Oh, to live for a good book (about death...)

Paul Auster :: The Invention of Solitude
(click on the post title to reach a thoughtful review of it).

My mother sent me this book, translated quite well, and as I started reading it I was distracted by thoughts of her, how she read it, in her precarious state of health these last few years, and what went through her mind as the words dissecting a parent's death coincide with her own thoughts about what remains of her life.

Here is a short quote:
Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear. An inventor survives in his inventions, an architect survives in his buildings, but most people leave behind no monuments or lasting achievements: a shelf of photograph albums, a fifth-grade report card, a bowling trophy, an ashtray filched from a Florida hotel room on the final morning of some dimly remembered vacation. A few objects, a few documents, and a smattering of impressions made on other people. Those people invariably tell stories about the dead person, but more often than not dates are scrambled, facts are left out, and the truth becomes increasingly distorted, and when those people die in their turn, most of the stories vanish with them.