While Paul Auster was commonly regarded as a New York novelist, more discerning critics would aptly characterize him as a "Brooklynite" writer. "I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn to me," testifies his character, Tom Wood, in the opening of his 2002 novel, "The Brooklyn Follies." Auster became the face and voice of the huge Brownstone borough long before gentrification, galleries, and co-working spaces. There, in 1982, he wrote "The Invention of Solitude" – the novel that made him an international star almost overnight.
For decades, Auster saw the privilege of urban and existential loneliness as holy and followed it devoutly. He walked from his Park Slope home to the Sweet Melissa Cafe with a short cigar in hand, a black wool coat, and sunglasses. This was a light, refreshing stroll in his grueling work routine. He wrote with a fountain pen and on an Olympia typewriter – which became the name of a heroine in one of his books – and abstained from technology and networks. "Keyboards have always intimidated me," he told the Paris Review in 2003. It wasn't a moral stance, he explained; rather, it was for his comfort.
The self, the introspection, the melancholic and ironic gaze at the body and soul – Auster's writing walked the fine line between loneliness and solitude, and from there it gained strength as a universal literary revelation. "Loneliness proves we are human, because it's the point where we are cut off from our basic needs. It represents a longing to be with other people. oneliness is the opposite of solitude, which can be by choice. A person can never be in a state of loneliness by choice," he said in an interview with Israel Hayom in 2012.
Auggie's photo
Auster was the modernist version of postmodernism. In his book of conversations, "A Life in Words," he testified that "I've always wanted to write what to me is beautiful, true, and good, but I'm also interested in inventing new ways to tell stories. I wanted to turn everything inside out," and expressed an affinity with Jacques Derrida's deconstructionism. However, his language was clear and story-driven, on the seam between urban tales and the mystery genre, and therefore accessible to many readers worldwide.
He was a unique novelist for the parent and child generations for at least two decades – appearing on bookshelves in the East Village and Petah Tikva, and was a superstar in Paris. He was never a top contender for the Nobel Prize, and didn't even win the Booker Prize, and to sum it up in clichés of the trade – he was an author of the people; not of the writers.
Auster excelled at capturing the present and saw life itself as part of literature, in the sense that the self of a person develops just as a character develops in a book, as observed by Will Blythe, the literary editor of Esquire. Hence, perhaps, the temptation to see him as a New Age harbinger, despite being a remnant of a bygone classical era.
His writing could easily be seen as conservatively subversive. Another expression of "Austerianism" can be identified in the ritual of his character Auggie from the screenplay "Smoke," which received a wonderful cinematic adaptation by Wayne Wang in 1995, starring Harvey Keitel. Every morning, precisely at 8:00 a.m., Auggie photographs the opposite corner visible from his Brooklyn tobacco shop; every day, at the same time, from the same angle. Auggie keeps the photos in albums: the changes are minor, almost imperceptible. Yet, over the years, reality is no longer identical to what it once was. A shift has occurred that we didn't notice. Paul Auster was a novelist of a world that was here just a moment ago – and is now gone.
Planting trees for Israel
Growing up in the post-World War II era by Jewish parents in South Orange, New Jersey, then in the rural area of New York State, and finally in urban Newark. As in every Jewish household on the East Coast in the years back then, the fate of European Jews after the war preoccupied the family. "I grew up with Israel," he recounted in 2012 in the interview with Israel Hayom, "every morning I would go to the Hebrew school in New Jersey, knowing that part of my lessons would be devoted to raising money for the young state. We were busy all the time with planting trees and writing little greeting cards to people in Israel. We felt as though we were part of the state, even though physically we lived far away from it. We, the children and the adults, felt as though we were helping to build a place with new ideals. We were very excited about it."
He visited Israel in the mid-1990s and then in 2010. Since then, he observed that "one of the authors who participated in the festival told me, justifiably, that the feeling is that the Israelis live between despair, which characterizes the Left, and denial, which characterizes the Right, with very little in the middle. The denial is insufferable, it can't survive, and the despair; it also doesn't arouse hope. So everything is stuck."
Befitting a bon ton, he regularly criticized Benjamin Netanyahu, and despite being the flesh and blood of "New York Times Judaism," he looked squarely at the progressive hot air that took over the elite on America's coasts.
In the last decade, he lowered the volume a bit, but still published two prose books, several essay collections, and even a new book of poetry. In December 2022, his novelist wife, Siri Hustvedt, announced his battle with cancer. On April 30, 2024, he passed away. Perhaps he fulfilled what he sought in his first book: "Under any circumstances, he had managed to keep himself at a distance from life, to avoid immersion in the quick of things."
