Our correspondent picks seven books with one tying theme: the protagonists of all the stories are never quite still

He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.”
– The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

In The Book of Illusions, published in 2002, Paul Auster uses the words of the 19th century French memoirist Chateaubriand for the epigraph: “Man has not one and the same life. He has many lives, placed end to end, and that is the cause of his misery.” That’s also perhaps part of the reason why Man is “never quite still”. Think Ulysses, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet or even Jay Gatsby of Fitzgerald’s most famous novel. That restlessness is even more pronounced as we try and make sense of a divided, and yet obviously indivisible world, in the wake of 9/11 — as the seven novels across genres, chosen at random, illustrate.

So, a grieving professor embarks on a journey to research a book on a silent comedian who has been presumed dead for 60 years. An immigrant from Bangladesh reaches out to her love outside marriage. A journalist arrives in a snow-bound city grappling with a suicide epidemic and ends up investigating East-West relations — and more. A neurosurgeon’s happiness bubble bursts. A Russian-Jew writer about to be sent to Auschwitz brilliantly captures Parisians in flight. In the wake of 9/11, a Princeton graduate, a Pakistani, is suddenly an outsider looking in. A girl must “mutate” to survive smog city. Seven stories, one tying theme: the protagonists are “never quite still”.
Take Auster’s The Book of Illusions. One character jumps in and out of roles — European Jew, Hollywood playboy — assuming new identities; the other, grieving for his dead wife and sons, travels far to find love, only to lose it.

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