Here and Now is a collection of letters between Paul Auster and JM Coetzee
described by the publishers as “an epistolary dialogue between two great writers
who became great friends”.
The title implies immediacy, and the letters were written from 2008-11, but
the overriding sense of the exchange is of things past. The letter itself is a
dying object, and a hint of anachronism runs through the correspondence.
Every now and then Auster mentions his tech-savvy wife, Siri Hustvedt,
responsible for printing out emails from Coetzee and passing them on. Later he
announces that he has bought an overhauled Olivetti typewriter. Coetzee too is
uncomfortable with contemporary technology, which is conspicuously absent from
his fiction. He speculates on the ubiquity of the mobile phone and its influence
on the novel:
“The presence/absence of mobile phones in one’s fictional world is going to
be, I suspect, no trivial matter. Why? Because so much of the mechanics of novel
writing, past and present, is taken up with making information available to
characters or keeping it from them. One used to be able to get pages and pages
out of the non-existence of the telegraph/telephone and the consequent need for
messages to be borne by hand or even memorised.”
Much of Here and Now is, like this, a mixture of the quotidian and the
fascinating. With no introduction and only skeletal notes, it plunges you cold
into a wide-ranging exchange taking in sport (watching and playing), cinema
(watching and writing for) and politics (watching and despairing of) and much
else. The two writers quickly fall into their allotted roles. Coetzee – who a
colleague once claimed to have seen laugh only once in 10 years – plays the
professorial straight-man. Auster, the funny guy
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