The secret motto that could be written over many of The New Yorker‘s novels, stories and autobiographical essays is: how life and literature play out. With Paul Auster it was difficult to imagine one without the other. He always remained an author to attack. His cigarillo brand and hairdresser’s address were well known; He typed his manuscripts into an old Olympia typewriter, purchased in 1974 for $40. Auster was a thoughtful, cheerful and friendly conversationalist who hated interviews – yet there are a striking number of them in the archives. Never talk to journalists, he emphasized in the novel “Sunset Park” (2012), the interview was an inferior form. The parade New Yorker repeatedly got involved in politics. In the doomsday vision “Man in the Dark” (2008) he attacked the Bush administration, this “whole gang of fascist criminals”. In “Sunset Park” he wrote against Guantánamo and arbitrary torture, and with “Bloodbath Nation” (2023) he recently published an angry essay against the rampant gun violence in the United States.
In his own way, Auster has been writing a single large book for decades, in which recurring questions and themes can be found: family, artistry, fiction and reality, love and even greater love, the everyday life of life and that of art; Finally, the countless attempts to find answers to questions that have not yet been asked. The enthusiasm about the clatter of typewriters and sitting at the desk (and how life sparks hopelessly in between), the magic of notebooks and stacks of manuscripts: that has been Auster’s art since his first novel “City of Glass” (1985), part one of the so-called “New -York Trilogy”. Auster’s work is a rather unique testament to decades of writing and thinking about the boundaries of literature. He himself always remained the ex-young star of contemporary US literature who had matured into an old master and published an average of one book per year. There aren’t many authors who work so consistently on a single major story, working on the Great American Novel – see “The Invention of Solitude” (1982), “Moon over Manhattan” (1989), “Travelling in the Scriptorium” (2006 ), “Winter Journal” (2012), and finally “Baumgartner” (2023) as the last novel. Much of “Baumgartner” is reminiscent of the quality of great literature: a narrative that elegantly brings the past and the present into contact, the cheerful play with life, grief and death: “After death the following happens: You come to the Big Nowhere , that is a black space in which nothing can be seen, a noiseless vacuum of nullity, the orcus of nothingness.”
In March of last year, Auster’s wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, announced on Instagram: “My husband was diagnosed with cancer in December after being ill for several months before.” Since then, they have lived in a place she calls “cancer country.” . On April 30th, Paul Auster died in New York at the age of 77 as a result of his cancer.