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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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Auggie Wrens Christmas Story
paul auster
Illustrations by Isol
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Auggie Wrens Christmas Story
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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.