Paul Auster

Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer and film director. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His books have been translated into more than forty languages.

Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle-class parents of Austrian descent, Queenie (née Bogat) and Samuel Auster. He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, and Newark, and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood.

After graduating from Columbia University with B.A. and M.A. degrees in 1970, he moved to Paris, where he earned a living translating French literature among other jobs. After returning to the United States, in 1974, he published poems, essays, and novels, as well as translations of French writers, such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.

Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir titled The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. Although these books nod to the detective genre, they are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential questions of identity, space, language, and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process. According to Auster, "...the Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude."

The search for identity and personal meaning permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrated heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or, increasingly, the relationships between people and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. Auster's more recent works, from Oracle Night (2003) to 4 3 2 1 (2017), have also met with critical acclaim.

He was on the PEN American Center board of trustees from 2004 to 2009 and its vice president from 2005 through 2007.

In 2012, Auster said in an interview that he would not visit Turkey, in protest at its treatment of journalists. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan replied: "As if we need you! Who cares if you come, or not?" Auster responded: "According to the latest numbers gathered by International PEN, there are nearly one hundred writers imprisoned in Turkey, not to speak of independent publishers such as Ragıp Zarakolu, whose case is being closely watched by PEN Centers around the world."

One of Auster's more recent books, A Life in Words, was published in October 2017 by Seven Stories Press. It brought together three years of conversations with the Danish scholar I.B. Siegumfeldt about each one of Auster's works, both fiction and non-fiction. It has been considered a primary source for understanding Auster's approach to his works.

Auster was willing to give Iranian translators permission to write Persian versions of his works in exchange for a small fee; Iran does not recognize international copyright laws.

Themes

Much of the early scholarship about Auster's work saw links between it and the theories of such French writers as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and others. Auster himself denied these influences and asserted in print that "I've read only one short essay by Lacan, the 'Purloined Letter,' in the Yale French Studies issue on poststructuralism—all the way back in 1966." Other scholars have seen influences in Auster's work of the American transcendentalists of the nineteenth century, as exemplified by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The transcendentalists believed that the symbolic order of civilization has separated us from the natural order of the world, and that by moving into nature, as Thoreau did, as he described in Walden, it would be possible to return to this natural order.

Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Nathaniel Hawthorne also had a strong influence on Auster's writing. Auster specifically referred to characters from Poe and Hawthorne in his novels, for example William Wilson in City of Glass or Hawthorne's Fanshawe in The Locked Room, both from The New York Trilogy.

Auster's recurring themes include:

• coincidence
• frequent portrayal of an ascetic life
• a sense of imminent disaster
• an obsessive writer as central character or narrator
• loss of the ability to understand
• loss of language
• loss of money – having a lot, but losing it little by little without earning any more
• depiction of daily and ordinary life
• failure
• absent father
• writing and story telling, metafiction
• intertextuality
• American history
• American space

"Over the past twenty-five years," opined Michael Dirda in The New York Review of Books in 2008, "Paul Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature." Dirda also has extolled his loaded virtues in The Washington Post:

Ever since City of Glass, the first volume of his New York Trilogy, Auster has perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set disoriented heroes in a seemingly familiar world gradually suffused with mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination. His plots – drawing on elements from suspense stories, existential récit, and autobiography – keep readers turning the pages, but sometimes end by leaving them uncertain about what they've just been through.

Writing about Auster's 2017 novel, 4 3 2 1, Booklist critic Donna Seaman remarked:

Auster has been turning readers' heads for three decades, bending the conventions of storytelling, blurring the line between fiction and autobiography, infusing novels with literary and cinematic allusions, and calling attention to the art of storytelling itself, not with cool, intellectual remove, but rather with wonder, gratitude, daring, and sly humor. ... Auster's fiction is rife with cosmic riddles and rich in emotional complexity. He now presents his most capacious, demanding, eventful, suspenseful, erotic, structurally audacious, funny, and soulful novel to date. ... Auster is conducting a grand experiment, not only in storytelling, but also in the endless nature-versus-nurture debate, the perpetual dance between inheritance and free will, intention and chance, dreams and fate. This elaborate investigation into the big what-if is also a mesmerizing dramatization of the multitude of clashing selves we each harbor within. ... A paean to youth, desire, books, creativity, and unpredictability, it is a four-faceted bildungsroman and an ars poetica, in which Auster elucidates his devotion to literature and art. He writes, 'To combine the strange with the familiar: that was what Ferguson aspired to, to observe the world as closely as the most dedicated realist and yet to create a way of seeing the world through a different, slightly distorting lens.' Auster achieves this and much more in his virtuoso, magnanimous, and ravishing opus.

The English critic James Wood, however, offered Auster little praise, criticizing his "Clichés, borrowed language, bourgeois bêtises... intricately bound up with modern and postmodern literature"; he drew a distinction between Auster- "probably America's best-known postmodern novelist"- and "Beckett, Nabokov, Richard Yates, Thomas Bernhard, Muriel Spark, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace", who to Wood "have all employed and impaled cliché in their work", where Auster, who "clearly shares this engagement with mediation and borrowedness- hence, his cinematic plots and rather bogus dialogue", "does nothing with cliché except use it". Considering this "bewildering", Wood opines that "Auster is a peculiar kind of postmodernist", going on to question "is he a postmodernist at all?", observing that "Eighty per cent of a typical Auster novel proceeds in a manner indistinguishable from American realism; the remaining twenty per cent does a kind of postmodern surgery on the eighty per cent, often casting doubt on the veracity of the plot". Wood however noted that "One reads Auster's novels very fast, because they are lucidly written, because the grammar of the prose is the grammar of the most familiar realism (the kind that is, in fact, comfortingly artificial), and because the plots, full of sneaky turns and surprises and violent irruptions, have what the Times once called "all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller." There are no semantic obstacles, lexical difficulties, or syntactical challenges. The books fairly hum along." He stated that "The reason Auster is not a realist writer, of course, is that his larger narrative games are anti-realist or surrealist." Wood also bemoaned Auster's 'b-movie dialogue', 'absurdity', 'shallow skepticism', 'fake realism' and 'balsa-wood backstories'.

Auster was married to the writer Lydia Davis. They had one son together, Daniel Auster, who was arrested on April 16, 2022, and charged with manslaughter and negligent homicide in the death of his 10-month-old infant daughter, who consumed heroin and fentanyl he was using. On April 26, 2022, Daniel, who was found to be in possession of drug paraphernalia, died from an overdose. Daniel was also known for his association with the Club Kids and their ringleader Michael Alig, and was present during the killing of fellow Club Kid Andre Melendez.

Auster and his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt (the daughter of professor and scholar Lloyd Hustvedt), were married in 1981, and they lived in Brooklyn. Together they had one daughter, Sophie Auster, a singer.

Auster characterized his politics as "far to the left of the Democratic Party," but said he voted Democratic because he doubted a socialist candidate could win. He described right-wing Republicans as "jihadists", and the election of Donald Trump as "the most appalling thing I've seen in politics in my life".

In September 2009, he signed a petition in support of Roman Polanski, calling for his release after he was arrested in Switzerland in relation to his 1977 charge for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.

On March 11, 2023, Auster's wife Siri Hustvedt revealed on Instagram that he had been diagnosed with cancer in December 2022, and that he had been treated at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York since then.

Paul Auster died of complications of lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn, on April 30, 2024, at the age of 77.

• 1989 Prix France Culture de Littérature Étrangère
• 1990 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction finalist for The Music of Chance
• 1993 Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan
• 1995 Independent Spirit award for best first screenplay for Smoke
• 1996 Bodil Awards – Best American Film: Smoke
• 1996 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence
• 2001 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Timbuktu
• 2003 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2004 International Dublin Literary Award shortlist for The Book of Illusions
• 2005 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Oracle Night
• 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature
• 2006 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Literature
• 2007 Honorary doctor from the University of Liège
• 2007 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for The Brooklyn Follies
• 2007 Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
• 2008 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Travels in the Scriptorium
• 2009 Premio Leteo (León, Spain)
• 2010 Médaille Grand Vermeil de la ville de Paris
• 2010 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Man in the Dark
• 2011 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Invisible
• 2012 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Sunset Park
• 2012 NYC Literary Honors for fiction
• 2017 Booker Prize Shortlist for "4321"

Fiction

• Squeeze Play (1984) (written under pseudonym Paul Benjamin)
• The New York Trilogy (1987)
  • City of Glass (1985)
  • Ghosts (1986)
  • The Locked Room (1986)
• In the Country of Last Things (1987)
• Moon Palace (1989)
• The Music of Chance (1990)
• Leviathan (1992)
• Mr. Vertigo (1994)
• Timbuktu (1999)
• The Book of Illusions (2002)
• Oracle Night (2003)
• The Brooklyn Follies (2005)
• Travels in the Scriptorium (2006)
• Man in the Dark (2008)
• Invisible (2009)
• Sunset Park (2010)
• Day/Night (2013)
• 4 3 2 1 (2017)
• Baumgartner (2023)

Nonfiction

• The Invention of Solitude (1982)
• The Art of Hunger (1992)
• The Red Notebook (1995) (originally printed in Granta (44)) (1993)
• Hand to Mouth (1997)
• Collected Prose (contains The Invention of Solitude, The Art of Hunger, The Red Notebook, and Hand to Mouth as well as various other previously uncollected pieces) (first edition, 2005; expanded second edition, 2010)
• Winter Journal (2012)
• Here and Now: Letters, 2008–2011 (2013) A collection of letters exchanged with J. M. Coetzee.
• Report from the Interior (2013)
• A Life in Words: In Conversation with I. B. Siegumfeldt (2017)
• Talking to Strangers: Selected Essays, Prefaces, and Other Writings, 1967–2017 (2019)
• Groundwork: Autobiographical Writings, 1979–2012 (2020)
• Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (2021)
• Bloodbath Nation [with photographs by Spencer Ostrander] (2023)

Poetry

• Unearth (1974)
• Wall Writing (1976)
• Fragments from the Cold (1977)
• Facing the Music (1980)
• Disappearances: Selected Poems (1988)
• Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays 1970–1979 (1990)
• Collected Poems (2007)
• White Spaces: Selected Poems and Early Prose (2020)

Screenplays

• Smoke (1995)
• Blue in the Face (1995)
• Lulu on the Bridge (1998)
• The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007)

Edited collections

• The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (1982)
• True Tales of American Life (first published under the title I Thought My Father Was God, and Other True Tales from NPR's National Story Project) (2001)

Translations

• Fits and Starts: Selected Poems of Jacques Dupin, translated by Paul Auster, Living Hand Editions, 1974
• "The Uninhabited: Selected Poems of André du Bouchet" (1976)
• Life/Situations, by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1977 (in collaboration with Lydia Davis)
• A Tomb for Anatole, by Stéphane Mallarmé (1983)
• Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1998) (translation of Pierre Clastres' ethnography Chronique des indiens Guayaki)
• Vicious Circles: Two fictions & "After the Fact", by Maurice Blanchot, 1999
• The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (2005)

Miscellaneous

• Auggie Wren's Christmas Story (1990)
• The Story of My Typewriter with paintings by Sam Messer (2002)
• "The Accidental Rebel" (April 23, 2008: article in New York Times)
• "ALONE" (2015) – Prose piece from 1969 published in six copies along with "Becoming the Other in Translation" (2014) by Siri Hustvedt. Published by Danish small press Ark Editions.

• In 1993, a movie adaptation of The Music of Chance was released. Auster features in a cameo role at the end of the film.
• In 1994 City of Glass was adapted as a graphic novel by artist David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik. Auster's friend, noted cartoonist Art Spiegelman, produced the adaptation.
• From 1999 to 2001, Auster was part of NPR's National Story Project, a monthly radio show in which, together With NPR correspondent Jacki Lyden, Auster read stories sent in by NPR listeners across America. Listeners were invited to send in stories of "anywhere from two paragraphs to two pages" that "must be true", from which Auster later selected entries, edited them and subsequently read them on the air. Auster read over 4,000 stories submitted to the show, with a few dozen eventually featured on the show and many more anthologized in two 2002 books edited by Auster.
• Jazz trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler's 2001 album Hide and Seek uses words by Auster from the play of the same name.
• Auster narrated "Ground Zero" (2004), an audio guide created by the Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva) and Soundwalk and produced by NPR, which won the Dalton Pen Award for Multi-media/Audio (2005), and was nominated for an Audie Award for best Original Work (2005).
• Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth's composition ... ce qui arrive ... (2004) combines the recorded voice of Paul Auster with ensemble music and live electronics by Markus Noisternig and Thomas Musil (Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM)). Paul Auster is heard reading from his books Hand to Mouth and The Red Notebook, either as straight recitation, integrated with other sounds as if in a radio play, or passed through an electronically realized string resonator so that the low tones interact with those of a string ensemble. A film by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster runs throughout the work featuring the cabaret artist and actress Georgette Dee.
• In 2005 his daughter, Sophie, recorded an album of songs in both French and English, entitled Sophie Auster, with the band One Ring Zero. The lyrics of three of the songs (in English) are by Paul Auster; and he also provided for the accompanying booklet translations of several French poems which form the lyrics of other songs on the album.
• Auster's voice may be heard on the 2005 album entitled We Must Be Losing It by The Farangs. The two tracks are entitled "Obituary in the Present Tense" and "Between the Lines".
• On the 2006 album As Smart as We Are by New York band One Ring Zero, Auster wrote the lyrics for the song "Natty Man Blues" based on Cincinnati poet Norman Finkelstein.
• In 2006 Auster directed the film The Inner Life of Martin Frost, based on an original screenplay by him. It was shot in Lisbon and Azenhas do Mar and starred David Thewlis, Iréne Jacob, and Michael Imperioli as well as Auster's daughter Sophie. Auster provided the narration, albeit uncredited. The film premiered at the European Film Market, as part of the 2007 Berlinale in Berlin, Germany on February 10, 2007, and opened in New York City on September 7 of the same year.
• The lyrics of Fionn Regan's 2006 song "Put A Penny in the Slot" mention Auster and his novella Timbuktu.
• In the 2008 Russian film Плюс один (Plus One), the main character is in the process of translating one of Auster's books.
• In the 2008 novel To the End of the Land by David Grossman, the bedroom bookshelf of the central IDF soldier character Ofer is described as prominently displaying several Auster titles.
• In the 2009 documentary Act of God, Auster is interviewed on his experience of watching another boy struck and killed by lightning when he was 14.
• In the 2011 documentary on Charlotte Rampling The Look, Auster meditates on beauty with Rampling on his moored tug boat on the Hudson river.
• Pedro Almodovar's 2019 movie Pain and Glory ("Dolor y Gloria") is in many ways an homage to the works of Auster. While Salvador is in his heroin induced stupor, Alberto logs on to his computer. As the camera pans across the desktop screen, we see an icon entitled "Paul Auster." The narrative structure and arc of the film, with its many coincidences (Federico stumbling on to the performance of the play; the discovery, many years later, of Eduardo's painting), are a visual depiction of an Auster novel.