Very few authors become so prominent that their names are used to describe and define a specific corner of 20th century world literature. Kafka is an obvious title, and Borges. Gabriel García Márquez, possibly. Paul Auster – absolutely.
Whenever a novel maintains the realistic touch but wanders over the border into the fantastic without the reader really understanding how it happens, you refer to Paul Auster’s “New York Trilogy” and everyone understands what you are talking about.
I have a map of Manhattan. In the middle of Central Park, Paul Auster has written his name. At my urging, of course, when I met him maybe ten years ago, but I had thought he would spell his name up and down the streets of the metropolis, as the protagonist Quinn walks in “City of Glass”, the first novel in the trilogy that was published in 1985 and would make Auster a superstar. It remains an incomparable trilogy of novels. It completely lets go and takes hold of the time it was written in and becomes as timeless as the vast majority of authors can only dream of their books becoming.
Now the timeless author is dead and to honor his memory one should of course read about his books. It is good practice.
Before he broke through with his trilogy he was a struggling American intellectual. He lived in Paris, translated French poetry, and lived broadly like many other American writers who reach across the Atlantic towards Europe in general and Paris in particular. He wrote poetry and read Hamsun, Beckett and other 20th century classics. He has told about this in the book “Ur hand i mun”. My American edition of that book also includes a facsimile of a baseball-themed card game that he tried to sell to raise some cash. The book’s subtitle is “A chronicle of early failure”.
It may sound silly, but precisely the meeting between the concrete and the existentially abstract is breathless.
In 1982 he published a book about his father’s death. It is called “To invent the loneliness” and is one of the most poignant things you can read when it comes to the death of a loved one. An often quoted scene from the book is when Auster goes through his dead father’s ties. It may sound silly, but precisely the meeting between the concrete and the existentially abstract is breathless.
And then he writes The New York trilogy and suddenly becomes a celebrity. We shouldn’t get carried away with the fact that he’s handsome too. At the Book Fair in Gothenburg during the late 80s, his presence was more meaningful than if David Bowie or someone in that style had appeared. The superstar continued to write fantastic novels such as “Moon Palace”, “Leviathan” and “Mr Vertigo”. But sometimes he interspersed with more odd works. I would like to highlight “Journeys in the Scriptory” from 2006, where he lets his earlier fictions break free. And the thin “The Red Notebook” from 1995, which is a strange series of reasoning about how chance against all odds affects life.
In about a month, his last novel, “Baumgartner”, will be published in Swedish translation. It deals a lot with aging and grief, and like many of his earlier books, it seems that a part of him always yearned back to the time before he broke through and became the Paul Auster of the reading world.
About a year ago, Paul Auster’s wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, announced that he had been diagnosed with cancer. He passed away a few days ago. Paul Auster was 77.
Read more
Author Paul Auster is dead
DN’s interview with Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt from 2020
Review: Paul Auster knows that a single shot can generate pain for generations