Murió Paul Auster

Paul Auster, prolific and experimental man of letters and filmmaker, dies at 77

POR EFE – La obra del autor estadounidense, que tiene como trasfondo Brooklyn, el barrio de Nueva York donde residía y donde murió, había sido traducida a más de 40 idiomas e incluye poesía, relatos, ensayos o guiones de teatro y de cine, algunos dirigidos por él. Falleció a los 77 años. Tenía cáncer de pulmón

Paul Auster, escritor estadounidense, guionista y director de cine, autor de una prolífica obra en la que destacan la Trilogía de Nueva York, Brooklyn Follies o La invención de la soledad, murió este martes a los 77 años de edad, según informó The New York Times.

Su obra, que tiene como trasfondo Brooklyn, el barrio de Nueva York donde residía y donde murió, había sido traducida a más de 40 idiomas e incluye poesía, relatos, ensayos o guiones de teatro y de cine, algunos dirigidos por él.

Nacido el 3 de febrero de 1947 en Newark (Nueva Jersey) en una familia judía centroeuropea, estudió literatura inglesa en la Universidad de Columbia (1970) y se especializó en literatura del Renacimiento.

Tras terminar la universidad, se instaló en París donde vivió entre 1971 y 1973. De regreso a Estados Unidos se dedicó a la traducción (Mallarmé o Sartre), para después empezar su carrera de escritor.

Debutó con poesía Unearth (1974) y ensayos en las revistas New York Review of Books y Harper’s Saturday Review.

Bajo el seudónimo de Paul Benjamín, publicó su primera novela policíaca Squeeze Play (1982) y luego La invención de la soledad (1990), de corte autobiográfico.

Su despegue como escritor le llegó sin embargo en 1985 con la novela La ciudad de cristal, primera de La trilogía de Nueva York junto con Fantasmas (1986) y La habitación cerrada (1986).

Siendo profesor en la Universidad Princenton de Nueva York editó El país de las últimas cosas (1987) y El palacio de la luna (1989).

En 1990 salió al mercado Pista de despegue-Poemas y ensayos y La música del azar, en la que magnificaba las supuestas ventajas del desarraigo. Con este libro fue nominado para el premio Faulkner de obras de ficción. Escribió el guion de la película del mismo nombre, dirigida en 1993 por Philip Haas, en la que también hizo el papel de chófer.

Su recopilación de ensayos sobre poetas y narradores, escritos entre los años setenta y ochenta, apareció Iberoamérica en 1992 bajo el título El arte del hambre.

Ese último año publicó Leviatán, galardonada con el Premio Médicis a la novela extranjera. Le siguieron El cuaderno rojo (1993) y Mr. Vértigo (1994).

Escribió el guión para la película Smoke (1995, Wayne Wang), ganadora del Oso de Plata-Premio Especial del Jurado de la Berlinale y candidata al César francés a la Mejor Producción Extranjera. También dirigió junto a Wang la cinta Blue in the face (1995).

Lanzó su ensayo autobiográfico «Hand to mouth: A chronicle of early failure» (1997). Guionizó y dirigió, ya en solitario el filme Lulu on the bridge (1998).

Posteriormente publicó las novelas Dream days at the Hotel Existence (1998), Tombuctu (1999), Creí que mi padre era Dios (2001) y El libro de las ilusiones (2003).

Otros de su libros son La noche del oráculo (2004), Brooklyn Follies (2005), Viajes por el Scriptorium (2006) y La vida interior de Martin Frost (2007), que Auster presentó también como película, la segunda dirigida por el escritor en solitario y de cuyo reparto forma parte su hija Sophie (Anna James).

También Un hombre en la oscuridad (2008), Diario de invierno (2012), una autobiografía en la que se observa a si mismo desde fuera; y 4 3 2 1 (2017), novela en la que recorre cuatro caminos simultáneos e independientes de una misma vida, la de Archibald Isaac Ferguson, nacido en Newark (New Jersey), como el autor.

Entre sus últimos ensayos están «La llama inmortal de Stephen Crane» (2021), inspirado en la vida de este corresponsal de guerra del último tercio del siglo XIX; y «Un país bañado en sangre» (2023), donde mezcla biografía, anécdotas históricas y un análisis de los datos, desde el origen de los Estados Unidos hasta los conflictos armados de la actualidad informativa.

Tras hacerse publicó que padecía cáncer de pulmón, Auster publicó Baumgartner (2023), una historia sobre el amor, el deseo, la pérdida y la memoria.

En poesía, escribió varios libros como The Random House Book of Twentieth Century-French Poetry (1982), Espacios blancos (1983) y Fragmentos del frío (1988).

Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras (2006), posee además el título de Comandante de la Orden de las Artes y las Letras de Francia (1992) o la Medalla de Oro de la Gran Medalla de «Vermeil» de París, (2010).

Es doctor «honoris causa» de la Universidad Nacional de General San Martín (Argentina) (2014) y de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2022).

Casado con la también escritora Siri Hustvedt, madre de su hija, Sophie, actriz y cantante, de un matrimonio anterior nació su hijo Daniel, fallecido en 2022 por sobredosis de drogas. Daniel había sido imputado por la muerte de su hija Ruby -nieta de Paul Auster-, de 10 meses. Según declararía, había consumido heroína cuando se quedó dormido y al despertar la pequeña estaba muerta por intoxicación de fentanilo y heroína.

Paul Auster, prolific and experimental man of letters and filmmaker, dies at 77

BY HILLEL ITALIE – NEW YORK (AP) — Paul Auster, a prolific, prize-winning man of letters and filmmaker known for such inventive narratives and meta-narratives as “The New York Trilogy” and “4 3 2 1,” has died at age 77.

Auster’s death was confirmed Wednesday by his literary representatives, the Carol Mann Agency, which did not immediately provide additional details. Auster had been diagnosed with cancer in 2022.

Starting in the 1970s, Auster completed more than 30 books, translated into dozens of languages. A longtime fixture in the Brooklyn literary scene, he never achieved major commercial success in the U.S., but was widely admired overseas for his cosmopolitan worldview and erudite and introspective style. He was named a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 1991. He was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Called the “dean of American post-modernists” and “the most meta of American meta-fictional writers,” Auster blended history, politics, genre experiments, existential quests and self-conscious references to writers and writing. “The New York Trilogy,” which included “City of Glass,” “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room,” was a postmodern detective saga in which names and identities blur and one protagonist is a private eye named Paul Auster. The brief “Travels in the Scriptorium” wraps a story inside a story as a political prisoner finds himself compelled to read a series of narratives by fellow victims that will eventually include his own.

The author’s longest and most ambitious work of fiction was “4 3 2 1,” published in 2017 and a Booker finalist. The 800-plus page novel is a tale of quadraphonic realism in the post-World War II era, the parallel journeys of Archibald Isaac Ferguson from summer camp and high school baseball to student life in New York and Paris during the mass protests of the late 1960s.

“Identical but different, meaning four boys with the same name parents, the same bodies, and the same genetic material, but each one living in a different house in a different town with his own set of circumstances,” Auster writes in the novel. “Each one on his own separate path, and yet all of them still the same person, three imaginary versions of himself, and then himself thrown in as Number Four for good measure; the author of the book.”

His other works included the nonfiction compilations “Groundwork” and “Talking to Strangers”; a family memoir, “The Invention of Solitude”; a biography of novelist Stephen Crane; the novels “Leviathan” and “Talking to Strangers” and the poetry collection “White Space.” In his most recent novel, “Baumgartner,” the title character is a widowed professor haunted by mortality and asking himself “where his mind will be taking him next.”

Auster was so much the old-fashioned author that he worked on a typewriter and disdained email and other forms of electronic communication. But he did have an unusually active film career compared to his writing peers.

In the mid-1990s, Auster collaborated with director Wayne Wang on the acclaimed art-house film “Smoke,” an adaptation of Auster’s humorous story about a Brooklyn cigar shop and a certain customer named Paul. The film starred Harvey Keitel, Stockard Channing and William Hurt among others and brought Auster an Independent Spirit Award for best first screenplay. Wang and Auster quickly followed “Smoke” with “Blue in the Face,” an improvised tale which returned to the Brooklyn cigar store and again starred Keitel, along with appearances by everyone from Lou Reed to Lily Tomlin.

Auster eventually made the movies himself. Keitel was featured in “Lulu on the Bridge,” a love story released in 1998 that Auster directed and co-wrote with Vanessa Redgrave. Nine years later, Auster wrote and directed the drama “The Inner Life of Martin Frost,” starring David Thewlis as a novelist and Irène Jacob as the woman with an uncanny connection to the story he’s been writing.

“The four times I’ve worked on movies, I’ve never had a problem talking to actors,” Auster told director Wim Wenders during a 2017 conversation that ran in Interview magazine. “I always felt in great harmony with them. It was after those experiences that I realized there’s a similarity between writing fiction and acting. The writer does it with the words on the page, and the actor does it with his body. The effort is the same.”

Auster married fellow author Siri Hustvedt in 1982 and had a daughter, Sophie, who appeared in “The Inner Life of Martin Frost.” He also had a son, Daniel, from an earlier marriage to the author-translator Lydia Davis. Daniel Auster would struggle with drug addiction and die of an overdose in 2022, shortly after being charged with second-degree manslaughter in the death of his infant daughter, Ruby.

Paul Auster never commented publicly on his son’s death, but he had written often about parenthood. In “The Invention of Solitude,” published in 1982, he reflected on the “thousands of hours” he spent with Daniel in the first three years of his life and wondered whether they mattered. “It will be lost forever,” Auster wrote. “All these things will vanish from the boy’s memory forever.”

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Paul Benjamin Auster grew up in a middle-class, Jewish home torn between his father’s thrift, to the point of miserliness, and his mother’s urge to spend, to the point of recklessness. He would soon feel like an outsider in his family, soured by their materialism and more inspired by James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or the tales of Edgar Allan Poe than by the security of a traditional job.

His ideals would be well tested. After graduating from Columbia University, Auster struggled for years before he was able to find a publisher or earn money from his books. He wrote poetry, translated French literature, worked on an oil tanker, attempted to market a baseball board game and even thought of earning income by growing worms in his basement.

“All along, my only ambition had been to write,” Auster wrote in a brief memoir, “Hand to Mouth,” published in 1995. “I had known that as early as 16 or 17 years old, and I had never deluded myself into thinking I could make a living at it. Becoming a writer is not a ‘career decision’ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.”

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