Paul Auster, prolific American author of novels, poems and films propelled onto the international literary scene by his “New York Trilogy”, died of complications from lung cancer at the age of 77, announced the New York Times Tuesday.
Paul Auster died at his home in Brooklyn, New York, in the United States, said the daily, citing a friend of the novelist, Jacki Lyden. His cancer diagnosis was announced last year by his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt.
From “Moon Palace” to “Book of Illusions”
Paul Auster became a New York literary icon with his “New York Trilogy” published in 1987 and which gave a philosophical twist to the detective novel genre. Also a screenwriter, Paul Auster contributed to the film “Smoke”, which portrays lost souls gravitating around a Brooklyn tobacco shop.
His other successful works include “Moon Palace”, “The Book of Illusions” and “Brooklyn Follies”. Foreign Medici Prize for “Leviathan” in 1993, Paul Auster is a revered writer in France whom he considers his “second country”.
His “New York Trilogy” published in 1987 propelled him onto the international literary scene and definitively associated him with the megacity that he continually reinvented in his books and films. “Sometimes New York is the center of the story, sometimes it is just the periphery. New York, the city where I live and where I write, is an image that lives in my reality and in my fiction”he said.
In “City of Glass”, “Revenants” and “The Hidden Room” which form the “Trilogy”, its characters go in search of their identity like detectives in the labyrinth of Manhattan bristling with skyscrapers where everything It’s all reflections and pretenses.
Birth in Newark
It was in Newark, a New York suburb, that Paul Auster was born in 1947 to parents descended from Ashkenazi Jews. At a very young age, he was attracted to this city where he spent all his weekends. He moved there at age 18 to study French, Italian and British literature at Columbia University from 1965 to 1970.
Later, he anchored himself in Brooklyn, a family neighborhood that he celebrated in “Smoke” and its sequel “Brooklyn Boogie,” two films he directed with Wayne Wang. “Smoke” won the Silver Bear in Berlin (1995). After his studies, he lived in Paris from 1971 to 1975. He occupied a maid’s room, met a prostitute who recited Baudelaire to him and almost enrolled at the Institute of Advanced Cinematographic Studies. He wrote scripts for silent films and translated Breton, Mallarmé, Michaux and Dupin. He perfected his French, which he spoke with a voice raspy from the cigarillos he loved.
A tall, hedonistic brunette, with combed-back hair and slightly bulging dark-rimmed eyes, he appeals to women but experiences several years of professional wandering, which he recounts in “The Devil by the Tail”. “Unearth”, his first collection of poems, appeared in the United States in 1974, but due to lack of sufficient income, he took on odd jobs and took a job as a handyman on an oil tanker.
The inheritance from his father, who died in 1979, allowed him to devote himself to writing. After a divorce from the writer Lydia Davis, with whom he had a son, he married in 1981 the American novelist Siri Hustvedt. It’s the start of a new life.
Optical illusion
He published “The Invention of Solitude” (1982), an autobiographical novel in which he attempted to understand the personality of his father, an “invisible” figure who would inspire his characters struggling with a disturbing double. This is particularly the case in “Moon Palace” (1990), an initiatory novel about an orphan, which finally brought him American recognition.
A fine connoisseur of narrative tricks, Paul Auster likes to play with the reader: anagrams between names, interplays, fragmented stories. “Leviathan”, “The Book of Illusions” (2007) and the phenomenal “4321” (2018), blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. Sometimes at the risk of being too confusing and displeasing.
“We spend our time imagining stories. We live with this… the real and the imaginary are one. Thoughts are real, even thoughts of imaginary things,” explains one of his characters in “Alone in the Dark”. A Democrat, he denounces in this novel published in 2009, the eight Bush years when America was turned upside down by the war in Iraq and September 11, he says, “in a parallel world”, through the evocation of an imaginary civil war told by a depressed insomniac.
He returns to the autobiographical story with “Winter Chronicles” (2013) and “Excursions in the interior zone” (2014), deciding, “in the winter of his life”, to reconstruct the puzzle of his existence through the description of the mutations in his body. “I want to try to show, to make people feel what it is to be alive. Life is both wonderful and horrible and my task is to capture those moments. This is my mission as a writer. Nothing more “.
His son David, charged in April 2022 with involuntary manslaughter of his 10-month-old daughter who died after poisoning with fentanyl and heroin, himself succumbed a few days later to “an accidental overdose”. The same year, he was diagnosed with cancer, according to his wife. Despite his illness, he completed one last book with a nostalgic tone, “Baumgartner”.
