After Salman Rushdie was repeatedly stabbed with a knife at a book event in Chautauqua, New York in August 2022, writers came out on the steps of New York Library and read from his works. Among them were Paul Auster, who had adopted New York, particularly Brooklyn, and chronicled it like none other in his novels, and his writer wife Siri Hustvedt. But soon after, they faced a personal crisis — Auster, a smoker, had been diagnosed with lung cancer. He lost that battle on April 30, 2024, passing away of complications at age 77.
When Rushdie recovered — he lost an eye, and the use of one arm — he had visited Auster, as he writes in his recent memoir, Knife, and was happy to find him in good spirits. He had a chance to beat the cancer, Auster told Rushdie, and said he hoped to do better than Vaclav Havel, “also a heavy smoker, [who] ended up with only half of one lung after surgery, but kept going pretty well on that.”
Many characters in Auster’s novels are over-marked by death, but by contemplating on life’s only certainty, he also tells readers how to live — and cope.
Metaphor of loss
Auster, a brilliant writer of ideas, shot to fame in 1982 with his early memoir, The Invention of Solitude, about his difficult relationship with his father, who passed away suddenly.
“One day there is life,” it begins. Another day, his father, in the best of health, not even old, with no history of illness, let out a sigh, slumped down in his chair, “and it is death.” As Auster ponders over “the irreducible fact of our own mortality,” he understands that “life stops. And it can stop at any moment,” but with it comes the realisation that he can do something to ensure his father’s life does not vanish with his death. He looks back at their relationship — “even before his death, he was absent”; “his capacity for evasion was almost limitless” — and understands that it is impossible to enter another’s solitude. “If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known.”
TheNew York Trilogy, which contains three novellas, City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room, published in a single volume in 1987, made him famous, but many more astonishing works were to follow, including The Music of Chance, Timbuktu, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions, 4 3 2 1, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017, and his last, Baumgartner, published last October.
In City of Glass, Quinn, a writer of mystery novels, who has suffered terrible personal loss, is mistaken for a detective, named, what else, Paul Auster, and is tasked with solving a case. His novels are filled with such irreverent coincidences, rich literary references, Kierkegaard et al — the epigraphs are a story by themselves — and wordplay. In Baumgartner, the protagonist is delighted to reveal that he has heard of a book titled, Waters of the World, written by Sarah Dry!
Frailty, strength
In several of his novels, Auster tells stories about people grappling with devastating loss: In City of Glass, Quinn is 35 years old, and grieving the loss of his wife and son — “He no longer wished to be dead. At the same time, it cannot be said that he is happy to be alive.” All he knew was that motion was of the essence: “the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body.”
In The Brooklyn Follies (2005), set against the contested American election of 2000, Auster tells the story of an uncle and nephew, Nathan and Tom, and through it maps contemporary America too with its follies and desperate dreams. Nathan’s lung cancer is in remission, and there’s reason for “guarded optimism” despite the fact that he is “looking for a quiet place to die.” When someone recommends Brooklyn, he decides to “scope out the terrain.” Tom is hiding away from his career as a teacher and also from life; and in Brooklyn, uncle and nephew find a new life, and reasons to go on living.
Auster, in his 60s, and J.M. Coetzee, older to him by seven years, began corresponding with each other, collected in Here and Now (2013), discussing among other things, the art and craft of writing, sport — Auster was a lifelong baseball fan — films (Auster dabbled in writing screenplays and was even on the Prize jury at Cannes), and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Coetzee offers the word — ‘schrecklich’ — for the “ugly, hard, heartless” way Israel clamped down on Gaza. The letter is dated April 17, 2010. Auster responds that given how “tangled” the situation has always been between the two sides, he can’t help having “tangled thoughts”, and wishes Amos Oz’s words would be heeded: “Make peace, not love.”
Auster leaves behind a rich legacy of work, including 18 novels and memoirs. He preferred to write longhand, and typed his manuscripts on an Olympia typewriter, surrounded by books. One can imagine him mulling over the idea of his last novel. Seymour (Sy), an academic at Princeton, has lost his wife to a freak surfing accident years ago; will he be able to get over his grief, and take a second chance at life? Reading Auster is to accept life belongs ultimately to death, but that telling stories makes it somewhat bearable.
