2024-05-01 07:32:15
On January 23, 1919, just two weeks into World War I, the following happened in a home in the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin: A woman was putting her six-year-old son to bed. On this occasion she retrieved a pistol that was hidden under the child’s bed. Then she went downstairs to the kitchen. The house was in darkness; In the kitchen, the woman’s ex-husband was busy repairing an electrical outlet, so she turned off the power. The ex-husband had long been living in Chicago with a new woman, but he had come to visit to bring his children gifts.
His older son, who was nine, held a candle while the man wielded pliers and a screwdriver. The woman with the gun entered the dark kitchen. She fired at her ex many times, one bullet hit him in the hip, one in the neck, from this bullet he died. The woman was brought to trial and acquitted: it was said that she was mentally incompetent at the time of the crime. The murderer then moved with her children to Newark, New Jersey. Of course, that night in Wisconsin was never allowed to be talked about, not with outsiders, but not among each other either.
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Story by Paul Auster
The six-year-old boy who was upstairs in his bed and must have heard the shots was the father of the writer Paul Auster. He later built an emotional wall around himself reinforced with broken glass that no one was allowed to climb over. He lived at home with his murderous mother until he was 33. Of course, little Paul knew that his grandfather had died young, but he didn’t know how. The father told tall tales: his grandfather was repairing the roof of a tall building and fell to his death. The grandfather died in a hunting accident. The grandfather died in the First World War. Paul Auster only learned the truth because chance placed one of his cousins on a transatlantic flight next to a neighbor from back then, and he was able to report exactly what had happened.
Is it any wonder that Paul Auster, born in New Jersey in 1947, became a writer? He probably had no choice at all. And is it any wonder that his novels are about absurd blows of fate and the lies that people tell others, but above all themselves, in order to make life bearable? The novel that made Paul Auster suddenly famous at the age of 40 was the “New York Trilogy”. It begins with the sentences: “It was a wrong number that set everything in motion, the phone rang three times in the night and the voice on the other end asked for someone who wasn’t him. Much later, when he was able to think about what had happened to him, he came to the conclusion that nothing was real except chance.”
The acclaimed “New York Trilogy”
At the time, literary critics celebrated the “New York Trilogy” as an achievement of postmodern literature because reality crackled like brittle ice at every turn and the author had set up a lot of mirrors in which the text virtually encountered itself; In addition, a certain Paul Auster appeared in the pages, who shared certain characteristics with the author. Relationships with Poe and Hawthorne were registered, as were references to Beckett and Miguel de Cervantes. Perhaps you could put it more simply: The “New York Trilogy” read at times as if Franz Kafka had been reborn in the brain of Raymond Chandler and had allowed himself the joke of writing a series of hard-boiled detective novels. On the last page of the book, the reader is delighted to see that all clarity has been completely eliminated.
Lonely men as heroes: Paul Auster around 2005
Quelle: Getty Images
Paul Auster’s heroes were often lonely men with deep sorrows in the past, burying themselves in gloomy hotel rooms and downing ponds of whiskey. Anyone who thought he was drawing self-portraits was quickly proven wrong during visits: Paul Auster lived with his wife, the beautiful Siri Hustvedt, in a bright house in Brooklyn. He was a good host who would uncork the Sancerre in the afternoon and crack jokes, even at his own expense. He explained to his guest that he catches his sentences in the air and then slaps them onto the paper like flies. Unfortunately, most of the sentences did not survive the maneuver. And: He was no longer interested in his closed books at all – they were like packed suitcases that he left standing next to the street; Maybe some contemporary would like to take her with her. If not, that’s good too.
Being on the left was important to him
Unlike another famous Newark writer, Philip Roth, who was 14 years his senior, the fact that he was Jewish played almost no role in Paul Auster’s books. He had already been born into a different world – a world in which there were no longer any personal memories of the Second World War and American Jews no longer experienced much anti-Semitism firsthand. For Paul Auster, something else was much more important than his being Jewish: he was an American leftist. He would have voted for socialists if there had ever been a socialist party with a majority in the United States. In many of his novels he was unable to resist the temptation to preach a worldview.
In a scathing review in The New Yorker, critic James Woods accused Auster of linguistic shallowness. In fact, in the war against clichés that every writer must wage, Auster has often signed the surrender document before the first shot has been fired. The older he got, the more humor left him. On the other hand, it was precisely the cliché nature of Auster’s language that made his novels very easy to read – they purred along like racing cars on a Carrera track. People were happy to accept that his dialogues often read as if they came from a B-movie. What was significantly more disturbing was that Auster’s figures had printer’s ink running through their veins rather than blood, and that on closer inspection the skin that covered them often consisted of scribbled paper.
Auster wrote more than 30 books that have been translated into more than 40 languages. The most recent publications included “4 3 2 1” (2017) and “Baumgartner” (2023). Perhaps every Auster reader has a special novel that they love, although its flaws are clearly visible even without a magnifying glass. For this reader, that is the 1996 novel “Mr. Vertigo,” a mix of fantasy, bildungsroman, and historical epic about a boy who learns to fly in the United States in the 1920s. One objection to this book is that it diligently works through the checklists of correct attitudes: the hero grows up as a racist, but then learns his true destiny in a household run by a Hungarian Jew and consisting of a black boy and an old Indian woman consists.
One can also note that the protagonist’s bad childhood seems to come straight from Dickens. One might find the symbolism a little heavy-handed — the boy learns to fly on the same day that Charles Lindbergh crosses the ocean, and in the end, having forgotten how to fly, he literally has to crawl on his stomach through the dirt. Nothing does anything, the whole thing seems coherent and reads like a beautiful picaresque novel that ends, as it should, in the melancholy of old age.
Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt with their daughter Sophie, 2006
Quelle: Getty Images
In his review of Auster, James Woods writes that his novels are plagued by accidents that “fall like automobiles from the sky.” You don’t find this joke quite so funny anymore when you consider what happened to Paul Auster as an old man: he experienced perhaps the worst thing a person can experience, the death of both his child and his grandchild. His ten-month-old granddaughter died under unclear circumstances – Auster’s son claimed she fell asleep on his chest, but somehow drugs got into her system, and a case was opened against him. Auster’s son died a short time later of an overdose. You don’t find this much darkness in even the darkest of Paul Auster’s books; It is not literature that invents such absurd coincidences, only so-called life.
Then Paul Auster himself became seriously ill with cancer. The rest is silence: On April 30, 2024, Paul Auster died of complications from this cancer in Brooklyn at the age of 77, as the New York Times reported, citing a friend of the writer.
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