Arrives with a smartphone notification New York Times the news of Paul Auster dies aged 77 in the very city he had photographed in words, and for a moment the world seemed to contract with sadness. The writer of the famous “New York trilogy” passed away at his home in Brooklyn due to lung cancer which he had deliberately kept quiet, due to that innate modesty in speaking about themselves directly which leads writers to hide in their own books. Superstar of American literature, a native like Bruce Springsteen of that New Jersey so reviled by New Yorkers in TV series (and perhaps even more essence of America), in his books Paul Auster he had the ability to look transversally at the city-microcosm for which everyone has tried to have effective words, framing it from unknown perspectives. Cultivated during the long period spent in France as a young man who had given a European touch to his books, according to many critics, fusing together Derrida, Emily Brönte and the surgical noir of his very first reading love, Robert Louis Stevenson, to whom his grandmother as a child to make him understand that there were other worlds beyond baseball. A style that he also expressed in the cinema, writing screenplays Smoke and directing Blue in the face, both played by his expressive fetish Harvey Keitel. Cinema for which she had always had a special passion, Paul Austeralthough he chose not to study it in his time in France due to shyness in public speaking.
SUPER ET New York Trilogy
SUPER ET New York Trilogy
He was the least American in style, and at the same time the subtle distiller of details that changed the stories. Always from that house in Brooklyn where he had chosen to live well before the intellectual hype of the third millennium. He who was the prime example of the pure man of letters, disciplined in his profession to the point of writing at least six hours a day, seven days a week, strictly with a fountain pen and notebook. He typed only the drafts, gracefully rejecting the enthusiastic excesses of technological innovations that did not capture him. “Keyboards have always intimidated me. A pen is a much more primitive instrument, you feel the words coming out of your body, and then you carve them onto the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality, for me, it’s a physical experience,” he explained to The Paris Review in an interview in 2003. “Auster made being a writer seem like something real, something a person could actually do,” poet and writer Meghan O’Rourke commented to the NYT. The last voice of a distant New York, and a goodbye.
