Paul Auster, prolific American writer propelled onto the literary scene by his New York trilogydied of complications from lung cancer at the age of 77, the New York Times.
He died at his home in Brooklyn, New York, said the daily, citing a friend of the novelist.
His cancer diagnosis was announced last year by his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt.
Paul Auster is the author of novels, poems and films, marked by New York and disoriented characters who take the reader on a dizzying existential quest.
Foreign Medici Prize for Leviathan by 1993, Auster was a revered writer in France, which he considered his “second country.”
Her New York trilogypublished in 1987, propelled him onto the international literary scene and definitively associated him with the megacity that he continually reinvented in his books and films.
“Sometimes New York is the center of the story, sometimes it is just the periphery. New York, the city where I live and where I write, is an image that lives in my reality and in my fiction,” he said.
In City of Glass, Returned And The Hidden Room which form the Trilogyits characters set off in search of their identity like detectives in the labyrinth of Manhattan bristling with skyscrapers, where everything is only reflections and false pretenses.
It was in Newark, a New York suburb, that Paul Auster was born in 1947 to parents descended from Ashkenazi Jews. At a very young age, he was attracted to this city where he spent all his weekends. He moved there at age 18 to study French, Italian and British literature at Columbia University from 1965 to 1970.
Later, he anchored himself in Brooklyn, a family neighborhood that he celebrated in Smoke and its sequel Brooklyn Boogietwo films he directed with Wayne Wang. Smoke won the Silver Bear in Berlin (1995).
After his studies, he lived in Paris from 1971 to 1975. He occupied a maid’s room, met a prostitute who recited Baudelaire to him and almost enrolled at the Institute of Advanced Cinematographic Studies. He wrote scripts for silent films and translated Breton, Mallarmé, Michaux and Dupin. He perfected his French, which he spoke with a voice raspy from the cigarillos he loved.
A tall, hedonistic brunette with combed-back hair and slightly bulging dark-rimmed eyes, he appeals to women but experiences several years of professional wandering, which he recounts in The devil by the tail. Unearthhis first collection of poems, appeared in the United States in 1974, but due to lack of sufficient income, he took on odd jobs and embarked as a handyman on an oil tanker.
The inheritance from his father, who died in 1979, allowed him to devote himself to writing. After a divorce from the writer Lydia Davis, with whom he had a son, he married in 1981 the American novelist Siri Hustvedt. It’s the start of a new life.
Optical illusion
He publishes The invention of solitude (1982), an autobiographical novel in which he attempts to understand the personality of his father, an “invisible” figure who will inspire his characters struggling with a disturbing double. This is particularly the case in Moon Palace (1990), an initiatory novel about an orphan, which finally brought him American recognition.
A fine connoisseur of narrative tricks, Paul Auster likes to play with the reader: anagrams between names, interplays, fragmented stories. Leviathan, The book of illusions (2007) or even the phenomenal 4321 (2018), blur the lines between fiction and reality. Sometimes at the risk of being too confusing and displeasing.
“We spend our time imagining stories. We live with that… Real and imaginary are one. Thoughts are real, even thoughts of imaginary things,” explains one of his characters in Alone in the dark.
A Democrat, in this novel published in 2009 he denounces the eight Bush years when America, the war in Iraq and September 11, fell, he says, “into a parallel world”, through the evocation of a imaginary civil war told by a depressed insomniac.
He returns to the autobiographical story with Winter Chronicles (2013) and Excursions in the interior area (2014), decided, “in the winter of his life”, to piece together the puzzle of his existence through the description of the mutations of his body. “I want to try to show, to make people feel what it is to be alive. Life is both wonderful and horrible and my task is to capture those moments. This is my mission as a writer. Nothing more. »
His son David, charged in April 2022 with manslaughter of his 10-month-old daughter who died after poisoning with fentanyl and heroin, himself died a few days later of “an accidental overdose”.
The same year, he was diagnosed with cancer, according to his wife. Despite his illness, he completed a final book with a nostalgic tone, Baumgartner.