image source, Reuters
Caption: Auster was well known on the New York cultural scene.Article information
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1 mayo 2024
Renowned American author Paul Auster, acclaimed author of “The New York Trilogy” and “The Moon Palace” died at the age of 77.
Auster died on Tuesday night at his home in the New York neighborhood of Brooklyn surrounded by his family, including his wife Siri Hustvedt and his daughter, the singer Sophie Auster, said his friend and colleague Jacki Lyden in a statement sent to AFP.
“Paul died this afternoon, at home, surrounded by his loved ones,” Lyden wrote Tuesday, describing him as a “writer’s writer.”
Auster had been receiving treatment for lung cancer diagnosed in March 2023.
Among his best-known works are the aforementioned “The New York Trilogy” – a crime novel inspired by the police genre -, “The Palace of the Moon”, and “4 3 2 1”, his last work of great inspiration. with which he broke his concise style.
Chance and coincidences were always part of his work, because, as he told BBC Mundo journalist Gerardo Lissardy in a 2020 interview, “what I have tried to say in many of the things I have written is that anything can happen to him.” happen to anyone, at any time.
Caption, His novel “4, 3, 2, 1” has 866 pages.
Also his are “Timbuktu” (1999) and the series of existential novels: “Moon Palace” (1989), “The Music of Chance” (1990) and “Leviathan” (1992).
His gift for sharp dialogue was key to the success of the film “Smoke,” which he wrote and co-directed, about a Brooklyn tobacco store owner played by Harvey Keitel.
He also wrote and directed the film “Lulu on the Bridge.”
Beyond his acclaimed novels, he is the author of short stories, poetry and essays.
Caption, Many of his works have a common setting: New York
But throughout his career he wrote more than 30 books that are found both on airports and on university reading lists and have been translated into more than 40 languages.
His death occurs a few months after publishing “Baumgartner”, the novel with autobiographical overtones and a nostalgic tone reflected in his memories of university, his marriage or his career as a philosophy professor at Princeton.
A “tender and miraculous little book,” in the words of his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt.
Auster was born in 1947 and grew up in Newark, New Jersey. He was the son of Polish Jewish immigrants.
He moved to New York to attend Columbia University, where he studied French, Italian, and British literature.
5 essential novels by Paul Auster
- The New York Trilogy. The work that made him known. Three existentialist police stories that form a single narrative
- Moon, S Palace. The novel that cemented his fame. The life and adventures of Marco Fogg, a young teenager who remembers the protagonist of “The Catcher in the Rye”, but at the end of the 20th century.
- The music of chance. Inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, with two eccentric millionaires and the two men in debt with them.
- Leviathan. A man tells the story of his best friend, who died trying to blow up all the statues of liberty that existed in the United States (with the exception of the original)
- 4 3 2 1. His last long-term work. The life of Archie Ferguson told in four different versions.
image source, Reuters
image captionAuster received the “Prince of Asturias Award for Literature” in 2006.
After his studies, he lived in Paris from 1971 to 1975 and translated French poets, but had to take on more jobs before he could make a living from his books. At that time he was especially influenced by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, especially by his sense of existential absurdity.
The inheritance from his father, who died in 1979, allowed him to dedicate himself to writing.
In 1992 he was named Knight of the French Order of Arts and Letters, and in 2006 he received the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts.
A revered writer in France, which he considers his “second country”, he received the Foreign Medici Prize for “Leviathan” in 1993.
He is also quite well known in the Hispanic world, where the Anagrama publishing house translated and published most of his work.
In April 2022, he lost his son Daniel Auster, 44, who he had with the writer Lydia Davis, his first wife.
The latter died of an “accidental overdose” in New York after being accused of involuntary manslaughter for the death at the end of 2021, also due to an overdose, of his daughter Ruby, who was only ten months old.
In the aforementioned interview with Gerardo Lissardy, Paul Auster spoke about death:
“The possibility of dying is very present. I think about it all the time. I understand that I could die right after I get off the phone with you, and there is nothing I can do about it (…). But I am certainly prepared… “I think I’m ready.”
He died in Brooklyn, the New York neighborhood where he had lived since 1980 and which he turned into a literary myth.
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