Paul Auster, bestselling novelist who wrote ‘The City of Glass,’ dies at 77: NPR

“You think it will never happen to you,” Paul Auster wrote about aging and mortality in his 2012 book. Winter Journal. he is photo above in New York in April 2007.

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“You think it will never happen to you,” Paul Auster wrote about aging and mortality in his 2012 book. Winter Journal. he is photo above in New York in April 2007.

Nicolas Roberts/AFP via Getty Images

Bestselling author Paul Auster, whose novels tackled existential questions of identity, language and literature and created mysteries that raised more questions than they answered, has died. He was 77 years old.

His death was confirmed by his friend Jacki Lyden on behalf of Auster’s family.

A leading figure in his generation of postmodern American writers, Auster wrote more than 20 novels, including The New York trilogy, which included his groundbreaking 1985 book, City of glass, and his ambitious 2017 novel 4 3 2 1, which was almost 1,000 pages long.

“I think he was a really exciting and compelling voice of his generation,” says Alys Moody, a professor who teaches postwar American literature. “Auster will be remembered as one of the leading figures in a post-modern tradition that reinvents the central role of language, writing and, above all, storytelling.”

Auster was born in 1937 in Newark, New Jersey, to middle-class Jewish parents of Austrian descent. After earning an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree from Columbia University, he moved to Paris. There, he supported himself by translating French literature. Auster returned to the United States in 1974, part of a disillusioned generation. In a private interview with me in 1992, he said that his novel Leviathan It was a character very much like him: “Someone filled with a kind of idealistic hope about what could be done for the future of the country and the world, who saw all these dreams come to fruition. gradually dismantled by subsequent political events.”

In his twenties, Auster published his own essays, poems and translations. A strange event in 1980 led to his first novel.

“I was living alone in Brooklyn. And I got a phone call,” he recalls. “And the person on the other end of the line asked me if he had contacted the Pinkerton agency. And, of course, I said no and hung up. But after the second or third time, I said, well, what if I said yes? And that was the genesis of the novel.

The story of this novel, City of glass, is triggered when the main character, a crime fiction writer named Quinn, receives a phone call late at night:

“I would like to speak to Mr. Paul Auster.”

“There’s no one here by that name.”

“Paul Auster. From the Auster Detective Agency.”

“I’m sorry,” Quinn said. “You must have the wrong number.”

“This is a matter of the utmost urgency,” the voice said.

“There’s nothing I can do for you,” Quinn said. “There is no Paul Auster here.”

“You don’t understand,” said the voice. “Hurry up.”

The writer of the novel assumes the identity of the detective, who sets out to solve the mystery of “what is reality?” » He was sometimes criticized for bizarre coincidences in his work, but the events of his life, he said, exceeded the implausibility of his fiction.

“When I was about 13 or 14, I was at summer camp and we got caught in a storm. And a boy standing next to me was killed by lightning. He fell to his death .Heaven-struck. I think it influences my work perhaps more than any book I’ve ever read,” he explained.

Auster also wrote and co-directed a handful of independent films. He was never at a loss for words. In 2017, he published an 880-page novel entitled 4 3 2 1 which told the story of a main character in four different versions, in alternating chapters. When he finished this book, he decided to take a break from fiction and began writing a biography of 780 by 19 pages.^th author of the century Stephen Crane.

“I tried in my books to turn around as much as possible,” he said. “And don’t hide behind the style, the tricks – whatever you call it.”

Auster, whose literary influences included Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, will be remembered for the purity of his language and the seriousness of his intentions.