Paul Auster, the American writer who was the voice of New York, has died. He was 77 years old. He was suffering from cancer, his wife Siri Hustvedt announced it on Instagram. A prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who became famous in the 1980s for having given new life to the noir novel, over the years he has become one of the most characteristic New York writers of his generation. He died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn.
Celebrated as a “literary superstar”, although he was originally from New Jersey, he became inextricably linked to New York and in particular to Brooklyn, where he went to live in 1980, among the streets of Park Slope.
Protagonist of contemporary American and world literature, Paul Auster is pigeonholed into Postmodernism with his friends and colleagues Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His precise and incisive writing aims to reveal human anguish and neurosis and to describe the solitudes of contemporary lives, in a world often dominated by chance. Among his most famous works, translated and read all over the world, is New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The music of the case (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), Brooklyn Follies (2005).
Poet and essayist, he was also a screenwriter and director: his artistic production – influenced by Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Miguel de Cervantes, Kurt Vonnegut, Albert Camus – led him to also create important cinematographic works: Smoke, Blue in the Face And Lulu on the Bridge. With Lou Reed and Woody AllenPaul Auster has always been considered the singer of the Big Apple, builder of literary universes that gravitate around the search for identity, sense and significance of individual, collective, historical and social existence.
