Letters between J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster

Sometimes Auster endeavours to match Coetzee’s otherworldly tone, but it’s obvious that he’s too embedded in a world of opening nights and the New York Times: the best he can manage is a suggestion that Israel relocate to Wisconsin. Soon he begins to seem less than wholly confident of being a sufficiently heavyweight figure to go toe to toe with Coetzee in the realm of thought. He tries to interest his correspondent in baseball, in vain. Increasingly he tells rather self-admiring anecdotes, among them an account of a week in which he kept running into Charlton Heston – in Cannes, at a Chicago book fair and in Manhattan while on the way to lunch with Juliette Binoche. ‘What am I to make of this, John? Do things like this happen to you, or am I the only one?’ Answer: ‘It doesn’t seem strange to me that, operating in a film environment, you should keep running into another person from that environment. What is bizarre is that it should be Charlton Heston.’ He refers Coetzee to pieces in ‘my Collected Prose’ and sends him books and movies. Updates on Auster’s projects elicit polite responses: ‘So you have completed a 200-page history of your body. What an interesting idea … I’ll wait to see whether you deal with your body part by part or treat it integrally.’