The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster Page A

I think I’ve already figured out how to translate the title.
    Mémoires d’outre-tombe. Memoirs from Beyond the Grave .
    That feels awkward to me. Too literal, somehow, and yet at the same time difficult to understand.
    What do you have in mind?
    Memoirs of a Dead Man .
    Interesting.
    It’s not bad, is it?
    No, not bad at all. I like it a lot.
    The important thing is that it makes sense. It took Chateaubriand thirty-five years to write the book, and he didn’t want it to be published until fifty years after his death. It’s literally written in the voice of a dead man.
    But it didn’t take fifty years. The book was published in 1848, the same year he died.
    He ran into financial difficulties. After the revolution of 1830, his political career was over, and he fell into debt. Madame Récamier, his mistress of the past dozen years or so—yes, that Madame Récamier—talked him into giving some private readings from the Memoirs to small, select audiences in her drawing room. The idea was to find a publisher willing to pay Chateaubriand an advance, to give him money for a work that wouldn’t be coming out for years. The plan failed, but response to the book was extraordinarily good. The Memoirs became the most celebrated unfinished, unpublished, unread book in history. But Chateaubriand was still broke. So Madame Récamier came up with a new scheme, and this one worked—or sort of worked. A stock company was formed, and people bought shares in the manuscript. Word futures, I guess you could call them, in the same way that people from Wall Street gamble on the price of soybeans and corn. In effect, Chateaubriand mortgaged his autobiography to finance his old age. They gave him a nice chunk of money up front, which allowed him to pay off his creditors, and a guaranteed annuity for the rest of his life. It was a brilliant arrangement. The only problem was that Chateaubriand kept on living. The company was formed when he was in his mid-sixties, and he hung on until he was eighty. By then, the shares had changed hands several times, and the friends and admirers who had invested in the beginning were long gone. Chateaubriand was owned by a bunch of strangers. The only thing they were interested in was turning a profit, and the longer he went on living, the more they wanted him to die. Those last years must have been bleak for him. A frail old man crippled with rheumatism, Madame Récamier all but blind, and every one of his friends dead and buried. But he kept on revising the manuscript right up to the end.
    What a cheerful story.
    Not so funny, I suppose, but let me tell you, the old viscount could write one hell of a good sentence. It’s an incredible book, Alex.
    So you’re saying you don’t mind spending the next two or three years of your life with a gloomy Frenchman?
    I’ve just spent a year with a silent-film comedian, and I think I’m ready for a change.
    Silent film? I hadn’t heard anything about that.
    Someone named Hector Mann. I finished writing a book about him in the fall.
    You’ve been busy, then. That’s good.
    I had to do something. So I decided to do that.
    Why haven’t I heard of this actor? Not that I know anything about movies, but the name doesn’t ring a bell.
    No one’s heard of him. He’s my own private funny man, a court jester who performs only for me. For twelve or thirteen months, I spent every waking moment with him.
    You mean you were actually with him? Or is that just a figure of speech?
    No one’s been with Hector Mann since 1929. He’s dead. As dead as Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier. As dead as Dexter What’s-His-Name.
    Feinbaum.
    As dead as Dexter Feinbaum.
    So you spent a year watching old movies.
    Not exactly. I spent three months watching old movies, and then I locked myself in a room and spent nine months writing about them. It’s probably the strangest thing I’ve ever done. I was writing about things I couldn’t see anymore, and I had to present them in purely