I met Paul Auster many years ago, when I approached him at the end of an event to ask if he could introduce me to his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt. Accustomed to his prominence overshadowing her talent, Paul always remembered my daring with complicity and affection. If there is something that has defined him on a personal level, it is his passionate demand for the equal treatment that his wife’s talent deserved when she was still seen as Auster’s wife, and the deep love that was reflected in his eyes and smile when he talked about Siri. , or his daughter Sophie and his newborn grandson, Miles, a small but atomic family unit, a refuge for a person marked by a traumatic family past, who never took his bubble of domestic happiness for granted.
Over the years working with him at Seix Barral, I have been able to enjoy his infectious enthusiasm for detail. In the same way that the dynamics of chance have been the pillar on which he has built a prodigious narrative work, he was aware that precision was the only antidote to avoid leaving a text at his mercy. Hours on the phone debating the relevance of a term, commenting on how other countries had translated a word, debating a preposition or a comma, seem like minutiae, but they denote a reverential respect for the word, and the narrative power of language used well.
Years ago I commented with Don DeLillo and Paul Auster that they are a type of people, perhaps due to a generational issue, who do things well. Meeting a deadline, calling on a birthday, giving condolences, returning a call, correcting a comma are things that simply have to be done well. I will never forget when on a trip with him to the FIL in Guadalajara, an Argentine editor told him that he was going to be a father. Paul asked him if he was married, and the editor replied that it was not necessary, the love that he and his couple professed for each other was enough. Paul adopted a close and solemn tone to explain that documenting the union with a child on the way was a way to protect the little one. Such was his determination to persuade him that he promised him that if he married his girlfriend before having the child, he would travel from New York to be the best man at his wedding. Days passed and Paul asked me every month. Until I was able to confirm that they were getting married, and he flew to Argentina to fulfill his promise.
The relevance and popularity of his formidable narrative work is something historic; With his novels he has built a true “memory palace” in which we can take refuge from the elements of his absence. The determination, yes, that is the word, with which he has written each of his books is only comparable to the incredible beauty of the work that puts the finishing touch to that legacy, Baumgartner. Paul began to take refuge in his writing from the pain of the tragic loss of his son and granddaughter, and the novel shows how to move on when we have lost the one we love most and reflects great tenderness, luminosity and love for life, even when we don’t. It turns out how we wanted.
