As reported by his colleague Jackie Leiden, Oster died on Tuesday due to complications from the lung cancer he had been suffering from for the last few years.
Auster primarily wrote detective mystery stories, through which he dealt with existential issues while raising questions about human identity, creating his own recognizable style of writing. Often his heroes were writers.
He was also particularly concerned with the role of coincidences and random events in life, and this because of an incident that had happened to him in his teenage years and had marked his life. It was the death of a boy who was struck by lightning while standing inches away from him at a camp where Oster had been at age 14. Luck, “understandably, became a recurring theme in his fiction,” critic Laura Miller wrote in 2017. A similar incident occurs in Auster’s 2017 Booker shortlist 4 3 2 1 : one of the four versions of the protagonist, Archie Ferguson, in the book runs under a tree at summer camp and is killed by a falling branch when he is struck by lightning.
Who was it
Paul Oster was born to Jewish parents of Polish descent on February 3, 1947 in Newark. He studied literature at Columbia University. After finishing his studies and after working on a tanker for some time in the early 1970s, he went to Paris. He worked at various jobs, including translation, where he devoted himself to the study of contemporary French poets. All this time he wrote mainly poems, which he did not manage to publish. He lived with his partner, acclaimed author Lydia Davis, whom he had met while attending college. In 1974 they returned to the US and married. At the same time, he got a job in a large publishing house, as a manager of translations from French. At the same time he published some of his poems and translations of French authors such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert. In 1977, the couple had a son, Daniel, but divorced shortly after.
In 1981 he married fellow writer Siri Hustvedt, with whom he also had a daughter, Sophie.
In April 2022, Oster and Davis’ son, Daniel, died of a drug overdose. In March 2023, it became known that the author had begun treatment for cancer with which he had been diagnosed in December 2022.
HIS WRITING WORK
“Always have a pencil in your pocket”
According to him, his writing life began at the age of 8, when he was unable to get an autograph from baseball player Willie Mays because neither he nor his parents had a pencil with them to the game. Since then, he took a pencil with him everywhere. “If there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance you’ll one day be tempted to start using it,” he wrote in a 1995 essay.
Auster’s first novel was called Squeeze Play and was published in 1976 under the pen name Paul Benjamin. As Auster himself mentioned in the autobiography Hand to Mouth, which includes – as a footnote – the novel, Squeeze Play was written in the hope of bringing him money, since at that time the author was facing serious financial problems. However, the goal was not achieved.
His first book of prose as Paul Auster was published in 1979. It was entitled The Invention of Solitude and was written in prose. He achieved remarkable success and his name began to be known. However, when, having now decided for good to abandon poetry in favor of prose, he attempted to publish a novel, The Glass City, the book was rejected by dozens of publishers before a small California publishing house finally took it on. The success was instantaneous. Reviews were rave and the book sold spectacularly.
The books “Ghosts” and “Locked Room” followed, which together with “The Glass City” make up the “New York Trilogy”. All three books, like others by Oster, have been translated into Greek.
Among his best-known novels are “The Palace of the Moon” (1989), “Vertigo” (1994), “The Book of Illusions” (2002), “Invisible” (2009). He was also a poet, essayist, translator, screenwriter and director.
Auster’s latest novel, Baumgartner, about a widowed 70-year-old writer, was published in October.
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