Paul Auster, author of 34 books including the acclaimed New York trilogy, has died at the age of 77.
The author died on Tuesday from complications from lung cancer, his friend and fellow author Jackie Lyden confirmed to the Guardian.
Auster became known for his “highly stylized, strangely enigmatic postmodernist novels in which the narrator is largely unreliable and the basis of the plot is constantly changing.” has been written. Novelist Joyce Carol Oates Written in 2010.
His stories often revolve around the themes of chance, chance, and fate. Many of his protagonists are writers themselves, and his body of work is self-referential, with characters from his earlier novels reappearing in later novels.
“Auster established one of the most distinctive branches of modern literature.” wrote a critic Michael Dilda, 2008. “His speaking style is as hypnotic as the voice of an ancient sailor. When you start reading his books, by the second page you can’t help but listen.”
The author was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1947. According to Auster, his writing career began at the age of eight when he failed to get an autograph from baseball hero Willie Mays because neither he nor his parents had one. He pencils in the game. From then on, he carried a pencil with him everywhere. “If you have a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance you’ll want to start using it at some point,” he writes. 1995 essay.
While hiking at summer camp when he was 14 years old, Auster witnessed a boy being struck by lightning and killed instantly a short distance away. He said His life had “completely changed” and he thought about it “every day.” Chance “unsurprisingly became a recurring theme in his novels.” the critic wrote Laura Miller in 2017. A similar incident occurs in Auster’s novel “4 3 2 1,” which was shortlisted for Booker in 2017. One of the four versions of the book’s main character, Archie Ferguson, runs under a tree at summer camp and is killed by a falling branch during a lightning strike.
Auster studied at Columbia University and moved to Paris in the early 1970s, where he worked various jobs, including translation, and lived with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, writer Lydia Davis, whom he met while attending college. College. In 1974 they returned to the United States and married. In 1977, the couple had a son, Daniel, but separated shortly thereafter.
In January 1979, Auster’s father Samuel died, an event that became the seed for the writer’s first memoir, The Invention of Solitude (published in 1982). In it, Auster revealed that his paternal grandfather was shot and killed by his grandmother. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity. “A boy cannot survive such an event unaffected as a man,” Auster wrote of his father, and with his father “an immovable relationship, a relationship cut off from each other’s sides.” “It’s there,” he said. wall”.
Auster’s breakthrough came with the 1985 publication of City of Glass, the first novel in his New York trilogy. Although these books are ostensibly mystery novels, Auster used the format to ask existential questions about identity. “more [Auster’s detectives] The more we creep into their eccentric quarries, the more they seem to actually creep into the big questions: the implications of authorship, the mysteries of epistemology, the veils and masks of language. ” I have written Written in 1987 by critic and screenwriter Stephen Schiff.
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Auster published regularly throughout the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s, including Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), He has written more than a dozen novels, including “Oracle Night” (2003). He also worked in film, writing the screenplay for Wayne Wang’s Smoke, which won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay in 1995.
In 1981, Auster met author Siri Hustvedt, and they married the following year. In 1987, the couple had a daughter, Sophie, who became a singer and actor. Auster’s 1992 novel Leviathan, about a man who accidentally blows himself up, features a character named Iris Vegan, the heroine of Hustvedt’s first novel, Blindfolded.
Auster was better known in Europe than in his native United States. He is “nothing short of a best-selling author in these fields,” his 2007 paper read. new york magazine article, “Auster is a rock star in Paris.” He won Spain’s Prince of Asturias Literary Award in 2006 and the Medici Etranger Award in 1993 for Leviathan. He was also the Commander of Arts and Culture.
In April 2022, Auster and Davis’ son Daniel died of a drug overdose. In March 2023, Hustvedt revealed that Auster was diagnosed with cancer the previous December and was undergoing treatment. Her last novel, Baumgartner, about a 70-something writer who loses her husband, was published in October.
Mr. Auster is survived by Mr. Hustvedt, his daughter Sophie Auster, his sister Janet Auster, and his grandchildren.
