With Paul Auster leaves one of the most important 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 de España, who told me about the novel City of glass ( Ciutat de vidre ), which fascinated him. It mesmerized me too. Ramón convinced the managers of Júcar, a small publishing house, to translate it into Spanish and publish it; it happened without excessive grief or glory.
When I learned in 1990 that the Institute of North American Studies would invite him to a cycle of authors from the contemporary United States, I asked my bosses at La Vanguardia to send me to New York to interview him. I went to his studio in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and met him there. Once in Barcelona we went out with a group, after his conference, to dinner at a famous restaurant in the Raval, and he and his wife Siri suffered severe indigestion that night. So that first visit had a bittersweet aftertaste for him. In the years that followed, he became, along with Woody Allen, one of the creators of the United States most appreciated by the people of Barcelona.
Auster has been a more valued and read author in Europe than in the USA, with special weight in France and Spain. Barcelona has had its publishers: Jorge Herralde d’Anagrama, who consolidated its dissemination and prestige; Elena Ramírez de Seix Barral, who supervised his latest works, and Pilar Beltran, in Catalan.
His novels, often with autobiographical elements, quite metaliterary, border different trends that have marked the most innovative literature of the last half century, and at the same time they always have a strong poetic and great narrative component that allow him to reach a wide audience In addition, he has always approached issues of American history and politics from a progressive and committed perspective.
In his memorial book The Invention of Solitude provides family memories and training. His parents had a bad understanding. The progenitor was a collector of cheap rents, a somewhat mean man, brought up in poverty. The mother, active and lover of the good life. They get divorced. Auster goes to university, experiences the 1968 revolts in Colombia and meets the countercultural. He is saved from going to Vietnam for his university studies. He lives in France for a few years and familiarizes himself with its literature. He returns to the US and does food literary work. Finally he inherits some money from his father and starts writing full time.
In City of Glass (1985) a writer, Quinn, who has lost his wife and son, receives a call mistaking him for detective Paul Auster. Quinn sets off on the trail of a goon who makes strange journeys through New York. It is the first novel of the New York Trilogy, which is followed by Ghosts and The Locked Room, and which links him for life to the literary myth of the city of the Hudson.
The palace of the moon (1989) marks his great European consecration. Marco Stanley Fogg falls into destitution and becomes a bushman in Central Park until Kitty Wu rescues him. These are the years of the moon landing. He works as a reader for a paralytic painter, Effing, and ends up traveling to the other end of the country, connecting with another great literary myth of the United States, the Conquest of the West.
In Leviathan (1992), an intellectual terrorist is dedicated to blowing up replicas of the Statue of Liberty across the US. And a transsumption of Sophie Calle, a conceptual artist with whom he maintains a long connection, appears.
In these works and others, the characteristics of his universe are drawn. He often intervenes in the narration or places data from his life. Fanshawe, from The Locked Room, is an alter ego. Play with chance, the appearances and disappearances, the mystery. It integrates elements of popular narrative and high culture, such as the surrealist school. He offers sumptuous prose and introduces literature within literature, quite a few of his characters are writers or people of the guild. In any case, these are maladjusted people with emotional problems.
Some of his plots can be seen as humanistic parables, where lost people manage to find their place in the world because others help them. And they are filled with stories of secondary characters, like in Brooklyn Madness (2005), in which a doctor is waiting for his mother, who comes from Europe after many years in which they have not seen each other. He has to pick her up at the airport but due to a work emergency he can’t. She takes a taxi, has an accident and arrives dead at the hospital where the son works.
At the height of his career, Auster collaborated with filmmaker Wayne Wang on the film Smoke and directed three films; Blue in the face, Lulu on the bridge and The inner life of Martin Frost.
A 4 3 2 1, an extensive masterpiece from 2017, speculates on different versions of his own life and condenses stories and atmospheres that have been appearing throughout his entire production.
His farewell text, Baumgartner, is about a teacher who is still a traumatic widower. Melancholic book where it is difficult not to detect the imprint of some tragedy that the author has experienced in recent years.
About El palau de la luna I wrote in this newspaper that it was “one of the most complex, elegant, refined and intelligent novels of recent years”. If we add “full of humanity” and “intensely celebratory of life”, I think it 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.
