When he writes he is completely blind and floats. At the beginning he had a pretty precise idea of the book, but then surprising things happened and in the end it resulted in a completely different book, Paul Auster once said. The grandson of Jewish immigrants from Galicia lived for a few years as a bohemian in Paris, where he met Samuel Beckett, but was actually at home in New York, in Brooklyn, which he also immortalized in films such as “Smoke”.
Auster has been a baseball fan, poet, translator, screenwriter, novelist and cult author since his breakthrough with his “New York Trilogy” in the mid-80s. He wrote experimental crime stories like “City of Glass,” which – with clever twists – lead to ambivalence and complex existential questions.
“Vital Stories”
Writing is not easy, and stories are more than just silly entertainment, they are more of an art and vital to life, said Auster and wrote like he was obsessed. As soon as he finished one book, he started another. First with his hand, then on his Olympia. Auster was trained by French writers like Mallarmé, existentialists like Camus and transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau – and was influenced by fairy tales like in “Schlagshadow,” in which someone becomes a double of their own shadow, like Hans Christian Andersen.
Or the heroes have to pass a test and fail like Jim Nashe in the novel “Music of Chance”. Nashe is a firefighter who loses everything, his wife, his child, his identity, a chunk of money, until he builds a wall and seeks his purpose in it. And then the Berlin Wall fell.
His characters in his novels are seekers
He wrote the book in 1987 and 1988 and completed work on it in 1998, said Auster. “The day I finished it, the Berlin Wall fell.”
Many of his novel heroes lose their identity and become someone else. All of them are seekers, wanderers, often writers, detectives, always outsiders, often an alter ego of their author. Paul Auster’s books are full of quotes, cross-references, references to other authors, his own books and names. All characters are somehow related or known to everyone else. And he lived with them for years, even if fate and chance hit them until they no longer knew who they were.
Auster himself had experienced tragedy, surviving a thunderstorm as a child while a friend died – pure coincidence. Chance and music are central motifs in his work, this balance of chance and self-determination. He played it through in the novel “4 3 2 1”. There are four variants of a life, four what-if scenarios.
Life is a composition of random events, like a kind of music, said Auster. “We compose our own narrative and follow this common thread. This allows us to live in the present, with the past and looking to the future. We are walking on this line.”
The “monster” Trump
For two years, Auster was vice president of PEN America, working for persecuted writers. So talking about Paul Auster also means talking about politics: about his protest against the Vietnam War, his disgust, his shame at what happened to the USA, about the shift to the right and, as he said, the “monster” Trump, whom he only numbers 45, about the immaturity of US citizens in this country of “damn free” people, about the deficits in the constitution and the electoral law, according to which a small state like Wyoming with 580,000 citizens has as many votes in the Senate as California with 40 million.
Paul Auster saw his life as a writer as the sum of his books. It was a rich, productive, committed life with lots of characters who never die.
2024-05-01 11:46:58
#Mourning #Paul #Auster #existentialist #successful #author
