Paul Auster, Auggie Story

8/3/2019 Paul Auster, Auggie Story

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Auggie Wrens Christmas Story

Paul Auster was born in New Jersey in 1947. Ater

attending Columbia University he lived in France

or our years. Since 1974 he has published poems,

essays, novels, screenplays and translations. He lives inBrooklyn, New York.


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by the same author

Novels:

the new york trilogyin the country of last things

moon palacethe music of chance

leviathanmr vertigotimbuktu

the book of illusionsoracle night

the brooklyn folliestravels in the scriptorium

man in the darkinvisible

Non-Fiction:the invention of solitude

the art of hungerhand to mouth

Screenplays:smoke & blue in the face

lulu on the bridgethe inner life of martin frost

Poetry:selected poems

Illustrated:city of glass (adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli)

Editor:true tales of american life


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paul auster

Illustrations by Isol


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I heard this story rom Auggie Wren. Since Auggiedoesnt come o too well in it, at least not as well as

hed like to, hes asked me not to use his real name.

Other than that, the whole business about the lost

wallet and the blind woman and the Christmas dinner

is just as he told it to me.

Auggie and I have known each other or close to

eleven years now. He works behind the counter o a

cigar store on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn,

and since its the only store that carries the little Dutch

cigars I like to smoke, I go in there airly oten. For

a long time, I didnt give much thought to Auggie

Wren. He was the strange little man who wore a

hooded blue sweatshirt and sold me cigars and


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magazines, the impish, wisecracking character who

always had something unny to say about the weather

or the Mets or the politicians in Washington, and that

was the extent o it.

But then one day several years ago he happened to

be looking through a magazine in the store, and he

stumbled across a review o one o my books. He knew

it was me because a photograph accompanied thereview; and ater that things changed between us. I was

no longer just another customer to Auggie, I had become

a distinguished person. Most people couldnt care less

about books and writers, but it turned out that Auggie


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considered himsel an artist. Now that he had cracked

the secret o who I was, he embraced me as an ally, a

confdant, a brother-in-arms. To tell the truth, I ound it

rather embarrassing. Then, almost inevitably, a moment

came when he asked i I would be willing to look at his

photographs. Given his enthusiasm and goodwill, there

didnt seem to be any way I could turn him down.

God knows what I was expecting. At the very least, itwasnt what Auggie showed me the next day. In a small,

windowless room at the back o the store, he opened

a cardboard box and pulled out twelve identical black

photo albums. This was his lies work, he said, and it

didnt take him more than fve minutes a day to do it.

Every morning or the past twelve years, he had stood

at the corner o Atlantic Avenue and Clinton Street at

precisely seven oclock and had taken a single color

photograph o precisely the same view. The project now

ran to more than our thousand photographs. Each album

represented a dierent year, and all the pictures were laid

out in sequence, rom 1 January to 31 December, with

the dates careully recorded under each one.

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Paul Auster, Auggie Story

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