(Audio version of this review to follow on the Reading in bed Podcast at the start of April 2022. Available at all of the usual places)
Blurb:
Booker
Prize-shortlisted and New
York Times bestselling
author Paul Auster's comprehensive, landmark biography of the great
American writer Stephen Crane.
With Burning
Boy,
celebrated novelist Paul Auster tells the extraordinary story of
Stephen Crane, best known as the author of The
Red Badge of Courage,
who transformed American literature through an avalanche of original
short stories, novellas, poems, journalism, and war reportage before
his life was cut short by tuberculosis at age twenty-eight.
Auster’s
probing account of this singular life tracks Crane as he rebounds
from one perilous situation to the next: A controversial article
written at twenty disrupts the course of the 1892 presidential
campaign, a public battle with the New York police department over
the false arrest of a prostitute effectively exiles him from the
city, a star-crossed love affair with an unhappily married uptown
girl tortures him, a common-law marriage to the proprietress of
Jacksonville’s most elegant bawdyhouse endures, a shipwreck results
in his near drowning, he withstands enemy fire to send dispatches
from the Spanish-American War, and then he relocates to England,
where Joseph Conrad becomes his closest friend and Henry James weeps
over his tragic, early death.
In Burning
Boy,
Auster not only puts forth an immersive read about an unforgettable
life but also, casting a dazzled eye on Crane’s astonishing
originality and productivity, provides uniquely knowing insight into
Crane’s creative processes to produce the rarest of reading
experiences—the dramatic biography of a brilliant writer as only
another literary master could tell it.
Strengths:
Auster’s
last book 4 – 3 – 2 – 1 took me 18 months to build up the guts
and about 4 months to actually finish it. This new book took me about
a month to build up the courage to read that and about three months
to read because of the length off it (Close again to 800 pages).
Anybody
who knows the life and work of Stephen Crane would know he only lived
to 28 and 800 pages covering his life is some going.
Thankfully
Crane lived a heck of a life serving as a war correspodent in Greece
and Cuba and barely survived a shipwreck too.
Auster
however doesn’t write this as a straight biography but as much a
critic of his work going through most of his work.
Before
this book, I knew his two more famous books ‘Maggie of the Streets’
and ‘Red Badge of Courage (which I will be reviewing in future
episodes of Reading in Bed) but I certainly wasn’t aware of a lot
of his other work.
Auster
to give him credit I’ve heard him say 4 3 2 1 his last fiction
novel was very Stephen Crane ish and reading his biography you can
see elements of Auster being influenced certainly after this one.
I
don’t know a writer without anywhere near Auster’s gifts as a
writer would have dared write and I did find it interesting to note
Auster wrote this in about 18 months or so which frankly is pretty
amazing and his prose is frequently heartfelt and witty and you never
cease to feel him in awe of Crane.
Weaknesses:
The
book is certainly too long like 4 3 2 1 and does feel like it could
have benefited from being losing some off it as there is certainly
segments which didn’t add anything to the book and again I’ve
seen quotes from Auster over this too as well as 4 3 2 1 where he
apologies for the length off it.
However,
it is a remarkable book and let’s hope he does bring Crane back to
into the classroom as Crane’s work certainly a revisit over a
hundred years since he died.
8/10
