Paul Auster
I first came across Paul Auster in 1985 when I picked up a copy of In The Country Of Last Things, and was immediately captivated by the music and poetry of his writing. The speculative dystopia of the novel was an enchantment for me. There is a haunting melancholy that runs through all his books, a bleak humour too, but it is the sadness that is the most powerful for me. I knew at once that here was a writer I could rely on. When I met Paul Auster, briefly in 1997, I was relieved to see the dark rings under his eyes and the glowering brow. He looked like a man who worked too late at night. He looked like Baudelaire in a cashmere sweater.
Paul Auster is an American novelist working in a European tradition. His novels are located in very specific American locations, primarily New York, but intellectually and stylistically, they follow in the footsteps of Beckett and Knut Hamsun. Auster was born in New Jersey but has lived in New York City for most of his adult life. Like Woody Allen and Damon Runyon before him, Paul Auster is a chronicler of the city and its unreal streets. He first gained international recognition with three novellas published together as The New York Trilogy (1987) - a self conscious subversion of the detective novel. The narrative revels in red herrings, blind alleys, and loose ends. It is ostensibly a search for meaning in a maze of confusion, but is ultimately a quest to know the unknowable. The stories themselves become obsessed with obsession, the solitary writer meditating on solitude, challenging the reader to find the way out. The New York Trilogy does however provide an illuminating way into the work of Paul Auster, signalling many of the themes that have concerned him throughout his career. It acts as a siren song, drawing us into his elaborate investigation of the nature of identity, and imprisoning the unwary traveller in a Borgesian labyrinth.
Paul Auster's work is peopled by misfits and loners, seekers of self knowledge in an alienated age.
"I think a lot of them are completely lost," Auster has said of his characters. "But I'm interested in presenting cosmologies, a way of understanding, figuring things out through the stories."
His characters negotiate landscapes within his novels that are pitted with chance and coincidences, random fates of accident and circumstance, which serve to confound both the characters and the reader in the search for meaning. In The Book of Illusions Auster writes:
"Everyone had been tantalized by the proximity of the two events, but it was logically unsound to assume that one had caused the other. Contiguous facts are not necessarily related facts, even though their nearness to each other would seem to suggest they are linked."
Indeed this idea - the confusion between what seems to be and what is - fills the space in which much of Paul Auster's work takes place.
Paul Auster is the author of eleven novels and several works of non fiction and poetry. He has also written extensively for film and directed some of his own work. His most recent film is The Inner Life Of Martin Frost which he both wrote and directed. It premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival 2007.