Paul Auster, literary giant and voice of New York, has died: he was 77 years old – Corriere.it

Paul Auster, the prolific American writer and author of the New York trilogy, has died of complications from lung cancer, the New York Times reported. He was 77 years old. Auster died at his home in Brooklyn.

Before Cancerlandthe land of cancer, as his wife Siri Hustvedt had defined the area of ​​pain and illness in which her husband had found himself since December 2022, when he was diagnosed with lung cancer, Paul Auster he had had the opportunity to experience firsthand the twists and turns of fate that can turn an existence into tragedy. “The deaths, the accidents, the encounters, the unpicked flowers, the ignored paths decide in our name,” he wrote, saying that nothing in life had shocked him more than witnessing the death of a boy struck by lightning he was only fourteen years old.

Living with someone who has cancer and is bombarded with chemotherapy and immunotherapy is an adventure of closeness and separation – Siri Hustvedt wrote on Instagram She announces to readers and the world the illness of her husband, the least technological contemporary writer -. You have to be close enough to feel the treatments, which are unsettling, almost as if they were your own. And far enough away to be an effective help. Too much empathy can make a person useless. Of course, it’s not always easy to stay balanced in this thread, but it’s a true labor of love.

Who was Paul Auster?

A very fine narrator who started in the 1980s with the novels of New York Trilogy Created – and occupied – a space that had not previously existed in American fiction, Auster recounts in his dazzling memoir The invention of loneliness about the death of her father, but also about the fact that her paternal grandmother had murdered her husband, a secret that was kept hidden for a long time and discovered almost by accident.

In 2022 he had to face it Death of his son Danielhis first wife, Lydia Davis, also a writer, succumbed to an overdose after she in turn lost her ten-month-old daughter due to unsupervised ingestion, Psychotropic drugs and heroin.

Born in Newark, Indiana New Jersey (like the other US giant Philip Roth), originally from Eastern Europe on February 3, 1947, from Jewish parents (his paternal grandfather had emigrated from the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk in 19001), Auster spent time in Paris after graduating from Columbia University, where he held a variety of jobs and Private lessons, occasional collaboration with newspapers, translations of works from French, in a precarious situation that continued even after marriage with Lydia Davis and the birth of her first child, Daniel, as she will later recount in Making Ends Meet in 1997: When I turned thirty, I experienced a time when everything I touched failed. My marriage ended in divorce, my writing business collapsed, and I struggled financially.

The first works and successes

In 1974 he settled in New York and published the collection of poems Dig outwhich, among other things, is followed by the theatrical image Laurel and Hardy go to heaven (1977) and his first prose text, Space (1980). But with The invention of loneliness (1982), in which the portrait of the father, a headstrong, opaque man, as if immune from the world, mixes with a complex of voices of writers and artists who influenced his voice, making his name in the American literature decisively penetrated Panorama, while international success accompanied the publication of New York Trilogythat includes City of glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) e The closed room (1987). Auster was a liberal who participated in civil and left-wing political struggles Big supporter of Obama and a bitter opponent of the Trump presidency who has strongly condemned it in recent months the Russian invasion of Ukrainecompares the Russian president Wladimir Putin a Hitler.

He defined his wife, Siri StevedtWriter and psychoanalytic researcher, with whom he had lived in Brooklyn since 1981 and with whom he had his daughter Sophie, one of the best minds he knew: She is the intellectual of the familynot me, and I know everything about Lacan and Bakhtin, I learned it directly from her, she confessed to IB Siegumfeldt in the book interview A life in words. The author of eighteen novels and five autobiographical books, Auster expressed his passion for cinema in the 1990s by co-writing and directing two films with Wayne Wang. Smoke and blue on the facewhich they followed Lulu on the bridge e The inner workings of Martin Frost in 2007.

The style and the themes

In the novels of Paul Auster kissed by a scripture in a state of gracethe characters’ feeling of alienation and alienation is predominant, individual identity appears as a fluid state that is also linked to the precariousness of existence, while memory is always something that goes beyond pure personal experience: it is not so much my story, that interested me, but I used my experiences to ask myself questions about the world he explained to Reading in conversation with his friend David Grossman. Auster has often played with the narrative and the true self in his novels, as in City of Glass, where crime writer Daniel Quinn, lost not only in the city but also in himself, receives a call one night from someone looking for Paul is looking. Oyster. Or as he did in bold style 4321a novel that can once again shake the concept of identity telling the four possible lives in four different ways, yet real, by Archie Ferguson. Four parallel storylines in which the protagonists are good or evil, rich or poor, depending on the version.

The last book

In 2021, after years of study and research, he published a paper Boy on fire (published in Italy, like all of Auster’s books by Einaudi), an exemplary life that comes directly from the nineteenth century: that of Stephen Crane (1871-1900). In over a thousand pages, Auster tells the short parable of a forgotten writer, the author of “The Red Mark of Courage,” who died of tuberculosis in 1900 at the age of 28: “The more I got to know him, the more I felt him.” another character from my novels, he had said. Death and grief were the theme of Auster’s final work entitled Baumgartner, after the surname of the protagonist Seymour Baumgartner, a septuagenarian professor who cannot find peace after the loss of his wife Anna. A short, intimate book, a reflection on old age that combines irony and tenderness.