How is a writer born? For Paul Auster, the affair happened at 8 years old. Passionate about baseball, he is then in devotion before the“incandescent” Willie Mays, one of the New York Giants. One day, leaving a match, he meets his idol and asks him for an autograph. “Of course, son, Mays responds. Do you have a pencil? » The boy has nothing to write with. Nor his father. Nor anyone. “Sorry, son.” : no pencil, no autograph. Auster burst into tears, he says in Why write? (Actes Sud, like all of his work translated in France). “Since that evening, I have always had a pencil with me, wherever I go. And I happily tell my children, that’s how I became a writer. »
Nearly seven decades later, the kid with the pencil died, in his home in Brooklyn, New York, on Tuesday evening, April 30, announced the New York Times. He was 77 years old, and had around forty books behind him, translated into more than 40 languages. Novelist, but also poet, translator, critic, essayist and screenwriter, the author of Moon Palace (1990), Leviathan (1993), Alone in the dark (2009) or even Baumgartner (2024) had written thousands of pages, becoming an immense American writer. One of the most brilliant of his generation, the most Francophile too. A goldsmith in the art of storytelling, diving into his childhood, his history, what he called his “inner zone”, to nourish romantic, autobiographical or even political texts of extreme intelligence and sensitivity. He knew how to retrace like no other the lives of his characters or his own in all their amplitude, their contradictions, their windings, their bifurcations sometimes linked to apparent coincidences.
His wife, Siri Hustvedt, also a writer, announced in March 2023 that he was suffering from cancer, diagnosed in December after several months of illness. Paul Auster was being treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “I live in a place I ended up calling Cancerland,” wrote Siri Hustvedt: “Living with someone who has cancer and is bombarded with chemotherapy and immunotherapy is an adventure of closeness and separation. »
“The invisible boundary between life and death”
In 1982, it was through the story of another separation, the sudden death of his father, three years earlier, that Paul Auster entered the literary scene. The death, “we can accept it with resignation at the end of a long illness”, he wrote in the first paragraph of his first book, The Invention of Solitude, where he tried to figure out who his father was. “But if a man dies without any apparent cause, if a man dies simply because he is a man, we are so close to the invisible border between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. let’s find. Life becomes death, and seems to have been a part of it all along. »
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