The US writer Paul Auster is dead, like, among others New York Times and the British one Guardian to report. Both newspapers rely on information from Auster’s confidant Jacki Lyden. Accordingly, Auster died of lung cancer in his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77 years old.
Auster became a cult author in the 1980s with the postmodern crime novels of his “New York Trilogy.” He also wrote over a dozen other novels, essays and screenplays. The central themes of his work were strange coincidences and traumatic losses. A recurring setting in his literature was New York as a place of homeless people, “a city in which many people get stranded,” as he called it. Auster’s work was influenced by French existentialism.
Auster was born in Newark in 1947 to Jewish immigrants and dreamed of becoming a writer from an early age. He studied literature in New York and France and initially supported himself through teaching assignments and translation work.
The big city novel “City of Glass” was initially rejected by 17 publishers until a small Californian publisher published it in 1985. “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room” followed in 1986 in the “New York Trilogy”. The thematically loosely connected books then unexpectedly became bestsellers.
All three critically acclaimed novels begin like a classic crime novel, but with their intricate plots they develop an existential dimension that systematically leads the reader onto the slippery ice. The trilogy was discussed in university circles as a model example of deconstructive postmodern literature, but at the same time it appealed to a broad audience with its largely traditional narrative style.
He later established himself as an acclaimed best-selling author with works such as “Moon Over Manhattan”, “Mr. Vertigo” and “The Book of Illusions”. Auster’s characters, often influenced by his own life story, are eccentric, broken characters. You lose yourself in dark abysses and obscure corners in search of yourself.
The unforeseeable, random events and fantastic twists shape their existence and give rise to philosophical reflections on art and culture, identity, life and death. More recently, Auster has published several extensive works, including the 2017 novel “4 3 2 1”, which runs to more than 1,000 pages, and the approximately 800-page biography of the US author Stephen Crane (1871-1900) with the title “In Flames” (original title: “Burning Boy”). The relatively short novel “Baumgartner” (around 200 pages) was published in the USA last November.