“You have taken away the dignity of the announcement of his death. It’s unfair” – Corriere.it

The books of Paul Auster, who died on April 30th in New York at the age of 77 as a result of lung cancer at the end of 2022, consist of notebooks. And as only the greatest can do, Auster told his story – and our lives – by telling himself.

In City of glassthe first volume of New York Trilogy (Einaudi, like all Auster), who made him famous, Quinn takes notes in a red notebook (and a few years later Auster will give the title). The red notebook to his improvisations). Anna, in In the land of the last things, writes in a blue notebook. In Mr. VertigoWalter writes his life story in a school notebook. The complete works of Willy G. Christmas by Timbuktu (It is unlikely that those who accused Auster of being a cold writer have read this novel), collected in 74 notebooks. Also notebooks The Book of IllusionsYes The Night of the Oracle. There is a red notebook inside Invisible. One more in there Sunset Park. Almost all of the protagonists in his books keep some kind of diaryand that 4 3 2 1 The book, which tells four different lives of Archie Ferguson – the author’s alter ego – does so in a way that would have made Italo Calvino happy, bending the line of the narrative horizon ever further like an arc. AND Winter diary the story of Auster’s sixty-fourth year.

Now the America of letters is shedding crocodile tears: He was very popular with the French, who were incredulous at an American writer who spoke their language perfectly and he knew Mallarm, Sartre and Blanchot, who were translated by him, better than they did. He became a writer during a four-year stay in France immediately after graduating, with his first wife Lydia Davis, also a writer and mother of his first son Daniel.

In 1985, the most New Yorker writer of his generation published City of glass with a small publisher in Los Angeles and after completion with the other two volumes The New York TrilogyFaber & Faber, publisher of TS Eliot, is promoting it in the UK, and here are France and Italy (New York Trilogy first published by Rizzoli) and in the rest of the world. After the first unhappy marriage, the second happy one follows with another writer, Siri Hustvedt, the Iris – Siri the other way around – who saves the protagonist Leviathan, Siri, who gave him his daughter Sophie, a good singer-songwriter. Siri, who defended him even after his death
: May 2, on InstagramIn her tribute to her husband, she explained that the news of Paul’s death was spread against the wishes of the family before his body was even removed from our home, depriving his loved ones of the opportunity to make friends at their own pace and on their way of notifying. .

Auster is the meticulous preparer of literary traps, which, however, appear in political books such as: Man in the dark e Sunset Park They describe today’s America with brutality and with the heart always on the left. The secular Jew thinks about Anne Frank and her house in Amsterdam next to Descartes’, imagining that she had escaped the Nazi beasts, a university student of philosophy after the end of the war. Auster visitor from Bergen-Belsen who analyzes the architecture of barbarism and is struck by an auditory hallucination, with the screams of the dead echoing in his head.

He told us his dreamsthe dialogues with the father who hated him in life, but when Paul closes his eyes, he returns to him – and when he wakes up, the author never remembers what his father told him in a dark room on the other side revealed to your consciousness.

Like Richard Serra’s seemingly very black engravings, which gradually reveal universes of meaning as you get closer, Auster’s books reveal themselves to those willing to look closely at them. As in Ed Ruscha’s paintings, which obsessively repeat the cardinal points in white, red and blue, Auster’s America tries to orient itself in a time that it can no longer understand.

Since it is impossible to lock him in one of the basic cages for those who want to study at universities, he escaped the academy (better that way). He was a friend of the likes of Don DeLillo, Russell Banks and Salman Rushdie who immediately defended himself against Khomeinist barbarism in an open letter to the New York Times (My prayer for Salman Rushdie) became famous.

For the critics, Philip Roth was the neurotic Jew, Norman Mailer the braggart, Gore Vidal the left-wing Hidalgo, Cormac McCarthy the cowboy, Harold Brodkey the Proustian in a crescendo of clichés. But oyster? At home he was European. I was in the most American area (perhaps the last American classic according to Guido Fink) like Hawthorne, which he loved. He could simply publish essays and very dry fiction and immediately publish an 800-page literary biography of Stephen Crane (Boy on fire) and the thousands of 4 3 2 1.

He quoted Samuel Beckett as a fierce self-critic – As soon as the ink dries, I find what I have written repulsive – and when the Reading newspaper published one of his – impressive – writings on Ukraine in April 2022, Auster carefully followed the editing, and when he sent the copies to the newspaper Home received Thanks: Did your readers really find it interesting?

Shortly before his illness, he suffered two terrible tragedies: the death of her very young granddaughter and shortly afterwards that of her son Daniel defeated by decades of addiction, a prelude to the cancer diagnosis published by Siri – Cancerland. He had time to take care of the final work, Baumgartner
what will stay that way Ravelstein by Saul Bellow, to bear witness to the heights to which age passes, and to welcome his Sophie’s newborn nephew, Miles. And then? And then, as he wrote Moon Palace: We’re getting to the hard part: the last word, the farewells, the famous last words.