Here and Now, by Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee – review

In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek. So too in the luckless genre of letters artificially exchanged for the purposes of publication.

There’s been a little spate of these lately, the most interesting and unbalanced having been Public Enemies, in which Michel Houellebecq brilliantly began the exchange by telling Bernard Henri-Levy that what they had in common was that they were both a bit contemptible, a bond from which BHL tried unsuccessfully to extract himself for the rest of their collaboration.

Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee had read each other’s work for years but only met for the first time in February 2008, when they were both in their sixties. It seems it was the senior writer Coetzee who proposed this correspondence to Auster in a letter not included in the book, which begins instead with a formal discussion of the nature of friendship and its representation in literature by Coetzee, to which Auster responds much more loosely, talking eagerly about his own work and his own life in a way that Coetzee never does.