, but readers of this meticulous memoir, an often alarming, unfailingly astonishing account of his long, frustrating journey into print, will find many anecdotes eerily familiar. Each interlude in Auster's willfully improvised life--from summer jobs that generated mismatched friendships with heavy-drinking drifters to his years at Columbia at the height of the sixties, the stints on board oil tankers, his desperately intuitive life in Paris, and his patchy freelance editing and translating gigs (endeavors that sound innocent but which, for Auster, were strangely dangerous)--is a template for scenes in his cunning novels. Profoundly complex and temperamentally unsuited for the nine-to-five world, Auster even tried to solve his financial difficulties by peddling an intricately designed card game he invented called Action Baseball, which is reproduced here as an appendix, along with three of his plays, and his first novel, a pseudonymous mystery. This fascinating volume of new and old works provides an extraordinary glimpse into the tough early years of a major literary figure, who now has two terrific films to his credit, Smoke and Blue in the Face, but it also proves the wiliness of Auster's talent: ever enigmatic and elusive, he leaves as much of his true self in shadow as in light. Donna Seaman

Customer Reviews

When Am I Gonna Make A Living?
Paul Auster's autobiographical account spanning about 12 years or so after he finished college, is an excellent exposition of a young writer's search for meaning, and then the translation of that meaning into money, to provide for further existence, to allow the writer to keep producing work, representative of his desires, but also able to be sold for money to continue the quest.

The appeal to almost all people is hidden in the fact, that at anytime, any person, can be living a "hand to mouth" existence. This feeling of abject poverty and financial ruin is not uncommon today, in an economy that has lost over 2 million jobs, and forced hundreds of thousands to start their own businesses because work was not available. Those in America who have had to do this, can relate directly to Auster's feelings, especially the salient concept of when will I ever get to the point when I am making a living again, even a somewhat less luxurious one than before, just any living.

As usual, Auster uses his incredible incisiveness and truly exceptional clarity in his construction of this book. It is of special interest to Auster readers, as it gives the reader some very interesting information about the author's early days when he was still struggling to become known. But Auster's story is one that every actor, every writer, every lawyer, every doctor, or most of them anyway, have to go through at the beginning, including every new entrepreneur. Becoming established is very hard work. And more people fail, than succeed. This high failure rate is generated by the need to be able to sustain high levels of suffering in bad times, to get to the good times. Most of us are just not up to the task.

Not All Editions Include Game & Detective Novel Extras
Hand to Mouth, by itself, is a somewhat raw but not at all insensitive memoir of life before publishing. I found it engrossing at times.

Auster recounts his youthful rejection of middle class consumerism, his odd and fascinating encounters with all kinds of characters and life situations, his stay in Paris, his first marriage, his ...well... failures to make it big as a writer. His admirable sense of integrity (no jobs except ones literary) unfortunately kept the author wallowing in translation work to put food on the table, and the sense of pain, desperation and even a sort of starvation are palpable. Agonizingly, but rather fittingly, he tells only of his years BEFORE success. This is no rags to fame & riches story.

Hand to Mouth is basically a reality check. Of some value to anyone who wants to get published, but the only thing that keeps this from being totally depressing is our knowledge of Auster's eventual literary success.

Lovely sections about the wacky people he met on ships and on streets reveal inspiration for characters he brings alive in his humanistic fiction.

If you do buy an edition (check out the number of pages before you order) which contains "Action Baseball" and "Squeeze Play", you are in for a treat. The former is a complete card game and the latter is a detective novel. Squeeze Play was written under a pseudonym and features a Jewish private eye with a law degree from Columbia who has a taste for fine wine and music. Mickey Spillane gets urban Semitic spit & polish in this totally enjoyable bonus read.

If you're a starving writer -- you'll understand!
Paul Auster wrote the screenplay for Smoke, the classy Miramax ensemble drama from 1995. This memoir is deceiving - a 400-page book padded out by 300 pages of appendices. In the memoir part, he mentions his early material not being so great, then he crams his book full of it. But the memoir part is fascinating, an account of the struggles of pre-fame, the journeys people take on their way to success and the uncertainty of eschewing a safe career for an interesting one. Hand to Mouth is encouraging and depressing all at once.

Encouraging because it reinforces what I've come to realize about serious writers - that we're fascinated with life and want to absorb and involve ourselves in all facets, which means holding a variety of jobs in a variety of locations and not giving ourselves over to one profession. A lot of Auster's thoughts on life mirrored mine when he was my age. We both graduated college, scoffed at grad school and avoided serious jobs that would bring too many commitments. I purchased this book through Amazon.com right after another great purchase, THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez, about an unlucky writer/lost soul/failure addicted to the personals. Both are compelling, recommended books. Enjoy!