FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
NEW YORK – «Paul is really not well», his friend Salman Rushdie confessed to us a few weeks ago, in a recent interview. Paul Auster, highly celebrated author for many of his books, from New York Trilogy until recently Baumgartner”, and “patron saint of Brooklyn” as the New York Times defined him, died at the age of 77 on the night of Tuesday 30 April from complications related to lung cancer.
Auster had recently become a grandfather: his daughter Sophie had given birth to little Miles at 1.05am on New Year’s Eve. In a photo posted on Instagram by his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, the novelist looks at the newborn with adoration and amazement. Auster died at home in the brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he had lived since the 1980s with Husdvedt. Although he was born in New Jersey, he was “Brooklyn’s novelist,” an inspiration to other writers and intellectuals who came to the neighborhood from the 1990s onward.
It was his wife who announced in March 2023 on Instagram that Auster had cancer, like the protagonist of his Brooklyn Follies who was looking for “a quiet place to die”. Hustvedt also shared some at the beginning «Bulletins from Cancerland», to share with friends and readers who loved him the situation of her husband, who fought until the end with all his strength. «It’s not about tiny details of what Paul is experiencing and I with him, but about something that many people experience and it’s important not to pretend that nothing is happening».
The treatments made him very tired, so he was unable to present Baumgartnerpublished in November (in Italy by Einaudi), a novel which – he explained to the «Guardian» – «could be the last book I write». Baumgartner it is a love story, a bond made of sharing thoughts and writing, so deep that when it is missing it is as if a limb were torn away. During one interview given to us by Siri Hustvedt at their home last summer, Paul had suddenly returned after a hospital visit. He had told his wife that he had lost his glasses while he was out, but “the most beautiful woman in the world, or so she seemed to me at the time, found them and gave them back to me”, he added. Siri burst out laughing, and as we continued the interview with her, Paul said goodbye and said only: “Good luck.”
