I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

M. The common factor of both ideas is the question of the meaning of symbols for human beings. Paul Auster is heard reading from his books Hand to Mouth and The Red Notebook either as straight recitation integrated with other sounds as if in a radio play or passed through an electronically realized string resonator so that the low tones interact with those of a string ensemble.

Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3 1947) is an American author whose writing blends absurdism existentialism crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy (1987) Moon Palace (1989) The Music of Chance (1990) The Book of Illusions (2002) and The Brooklyn Follies (2005).