The news of the death of American writer Paul Auster, on Tuesday night, came after the police entered Columbia University to expel pro-Palestinian students occupying the Hamilton building.
Paul Auster graduated from Columbia, in the years when opposition to the Vietnam War was growing in North American society and in universities in particular. In 1968, he was one of the students who demonstrated against the conflict at the New York university. The protest had been going on for more than a month when, on the morning of April 30, police entered Hamilton Hall and Low Library, armed with tear gas, to clear the buildings.
“The Vietnam War was driving everyone crazy,” Paul Auster said 50 years later to Vanity Fair magazine, about the occupation of the university. “Things were falling apart and it felt like chaos reigned, no one knew where we were going. The frustration of not being able to stop the war led me to the sundial [na alameda principal da universidade] this day”.
Paul Auster died on Tuesday night, in Brooklyn, New York, when it was early Wednesday morning, in Europe. He was 77 years old.
He is the writer of coincidence and chance, of the decisive moment in which everything changes. His protagonists seem like projections of himself and, not infrequently, new plots reunite characters from previous novels, always woven in detail, in praise of the random and in a challenge to the improbability of everything that ends up happening happening.
At the beginning of “The Night of the Oracle” the protagonist of the story, writer Sydney Orr, survivor of a near-fatal illness, finds a blue Portuguese hardcover notebook in a stationery store in a city that can only be New York. You have to abandon everything to rebuild an almost identical life elsewhere, in a whirlwind of fiction upon fiction, in which the narrative is intertwined with marginal notes, which may seem real. “Words are dangerous”, they can change reality, they can kill, as Paul Auster demonstrated to Sydney Orr.
The writer was born in Newark, New Jersey, on February 3, 1947, with the name Paul Benjamin Auster. He graduated from Columbia University in 1970 and lived for the next four years in France, where he worked as a translator and prepared the fabric of fiction.
He returned to the United States in 1974, with his first wife, writer Lydia Davis, and settled in New York. He then began regularly publishing articles and stories and translated French authors such as Joseph Joubert – a writer at the turn of the 19th century, whose work was only created posthumously, through letters and short texts, in a reconstruction that never fails to suggest a character from his own. Auster.
Recognition came a decade later, in increasing form, as he published “The Glass City”, “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room”, which he would bring together in a single volume, as if they were “three movements of a symphony unique”, in the “New York Trilogy”. Behind was crime writer Paul Benjamin, with his debut novel “Squeeze Play” (1984).
The first book, however, came from 1982, three years after his father’s death. In “Inventar a solitude” (1982) he revisited his childhood, revealed that his paternal grandfather was murdered by his grandmother and, regarding his relationship with his father, he said that they both lived on opposite sides of a wall. “A boy cannot live through these kinds of things without being affected by them as a man,” wrote Auster. .
The memories would be revisited years later in “Winter Diary” (2012) and “Relatório do Interior” (2013), a mosaic of a journey to adulthood and the beginning of his career as a writer, already after “From Hand to the mouth” (1997). .
The year 1979 was also the year of divorce from Lydia Davis. Two years later, he met the writer Siri Hustvedt with whom he lived the rest of his life. Auster’s novel “Leviathan” (1992), about a man who blows himself up by accident, has a character named Iris Vegan, the heroine of Hustvedt’s first novel, “The Blindfold” (2003).
Auster’s work includes two dozen novels, including “Palácio da lua” (1989), “A Música do Chance” (1990), “Livro das Ilusões” (2002), “Sunset Park” (2010), more than one dozen volumes of essays and non-fiction works, and a dozen books of poetry, which he collected for the first time in 2007.
He has written for stage and film, such as “Smoke”, which Wayne Wang directed and Harvey Keitel starred in, and “Lulu on the bridge” and “The Inner Life of Martin Frost”, which he also directed.
In the essay “Why write?” (“Why write?”), for The New Yorker magazine, on December 17, 1995, the American writer confessed that his literary life actually began at the age of eight, when he was unable to obtain an autograph from his hero of baseball, Willie Mays, of the New York Giants, because neither he nor his parents had a pencil. Auster liked baseball, the chance of the game, the way it was decided. He never stopped having a pencil with him again.
The notion of chance would be reinforced later, when he was 14 years old and in a summer camp, he recalled in the same essay. At the time, Ralph, a boy his age, was struck by lightning, in a meadow, a few meters away from where he was. Ralph was knocked unconscious, but when years later Paul Auster used the incident in the 2017 novel “4 3 2 1”, it proved fatal for one of the four versions of the protagonist, Archie Ferguson.
“Baumgartner”, Paul Auster’s latest novel, was published last year, after he announced that he was undergoing treatment for cancer. The work focuses on Sy Baumgartner, a writer and Philosophy professor on the verge of retirement, who tries to survive the absence of his wife, the love of his life, who died years before.
At the beginning of 2023, he published “Bloodbath Nation”, with images by Spencer Ostrander, in which he reflected on violence in the United States and the relationship between Americans and weapons.
In 2017, when he was in Portugal, as part of the International Culture Festival, in Cascais, he spoke about the political panorama of his country, when Donald Trump was approaching his first year in the White House.
Auster considered him a “furious, irrational, unstable and narcissistic individual: a danger that feeds on the attention” the world gives him. From the writer’s point of view, it was up to “journalists to determine the truth of everything that happens”, assuming that “good journalism” is the “most important work for the well-being of the world” – a profession that he saw “under attack”, putting “people’s faith in the truth” at risk, at a time when journalists have never been more necessary.
Paul Auster, among many other distinctions, received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature 2006, was made 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.
“Life is simultaneously tragic and fun, at the same time absurd and deeply significant”, wrote Paul Auster in the presentation of the film project “The Inner Life of Martin Frost”, which Paulo Branco’s Medeia Filmes co-produced in 2007, and which today remember, on his page on the social network Facebook.
“More or less unconsciously, I tried to encompass this double aspect of experience in the stories I wrote — whether in novels or in cinematic scripts”, continues Auster, quoted by Medeia Filmes. “I feel like it’s the most honest and truthful way of looking at the world, and when I think about some of the writers I love most — Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, Kafka, Beckett — they were all masters at combining light and dark, the strangeness and the familiarity.”
