With Paul Auster goes one of the greatest writers of our time. I heard about him for the first time in Madrid, in 1986. I was staying in the apartment of a friend, Ramón from Spain, who told me about City of Glass, a novel that had fascinated him. It hypnotized me too. My friend convinced the people in charge of Júcar, a small publishing house at the time, to publish it, and translated it into Spanish; It passed without excessive pain or glory.
When in 1990 I learned that the Institute of North American Studies was going to invite him to a series of contemporary American authors, I asked my bosses at La Vanguardia to send me to New York to interview him. I went to his house in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and met him there. When he later came to Barcelona we went with a group, after his conference, to dinner at a famous restaurant in Barceloneta, and he and his wife Siri suffered severe indigestion that night. So that first visit had a bittersweet taste for him. In subsequent years, with repeated trips to the city, he has become, with Woody Allen, one of the figures of American culture most appreciated by Barcelonans.
Auster, despite the intense American flavor of his work, has been a more valued author and I would say read in Europe than in the US, with special weight in France and Spain, where he has received awards such as the Prince of Asturias. In Barcelona he has had his editors for Hispanoamérica: Jorge Herralde from Anagrama, who was the one who consolidated his work among us, and Elena Ramírez from Seix Barral, who has supervised his works in the last decade. And Pilar Beltrán, for the Catalan editions.
His novels, often with autobiographical elements, quite meta-literary, border different trends that have marked the most innovative literature of the last half century, and at the same time always have a strong narrative and poetic component that allows him to reach a wide audience. He has also addressed, always from a progressive perspective linked to the left of the Democratic Party, issues of history and recent North American politics without avoiding commitment.
In his memorial book The Invention of Solitude he provides family and training memories, which he completed for me in that interview for La Vanguardia. His parents got along badly. The father was a collector of cheap rents, a somewhat mean man, raised in poverty. His mother, active and lover of the good life. They get divorced. Auster goes to university, experiences the riots of ’68 in Columbia and meets the countercultures of the moment. He avoids going to Vietnam for his university studies. He travels to France, where he resides for several years and becomes familiar with its literature. He returns to the US and does various small-time literary jobs. Finally he inherits some money from his father and begins to write.
In The City of Glass (1985) a writer, Quinn, who has lost his wife and son, receives a phone call mistaking him for detective Paul Auster. Quinn sets out on the trail of a crazy man who makes strange trips around New York to trace letters of a language. The pursuer ends up as a homeless person. It is the first novel of the New York Trilogy, which will be followed by Ghosts and The Locked Room, and which links him for life to the literary myth of the city on the Hudson.
The Palace of the Moon (1989) marks his great European consecration. Marco Stanley Fogg becomes destitute and becomes a man of the woods in Central Park until Kitty Wu rescues him. These are the years of the discovery of the Moon. He later works as a reader for a paralyzed painter, Effing. Fogg – a nod to Jules Verne – will end up discovering a complicated family relationship and traveling to the other end of the country, thus linking up with another of the great myths of American literature, the Conquest of the West.
In Leviathan (1992), an intellectual terrorist dedicates himself to blowing up replicas of the Statue of Liberty around the world. In this work there also appears a transcript of Sophie Calle, a conceptual artist with whom he maintains a long professional connection.
In these and other volumes the characteristics of his universe are drawn. He often intervenes in the narrative or places data from his life. Fanshawe, the character in The Locked Room, is an alter ego of the author. He plays with chance, appearances and disappearances, mystery. He integrates elements of popular literature and influences from high culture, such as the surrealist school. He offers sumptuous prose and introduces literature within literature, many of his characters are writers or people from the guild. In any case, maladjusted people, with strong sentimental problems. “Some degree of conflict is good for people,” he has written.
Some of its plots can be seen as humanistic parables for adults, where lost people manage to find their place in the world thanks to others helping them. And they are filled with everyday stories of secondary characters, as in Brooklyn Follies (2005), where a doctor waits for his mother, who comes from Europe after many years in which they have not seen each other. He has to go pick her up at the airport but due to a work emergency she can’t. She takes a taxi, suffers an accident and arrives dead at the hospital where her son works.
Along similar lines, Sunset Park (2010) constitutes both a novel of feelings à la Vicky Baum and a novel of social denunciation à la John Steinbeck, intergenerational reflection and elegy for lost sexuality.
In the middle of his career, Auster undertakes various artistic adventures: he collaborates with filmmaker Wayne Wang and directs two films. In collaboration with illustrator Sam Messer, he dedicates a book to his typewriter, an instrument that he has never abandoned for the computer. He works with comic authors Paul Karasik and David Mazzuchelli on the adaptation of The City of Glass.
In 4,3,2,1, an extensive masterpiece from 2017, arguably the true peak of his career, Auster speculates with different versions of his own life and condenses personal, family and social stories that have appeared throughout the entirety of his career. his work.
His farewell text, Baumgartner, is about a philosophy professor who faces a traumatic widowhood, and after a while enters into another romantic relationship. Melancholic book where it is difficult not to detect the trace of some tragedy that the author has experienced in recent years.
Regarding The Palace of the Moon, I wrote in this newspaper more than thirty years ago one of those phrases that editors use on their pages, as it actually happened: it was “one of the most complex, elegant, refined and intelligent novels of the last years”. If we add “loaded with humanity” and “intensely celebrating life”, I believe that the definition can be applied to all the literature of the immense author who has just left us, and to whom we owe so many happy moments.
