Over the course of half a century, Paul Auster has delighted us with his absorbing prose and his inventiveness; he has amused and moved us with his characters, often exposed at random. Chance, precisely, with the reflection on the creative process and the constant play between reality and fiction, so characteristic of all his narrative, was already present in Trilogia de New York (1987), the work with which readers more cosmopolitans discovered a writer of race.
Years later would come the novels with which he gained the popularity of the most diverse readers -Bogeries de Brooklyn (2005), Sunset Park (2010) or 4321 (2017)-, when his frequent visits to Barcelona became a whole event, both for cultural journalists and for fan readers, who were so fans that they managed to sneak into a press conference and ask him questions (in 2012, with Diari d’hivern).
Generous, affable, friendly, shy and laughing, Paul Auster, on the more personal side, was always willing to share what he was doing. He cared about literature, cinema, family – he admired the work of Siri Hustvedt, his wife, and he was proud of his daughter Sophie’s musical career, and he proclaimed it to everyone -, friendship – also with writers like Don De Lillo, David Grossman, J.M. Coetzee: Read the correspondence Now and here-, politics and, of course, baseball and Brooklyn.
A little over a year ago now, just a few months after he was diagnosed with cancer, we, his editors, received the typescript of his latest novel, Baumgartner. Surprise was immediately followed by joy. “For me, writing is a matter of survival”, he had said on some occasion. That original therefore meant that Paul had not given up and was still fit. Now, this novel and its protagonist, Seymour Baumgartner, a famous writer on the verge of retirement who still lives marked by the deep love for his wife and must face her loss, imposes itself on us as a powerful reflection on life and death.
“Life is dangerous – says the character in a passage in the book – and anything can happen to us at any time. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it… and if someone doesn’t know it, then they haven’t paid enough attention, and if you don’t pay enough attention, then you’re not fully alive.” Since we do want to pay attention, and be fully alive, the best tribute we can pay Paul Auster is to read him and love his books as he loved life.
