The American writer Paul Auster, 76, one of the masters of American postmodernism, is ill with cancer, which was officially diagnosed at the end of last year, and is now being treated, with chemotherapy and immunotherapy treatments, at Memorial Sloan– Kettering Cancer Center in New York, one of the most famous cancer research and treatment centers in the world. The acclaimed novelist’s wife, 68-year-old writer and poet Siri Hustvedt, revealed this with an announcement on Instagram.
“I’ve been away from Instagram for a while. It’s because my husband was diagnosed with cancer in December, and he had already been ill for several months. He’s now being treated at Sloan Kettering in New York and I live in a which I have learned to call ‘Cancerland’ – writes his wife in a post on the social network – Many people have crossed its borders, because they are or have been ill or because they love someone, a parent, a child, a spouse or a friend who has or has had cancer. Cancer is different for each person who has it. Some people survive and others die. Everyone knows this, yet living close to this truth changes everyday reality.”
“Intimacy with another person is not just a parallel experience, two lines that move in the same direction but do not cross – continues Paul Auster’s wife -. It is much more like a dynamic Venn diagram – if such a thing is possible – where the overlapping parts of two circles keep moving and changing over time. A moving ‘I’ and ‘you’ which is also ‘we’. I think it would be terrible to be alone in the Land of Cancer. Living with someone who has cancer and is bombarded with chemotherapy and immunotherapy is an adventure of closeness and separation. You have to be close enough to feel the unnerving treatments feel almost like your own and far enough away to be a help genuine. Too much empathy can make a person useless! This rope isn’t always easy to walk, of course, but it’s the true labor of love.”
Born in Newark, New Jersey, on February 3, 1947, Paul Auster focused his poetics on the chance that dominates the universe, as in the “New York Trilogy” (City of Glass”, 1985; “Ghosts”, 1986; “The Closed Room”, 1987), a postmodern parody of the detective novel, and on attention to the improbable (“In the country of last things”, 1987; “Mr. Vertigo”, 1994). He also devoted himself to poetry, to non-fiction and film scripts.He has also directed films of his own writing, such as “Blue in the Face” (1995), “Lulu on the Bridge” (1998), “The Inner Life of Martin Frost” (2007). Italy his works are published by Einaudi.The catalog includes titles such as: “The invention of solitude”, “Sbarcare il lunario”, “Experiment of truth”, “The art of hunger”, “I thought my father was God”, “The Book of Illusions”, “The Night of the Oracle”. Auster is Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vi winner of the Prince of Asturias Award, the Prix Médicis and the Naples Award and is a member of the Pem Club America.
His wife Siri Hustvedt was born in 1955 in Minnesota and studied at Columbia University. She is the daughter of a university professor, after earning a Phd in English literature, she abandoned her academic career to devote herself to writing. With Einaudi he has published: “What I loved”, “Elegy for an American”, “The trembling woman”, “L’estate senza men”, “Living, thinking, looking”, “The dazzling world”, “The illusions of certainty” and “Memories of the future”. In 2012 you won the International Gabarron Prize for Human Sciences and Thought.
(by Paolo Martini)