Autumn's done come

'Autumn had arrived, that lovely cool time of year when everything changes colour and dies.' It would be an opening line to rival Camus' 'Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.' But Knut Hamsun is so good he can save it for the second page of his groundbreaking debut novel, Hunger.

The ramblings of a starving Norwegian writer, Hunger was written in 1890. Canongate's latest print - part of the Scottish publisher's series, The Canons (pictured) - features an introduction by dreary Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø, with an afterword (from 1970) by Paul Auster.

According to Auster, who wrote of his own early struggles as a writer in a book called Hand to Mouth (like this translation, from 1996), Hamsun manages to accommodate the mess (pace Beckett) of the twentieth century in Hunger. 'But it is in Kafka's story, A Hunger Artist, that the aesthetics of hunger receives its most meticulous elaboration... In Kafka's story, the hunger artist dies, but only because he forsakes his art, abandoning the restrictions that had been imposed on him by his manager. The hunger artist goes too far.'

Having written elsewhere in this blog about London on the page, Hunger's opening line marks this as a book about a city, too: 'It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him...' It is a point underlined by the novel's translator, Sverre Lyngstad, who takes issue with an earlier translation: 'Hunger is an urban novel, whose action takes place within a distinctive setting of streets, squares and residential areas familiar to Kristiania (now Oslo) residents.'

And, of course, it is about the changing season: 'At this moment my mind was lucid: I was going to die. It was autumn now and everything had gone to sleep. I had tried every way out, made the most of every resource I knew of. I indulged myself sentimentally with this thought, and every time I still cherished hopes of a possible rescue I whispered dismissively, "You fool. you've started to die already!"'

The 12 best novels about filmmaking, Part 2

6. Blue Movie, Terry Southern (1970)

Award-winning director Boris Adrian 'a film-maker - in the tradition of Chaplin, Bergman, Fellini' decides to make a stag film 'that's really good', in this Hollywood satire from the co-author of Candy (1958). 'I've got to find out… how far you can take the aesthetically erotic… suppose the film were made under studio conditions - feature-length, colour, beautiful actors, great lighting, strong plot… how would it look then?' Flown to Liechtenstein by his producer, Adrian gets his chance to fulfill an urge that's overtaken directors from Stanley Kubrick (Southern worked on the script for Dr Strangelove) to Lars von Trier.

5. The Day of the Locust, Nathaniel West (1939)

'West's Hollywood is made up of degeneracy and brothels, of failure and sexual desire, of cock-fighting and third-rate boarding houses,' says Alan Ross in his introduction to Picador's collection of the one-time screenwriter and contemporary of Scott Fitzgerald's work. Locust follows aspiring actress Faye Greener and the men who flock around her: set painter Tod Hackett, a cock-fighting Mexican and his cowboy extra friend, and a hapless clerk - Homer Simpson. It may have served as inspiration for AM Homes's This Book Will Save Your Life (2006).

4. The Last Tycoon, F Scott Fitzgerald (1941)

Hollywood loves films about filmmaking, so it was never going to forego the chance to shoot a script based on a work by one of America's greatest writers, even if Fitzgerald's novel was unfinished on his death in 1940. Robert De Niro and Theresa Russell were among the stars for Elia Kazan's 1976 movie set in Hollywood's golden age of the 1930s, inspired by MGM mogul Irving Thalberg. Fitzgerald had also worked in Hollywood, and previously mined the territory in his Pat Hobby stories.

3. The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster (2002)

American author Auster is rightly celebrated for his early novels, notably the New York Trilogy, but hopefully not at the expense of this powerful, more recent work. Grief-stricken professor David Zimmer receives an invitation to visit the elderly subject of Zimmer's film studies monograph, The Silent World of Hector Mann. For the last 50 years, Mann has been making films in secret on his New Mexico ranch, all of which are due to be incinerated within 24 hours of Mann's death. In an imaginative tour de force, Auster - who's made films himself - creates a shimmering back catalogue for his and Zimmer's mutual subject.

2. Remainder, Tom McCarthy (2005)

What happens when movie fiction becomes more real to us than our own experience, the brilliant Tom McCarthy asks in his debut novel (cf news events that are described as being like a film). Following a freak accident, Remainder's narrator lands an enormous amount of money, which he uses to create ever more elaborate sets and scenarios to bolster his sense of authenticity; 'Even before the accident, if I'd been walking down the street just like De Niro, smoking a cigarette like him… I'd still be thinking: Here I am walking down the street, smoking a cigarette, like someone in a film.'

1. Flicker, Theodore Roszak (1991)

History professor Roszak's book is tremendous: a student investigating the films of German B-movie director Max Castle uncovers a plot involving Orson Welles, Cathar knights and subliminal messages planted in films, which are portrayed as encapsulating the perpetual battle between good and evil (black and white/light). An unsurpassable mix of fanboy thrills and the sort of playful erudition espoused by Umberto Eco, it has long been rumoured to be a project for director Darren Aronofsky.

Part one is here

Paul Auster preview

An exclusive extract from American author Paul Auster's next novel, Hudson Script, due to be published spring 2012.

For almost a year now, Jack Spratt had sat at this same desk at this same hour. He sublet this room, no more than a storeroom, on the other side of the city where he was born and came here each morning at 8am, with the money workers going into their jobs. The space was brightly lit by overhead fluorescent tubes, and hot in winter. The only ventilation was a small window that could be reached by standing on his desk, even if he opened it he could not see out. At a certain time of day, in the late afternoon, by some chance the light would fall on it and, by now thoroughly drowsy and usually dispirited with his project, Jack would follow the square of sun that would trace its way across a small part of his boxroom.

Jack had left college without completing his studies intending to write a novel. He believed routine would allow the words to come, but each day he began again on the first page. He had 230 starts to more than 100 stories although often he returned to the same story, a reimagining of his relationships with his parents - now dead - and his step-sister, who he had last seen on his first day of college. He was no longer in contact with the one friend who could have passed on some news of Molly so he would imagine new lives for her, for them. How had they come to this, he wondered, when their childhood seemed full of colour and happiness. His father had set up a small independent publishing house, the Medici Press, in the late sixties, full of optimism following a trip to Paris as a student dropout himself. Paul's first wife, Jack's mother, died soon after the Medici Press was bought by a major publisher, the large payout he received meant Paul no longer needed to work.

Paul Spratt met his second wife, Mary, in the early seventies at an auction of rare books; she was an art dealer and they started talking about their shared love of seventeenth and eighteenth century French literature, which Paul specialised in publishing in translation. She impressed him with her knowledge of the poets of an even earlier era, François De Malherbe, one of his disciples, François Mainard, Malherbe's adversary Mathurin Régnier, Théophile de Viau and de Viau's friend Saint-Amant. When the couple moved in together, Molly immediately looked up to her new older brother. Cigar-smoking Paul would take them to baseball games together and Molly learned the players' averages so she could join in the men's conversation, as she thought of it. As they grew, she outpaced Jack, she invited him out with her friends, joined protest marches and rallies against the invasion of Iraq and the behaviour of bankers on Wall Street, and was the first to lose her virginity, an event after which she returned home immediately to tell Jack.

Paris memories

Summer has me thinking about Paris, and had me reading the latest book by Paul Auster, Invisible, which is partly set there. What caught me back for a moment is that the main character, student Adam Walker, settles into the streets I've always seen as my favourite in the city, from when I too was a student.

Walker books himself into a decrepit, crumbling hotel 'on the rue Mazarine in the sixth arrondissement, not far from the Odéon metro station on the Boulevard Saint-Germain'. The Hôtel du Sud is 'a historic structure, erected in the seventeenth century, he thinks ,' much like the place I love to stay when I visit. Another Invisible character lives in a chambre de bonne, as a friend did overlooking the Danton on carrefour de l'Odéon.

Soon, Walker is to be found 'sitting at an outdoor café on the place Saint-André des Arts, nursing a glass of beer and writing in a small notebook. It is six o'clock in the evening, the end of another workday and now that Walker has begun to settle into the rhythms of Paris, he understands that this is probably the city's most inspiriting hour...'

I'm not sure about this word 'inspiriting' - however, as is typical with Auster, it turns out that some of the narrative is a fiction, within fiction, 'but Paris is Paris. Paris alone is real.'

The new Auster-ity

I've always been a huge fan of American author Paul Auster's work and, when you're waiting for his next novel, you can enjoy the latest book by his wife, Siri Hustvedt. She shares many of his fascinations, tics, even subjects.

The main topic they share is grief: The Book of Illusion, the best of Auster's recent output, is a wonderful, empathetic treatise on grief. In Hustvedt's latest, The Sorrows of an American, the narrator, Erik, is separated from his wife (she is noticeable throughout by her absence; only halfway through do we learn why she left: "I'm fucking Alan. It's time you knew"); his sister, Inga, and Inga's daughter, Sonia, are mourning Inga's husband, a writer and filmmaker, Max; and Erik, Inga and their mother all miss their father, Lars, whose presence is evoked throughout by Lars's memoirs (taken from Hustvedt's own father's text).

As with Auster's characters, these are New Yorkers, who meet at dinner parties, in the majority opposed the Gulf War and struggle with their memories of 9/11. As Auster did for filmmaker Hector Mann in The Book of Illusions, Hustvedt enjoys creating a back catalogue for Max (his film Into the Blue is so beautifully imagined, it's tempting to check its existence on IMDb).

Hustvedt, too, gives thought to the naming of her characters: a nebulous figure is named Schadow; an unpleasant journalist is named Fehlburger – "curious name, Fehl is fault or blemish in German," the book's comic detective figure notes. And there is playfulness: the narrator of What I Loved – the book that preceded The Sorrows… for Hustvedt – Leo Hertzberg, is invited to one of those dinner parties. ("My friend," says Inga, "yet another professor, but a retired one, from art history at Columbia, lives on Greene Street, sees poorly, but he's very interesting and extremely kind." In case you wanted an update.)

While Auster's leads tend to be writers – especially in his most recent, introspective, work – or detectives, Erik is a detective of the mind, a psychoanalyst, who works in decoding his patients' tellings of their troubles. (Another recent paperback, Hanif Kureishi's much looser, London set, Something to Tell You, also features a therapist at its heart, though he could just as well be a writer. On a side note, I wonder if UK book jacket designers struggle depicting therapy-centred novels, as both Something… and The Sorrows… have covers more appropriate to chick-lit, though this may be a more general trend in publishing currently.)

Of course, the strangest intersection of Auster and Hustvedt's worlds comes in What I Loved; Mark, the son of one of Leo's friends, threatens to rip his parents' world apart with his drug-taking and malicious behaviour. Mark becomes friends with a cool new painter and together they are involved in a murder that is more like something out of American Psycho. The scene owes much to reality: in 1998, Auster's son by his first wife, Daniel, pleaded guilty to stealing money from a drug dealer; Daniel is also said to have been present at the murder of the dealer, Andre "Angel" Melendez. (Michael Alig – later played by Macauley Culkin in the movie Party Monster – poured drain cleaner down Melendez' throat, chopped up the body and dumped it in the river. Mark's victim is called Rafael Hernandez and his body thrown in the Hudson River.)

Auster tackles the same territory in Oracle Night: a writer called Trause (hmm) has a junkie son who attacks the wife of the book's narrator, Sidney Orr. ("You're lucky you don't have any children," Trause tells Orr. "They're nice when they're small, but after that they break your heart and make you miserable.") The boy is a manipulative liar who wreaks disaster in both books.

Auster and Hustvedt rarely discuss their private lives but what is perhaps most wrenching in The Sorrows… is Inga's plight following the death of her husband: the journalist Fehlburger is determined to avenge herself on Inga for some imagined slight. The chance arises when it seems Inga's husband Max had an affair with an actress, and even a child by her.

While Hustvedt achieves her own revenge – Fehlburger is the only character not afforded some redemption – most disturbing is the image of people climbing over Inga's body (Max's biographer even begins a consensual affair with Inga) to get to her dead husband. It's an eerie foretelling of a potential reality.