Paul Auster died this Tuesday, 30th, at his home in New York, reported The New York Times. The award-winning American writer couldn’t resist lung cancer.
Born into a Jewish family of Austrian descent, in 1947, in Newark (New Jersey), Auster would later make Brooklyn his home and the setting of novels, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. He has an extensive literary work published in more than 40 languages.
In Portugal, Paul Auster has published a large part of his work, particularly his novels, such as “Mr. Vertigo”, “Moon Palace”, “Music of Chance”, “Leviathan”, “The New York Trilogy”, “Timbuktu”, “The Book of Illusions”, “The Follies of Brooklyn”, “The Man in the Dark ” and “4 3 2 1”, with which he was a finalist for the Booker Prize.
In 2021, on the occasion of the release of the biography “A Man on Fire – The Life and Work of Stephen Crane”, he was interviewed by VISÃO through a phone call he answered at his home in Brooklyn, which a few years earlier, in 2004, had open to our magazine to talk about books, cinema, politics.
The novelist signed on to direct a couple of films, including “The Inner Life of Martin Frost” (2007), partially shot in Portugal.
He was awarded the 2006 Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature, made a Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters in 2007 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In recent years, Auster’s life had been marked by two tragedies: the deaths of his son and granddaughter. In 2021, Ruby, the 10-month-old granddaughter, ended up dying before reaching the hospital, after emergency services were called to the apartment in New York where she lived, but no longer had time to save her. It was later discovered that it was an overdose of fentanyl and heroin, but it was not clear how Ruby ingested the substances. But two weeks later, on November 15, his son Daniel Auster would be arrested on charges of negligent homicide.
On April 28 last year, Daniel Auster, after being released on bail, also died of an overdose, aged 44. Authorities said at the time that it would have been accidental, as the amount of narcotics found in his body was identical to that which he took regularly.
With Lusa
