There are circumstances that mark. This is what Paul Auster commented in an interview held near his house in 2009. If at the age of 14 you see how lightning strikes your friend a few meters away while he is trying to escape the storm under a wire fence, possibly that will make you change your vision of life.
In another passage he recalled that “thunder sounded at the precise moment when Siri and I said I do and I couldn't help but think that the heavens were opening when I took such a decisive step in my life.”
Who could be surprised that his literature is an exercise in coincidences. “They are not my books, but everything in life is the result of chance. It's fascinating to think, for example, where did your parents meet? It's luck. If they hadn't met, you wouldn't be in Brooklyn. Isn't it a strange story? They met by chance, don't doubt it, and now you are sitting in front of me,” she reflected then.
Auster, author of the famous New York Trilogy, died Tuesday night at his home in Brooklyn due to lung cancer. He was 77 years old and had a prolific work. Novelist, memoirist and writer, as some defined him, he emerged as a relevant pen for his fusion of genres, his mixture of everyday reality with intrigue and moral fable.
He was born in New Jersey in 1947. However, due to family ties and his experiences, he became a New Yorker. “For me there is not just one New York,” he said. “I feel it in different ways and different places. There is the solitary New York or the New York of friends and friendship, and each one fosters a type of book,” he clarified.
One critic described him as “one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers.” Owner of a very refined technique, he established the foundations of a unique narrative concept that escaped all ascription.
As his fame grew, Auster became something of a standard-bearer for Brooklyn's rich prominence in letters and as a place of residence for the cool crowd. Brooklyn Follies (2005) or Sunset Park (2010) directly allude to his habitat. But, in another of his coincidences, he confessed to this chronicler that he and his wife Siri Hustvedt ended up there, in the Park Slope neighborhood, because they couldn't find anything at a better price in Manhattan, their desired location.
His literary journey began to take flight with The Invention of Solitude, in 1982, a disturbing memoir in which he reflected on his distant relationship with his father, who had recently died.
City of Glass, his first novel, was rejected by 17 publishers before it finally saw the light of day in 1985 thanks to a small California publisher. This volume later became the first part of his celebrated New York Trilogy, three novels (along with Ghosts and The Locked Room) packaged into one volume.
Auster confessed that he always wanted to be a writer who wrote things that for him were beautiful, true and good, but he clarified that he was also interested in inventing new ways of telling stories.
Among his most acclaimed books are The Palace of the Moon (1989), Leviathan (1992) and The Book of Illusions (2002). Starting in the 90s, Auster had the spotlight in Hollywood. From this ambition came Smoke (1995), a film with a masterful Harvey Keitel. That same year came Blue in the Face, with cameos by Lou Reed and Madonna.
Despite the successes, he also received setbacks. The most notable were those by critic James Wood in The New Yorker.
But he learned to live with that. Much worse was that, in his final years, his existence was affected by tragedy. His son Daniel Auster, who was 44 years old, died of an overdose in 2022. Daniel had been charged with the death of his 10-month-old daughter Ruby (and Auster's granddaughter). He stated that he had used heroin, fell asleep, and when he woke up, the little girl was dead from fentanyl and heroin poisoning.
In 2006, the storyteller received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. In his speech he stated: “I have spent my life striking up conversations with people I have never seen, with people I will never meet, and I hope to continue doing so until the day I breathe my last breath.”
