The books of Paul Auster, who passed away on April 30 in New York at the age of 77 due to the consequences of the lung cancer that struck him at the end of 2022, are made of notebooks. And as only the greatest are capable of doing, Auster talked about his time — and our lives — by telling himself.
In Glass citythe first volume of New York Trilogy (Einaudi, like all Auster) who made him famous, Quinn takes notes in a red notebook (and a few years later Auster will give the title of The red notebook to his improvisations). Anna, in In the land of the last things, writes in a blue notebook. In Mr. Vertigo, Walter writes his life story in a school notebook. The Complete Works of Willy G. Christmas by Timbuktu (it is unlikely that those who accused Auster of being a cold writer have read this novel) is collected in 74 notebooks. Notebooks too The Book of Illusionsneither The night of the oracle. There is a red notebook in Invisible. Another in Sunset Park. Almost all of the protagonists in his books keep a diary of some kindand that 4 3 2 1 which tells four different lives of Archie Ferguson – the author’s alter ego – does so in a way that would have made Italo Calvino happy, increasingly curving the line of the narrative horizon, like an arch. AND Winter diary it is the story of Auster’s sixty-fourth year.
Now the America of letters sheds crocodile tears: he was much loved by the French who were incredulous in front of an American writer who spoke their language perfectly and he knew Mallarmé, Sartre and Blanchot translated by him better than them. He became a writer in France, during a four-year stay, fresh from university, together with his first wife Lydia Davis, also a writer and mother of his first son Daniel.
In 1985, the most New York writer of his generation published Glass city with a small Los Angeles publisher and, when completed with the other two volumes The New York TrilogyFaber & Faber, publisher of TS Eliot, promotes it in the United Kingdom, and here is France and Italy (New York Trilogy first released at Rizzoli) and the rest of the world. After the first unhappy marriage, the second happy one with another writer, Siri Hustvedt, the Iris – Siri in reverse – who saves the protagonist of Leviathan, Siri who gave him his daughter Sophie, a good singer-songwriter. Siri who defended him even after his death: May 2, on Instagramin the tribute to her husband, explained that the news of Paul’s death was spread against the will of the family “before his body was even moved from our house”, robbing his loved ones of the possibility of notifying friends according to their own times and ways.
Auster is the meticulous preparer of literary traps which, however, in political books such as Man in the dark And Sunset Park they describe today’s America with brutality and with their hearts always on the left. He is the secular Jew who reflects on Anne Frank and her house in Amsterdam next to that of Descartes, imagining her having escaped the Nazi beasts, a university student of philosophy after the war was over. Auster visitor from Bergen-Belsen who analyzes “the architecture of barbarism” and is struck by an auditory hallucination, the screams of the dead echoing in his head.
He told us his dreamsthe dialogues with the father who hated him in life but when Paul closes his eyes he returns to him – and upon awakening the writer never remembers what his father revealed to him “in a dark room on the other side of your consciousness”.
Like Richard Serra’s apparently very black engravings which, as soon as you get closer, progressively reveal universes of meaning, Auster’s books reveal themselves to those who are ready to look at them closely. As in Ed Ruscha’s paintings that obsessively repeat the cardinal points in white, red and blue, Auster’s America tries to orient himself in an era that he can no longer understand.
Impossible to lock up in one of the fundamental cages for those who want to be studied in universities, he escaped the academy (better that way). He was a friend of the greats like Don DeLillo, Russell Banks and Salman Rushdie who immediately defended himself from Khomeinist barbarism in an open letter to the New York Times (My prayer for Salman Rushdie) became famous.
Philip Roth for the critics was the neurotic Jew, Norman Mailer the braggart, Gore Vidal the left-wing hidalgo, Cormac McCarthy the cowboy, Harold Brodkey the Proustian in a crescendo of clichés. But Auster? At home he was “European”. He was actually very American (“perhaps the last of the American classics” according to Guido Fink) like Hawthorne, which he loved. Simply he could publish essays and very dry fiction and immediately afterwards an 800-page literary biography of Stephen Crane (Boy on fire) and the thousand of 4 3 2 1.
Fierce self-critic, he quoted Samuel Beckett – “as soon as the ink dries I find what I have written revolting” – and when “la Lettura” published one of his – formidable – writings on Ukraine in April 2022, Auster followed the editing painstakingly, and when he received it at home the copies of the newspaper telephoned to thank: «Did your readers really find it interesting?».
Just before his illness, two terrible tragedies befell him: the death of her very young granddaughter and shortly after that of her son Daniel defeated by decades of addictions, a prelude to the diagnosis of cancer – “Cancerland” – made public by Siri. He had time to take care of the final work, Baumgartner which will remain as the Ravelstein of Saul Bellow to testify on what very high peaks old age passed, and to greet his Sophie’s newborn nephew Miles. And then? And then, as he wrote in Moon Palace: «We get to the difficult part: the final word, the goodbyes, the famous last words».
