Looking for something in the Yuletide spirit, but without “outpourings of hypocritical pap and syrup”? Then Paul Auster’s Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story is for you 😉
In this fine example of frame narrative (a story within a story), the first-person narrator is a writer who’s been asked by The New York Times to write a piece to be published on Christmas day. He agrees, only to discover that he has a problem: how to write an unsentimental Christmas tale?
This completely unconventional but truly touching Christmas story appeared in The New York Times on December 25, 1990, and later became the basis for the movie Smoke (1995). Without giving too much away, it involves a cigar store in downtown Brooklyn, four thousand photographs, a shoplifter, a lost wallet, and a blind grandmother. A quick read that will stay with you for long! 😊
I paused for a moment, studying Auggie as a wicked grin spread across his face […] it suddenly occurred to me that he had made the whole thing up. I was about to ask him if he’d been putting me on, but then I realized he would never tell.
I had been tricked into believing him, and that was the only thing that mattered.
As long as there’s one person to believe it, there’s no story that can’t be true.
Paul Auster, Auggie Wren's Christmas Story, 1990
