NEW YORK (AP) — Paul Auster, a prolific, award-winning author and filmmaker known for innovative storytelling and immersive stories such as “The New York Trilogy” and “4 3 2 1,” has died at age 77.
Auster’s death was confirmed Wednesday by her literary representation agency, the Carol Mann Agency, which did not provide further details. She had been diagnosed with cancer in 2022.
Since the 1970s, Auster published more than 30 books, translated into dozens of languages. He was long a pillar of the Brooklyn literary scene and never achieved great commercial success in the United States, although he was widely admired abroad for his cosmopolitan vision and his erudite, introspective style.
The French government made him a knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1991. He was also a finalist for the Booker Prize and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature.
Described as the “dean of American postmodernists” and “the most meta of American metafiction writers,” Auster combined history, politics, genre experiments, existential quests, and personal references to writers and writing.
“The New York Trilogy”, which brings together “City of Glass”, “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room” locked room”), was a postmodern detective saga in which names and identities are confused and a protagonist is a private detective named Paul Auster.
The short “Travels in the Scriptorium” wraps a story within a story as a political prisoner is forced to read a series of texts from other victims, which will end up including his own.
His longest and most ambitious work of fiction was “4 3 2 1,” published in 2017 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The novel, more than 800 pages, is a quadraphonic realist tale of the post-World War II era, the parallel sagas of Archibald Isaac Ferguson at summer camp, high school baseball games, and student lives in New York. York and Paris during the protests of the 1960s.
“They were identical, but different, that is, four boys with the same parents, the same bodies, the same genetic material, but each one living in a different house with their own circumstances,” Auster writes in the novel. “Each with his own path of his, and yet they were all the same person, three imaginary versions of himself, and to top it off he included himself as Number Four; the author of the book.”
Other works were the nonfiction compilations “Groundwork” and “Talking to Strangers”; a family autobiography, “The Invention of Solitude”; a biography of the novelist Stephen Crane (“The Immortal Flame of Stephen Crane”); the novels “Leviathan” (“Leviathan”) and the poetry collection “White Space.”
In his most recent novel, “Baumgartner,” the protagonist is a widowed professor burdened by the idea of mortality and wondering “where his mind will take him now.”
At the cinema
Auster was an author so old-fashioned that he used a typewriter and disdained email or other forms of electronic communication. He had an unusually active film career, compared to other writers.
In the mid-1990s, Auster collaborated with director Wayne Wang on the acclaimed film “Smoke,” an adaptation of Auster’s humorous tale about a Brooklyn tobacco shop and a certain customer named Paul. The film starred, among others, Harvey Keitel, Stockard Channing and William Hurt and earned Auster an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay. Wang and Auster then made another film, “Blue in the Face,” an improvised story, also about a Brooklyn tobacco shop, and which featured performances by Keitel and others such as Lou Reed and Lily Tomlin.
Auster eventually made his films himself. Keitel starred in “Lulu on the Bridge,” a love story released in 1998 that Auster directed and co-wrote with Vanessa Redgrave. Nine years later, Auster wrote and directed the drama “The Inner Life of Martin Frost,” in which David Thewlis plays a novelist and Irène Jacob plays the woman with a strange connection. to the story he’s been writing.
“The four times I’ve worked on films, I never had a problem talking to the actors,” Auster told director Wim Wenders in a conversation published in Interview magazine in 2017. “I always felt in great harmony with them. It was after those experiences that I realized that there is a similarity between writing fiction and acting. The writer does it with words on the page, and the actor does it with his body. ”
Personal life
Auster married writer Siri Hustvedt in 1982 and had a daughter, Sophie, who appeared in “The Inner Life of Martin Frost.” He also had a son, Daniel, from a previous marriage to author and translator Lydia Davis. Daniel Auster would battle drug addiction and die of an overdose in 2022, shortly after being charged with second-degree manslaughter in the death of his young daughter, Ruby.
Paul Auster never commented publicly on his son’s death, but he had written often about fatherhood. In “The Invention of Solitude,” published in 1982, he reflected on the “thousands of hours” he spent with Daniel in the first three years of his life and wondered if they mattered. “He will be lost forever,” Auster wrote. “All these things will fade from the child’s memory forever.”
Born in Newark, New Jersey, Paul Benjamin Auster grew up in a middle-class Jewish home, torn between his father’s thrift, to the point of greed, and his mother’s drive to spend, to the point of recklessness. He would soon feel like an outsider in his family, bitter by his parents’ materialism and more inspired by James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or the stories of Edgar Allan Poe than by the security of a traditional job.
His ideals would be severely tested. After graduating from Columbia University, Auster struggled for years before he could find a publisher or make money from his books. She wrote poetry, translated French literature, worked on an oil tanker, tried to market a baseball board game, and even thought about earning an income by growing worms in his basement.
“All that time, my only ambition was to write,” Auster said in his short memoir “Hand to Mouth,” published in 1995. “I knew it from the age of 16 or 17, and I never I had gotten my hopes up thinking that I could make a living from it. The writer doesn’t ‘choose a profession’ like someone who becomes a doctor or a police officer doesn’t choose it, but they choose you, and once you accept the fact that you don’t. “You are fit for nothing else, you must be prepared to walk a long and painful road for the rest of your days.”
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2024-05-04 03:46:18
