So Long, Paul Auster

One of my favorite authors, Paul Auster, died last month, and it was one of those deaths that had me glum for a few days. No more new books from this brilliant man. He published his last, Baumgartner, just six months ago, and I devoured it in a few days. It may not have been his best work, but each of his books had something to offer, and I regret that I’ll no longer be able to experience the pleasure of reading a book of his for the first time.

I first learned of Auster by happenstance. His wonderful novel, The Brooklyn Follies (and a good place to start for the uninitiated), was displayed on the “New Fiction” section of my local library, and I found its cover compelling. A man stands at the corner of a crosswalk peering into a plastic grocery bag. Is he lamenting having forgotten to purchase something? Did a carton of eggs break? I don’t know, but I was drawn to it. Chalk one up to the lost art of browsing (it just isn’t possible to do so on-line with any efficacy).

And so began a love affair.  In fact, I took a line from Brooklyn Follies for my 2016 song, “You.”

I think of Nathan Glass and his Book of Human Folly
All the blunders and pratfalls, embarrassments, the foibles, oh good golly
But you.  I wouldn’t change you.

The first and second lines are all Auster (except for the “oh good golly”) and I thank him for the inspiration.

As much as I loved Auster’s fiction, I found his memoirs positively fascinating. In 2012 I blogged about his book, Winter Journal, a one-of-a-kind memoir that defies convention. 

“(It)describes a nonlinear history of Auster’s physical body: the injuries it sustained, the physical pleasures, the scars – both mental and physical – it endured.  At various points, Auster describes the different sensations and actions that his body (and all of our bodies) have experienced:

‘Your body in small rooms and large rooms, your body walking up and down stairs, your body swimming in ponds, lakes, rivers, and oceans, your body traipsing across muddy fields...’

He spends 52 pages identifying the twenty-one permanent addresses his body has lived in, ten pages describing the plot of a movie he identifies with (and he does it so well that I feel I’ve already seen the 1950 film, D.O.A.), and a page and a half listing the countless activities of his hands (“brushing your teeth, drying your hair, folding towels, taking money out of your wallet, carrying bags of groceries...”).

Unconventional?  You bet.  But so much more interesting than a play-by-play of his life.”

The start of Auster’s published career was also a memoir, The Invention of Solitude, a haunting recounting of the aftermath of his father’s death, and in 2013 he published Report from the Interior, a companion peace to Winter Journal, in that the latter is a history of Auster’s physical body while the former recounts his psychological development through adolescence.

These are the books I will likely keep going back to. His fiction is fascinating (besides Brooklyn Follies, my favorites are The Book of Illusions and Man in the Dark), and – admittedly – sometimes over my head, but his memoirs speak to a shared humanity and mortality that we all reckon with, and one that I find endlessly compelling.

Thank you, Paul, for your significant contribution to defining the human condition. Peace.