Paul Auster

Paul Auster in 2010. Photo by David Shankbone. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Paul Auster
Born	Paul Benjamin Auster February 3, 1947 (1947-02-03) Newark, New Jersey, United States
Pen name	Paul Queen Paul Benjamin
Occupation	novelist and poet
Nationality	American
Period	1974 – present
Genres	absurdist, crime, & mystery fiction
Literary movement	postmodernism
Influences Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, James Joyce, Maurice Blanchot, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kurt Vonnegut, Albert Camus, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, Dashiell Hammett, Knut Hamsun, Charles Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Edgar Allan Poe, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Edmond Jabès
Influenced Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Jason Thornberry, Christopher Moore, Bill Bryson, Steven Wright, Steven Hall, Hideo Kojima

Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American poet and novelist known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction, and the search for identity and personal meaning.

Life

Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle class parents of Polish descent, Queenie and Samuel Auster. He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey and was graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris, France where he earned a living translating French literature. Since returning to the U.S. in 1974, he has published poems, essays, novels of his own, as well as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.

He and his 2nd wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, were married in 1981, and they live in Brooklyn. Together they have a daughter, Sophie Auster. Previously, Auster was married to writer Lydia Davis; they have a son together, Daniel Auster.

Paul Auster is also the vice-president of PEN American Center.

In 2012, Auster was quoted as saying in an interview that he wouldn't visit Turkey to protest their treatment of journalists. The Turkish Prime-Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized Auster: "As if we need you! Who cares if you come or not?". "According to the latest numbers gathered by International PEN, there are nearly one hundred writers imprisoned in Turkey, not to speak of independent publishers such as Ragip Zarakolu, whose case is being closely watched by PEN Centers around the world", responded Auster.

Writing

File:Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie and Shimon Peres.jpg

Auster greeting Israeli President Shimon Peres with Salman Rushdie and Caro Llewellyn in 2008

Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, space, language, and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process. Comparing the two works, Auster said, "I believe the world is filled with strange events. Reality is a great deal more mysterious than we ever give it credit for. In that sense, the Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude."

The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between people and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. Auster's more recent works, Oracle Night (2003), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), and the novella Travels in the Scriptorium have also met critical acclaim.

Themes

According to a dissertation by Heiko Jakubzik at the University of Heidelberg, 2 central influences in Paul Auster's writing are Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis and the American transcendentalism of the 19th century, exemplified by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Lacan's theory declares that we enter the world through words. We observe the world through our senses, but the world we sense is structured (mediated) in our mind through language. Thus our subconscious also is structured as a language. This leaves us with a sense of anomaly. We can only perceive the world through language, but we have the feeling that something is missing. This is the sense of being outside language. The world can only be constructed through language, but it always leaves something uncovered, something that cannot be told or be thought of, it may only be sensed. This is one of the central themes of Paul Auster's writing.

Lacan is considered to be one of the key figures of French poststructuralism. Some academics are keen to discern traces of other poststructuralist philosophers throughout Auster's oeuvre - mainly Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel de Certeau - although Auster has claimed to find such philosophies 'unreadable'.[1]

The transcendentalists believe that the symbolic order of civilization separated us from the natural order of the world. By moving into nature - as Thoreau did in Walden - it would be possible to return to this natural order.

The common factor of both ideas is the question of the meaning of symbols for human beings. Auster's protagonists often are writers who establish meaning in their lives through writing and they try to find their place within the natural order, to be able to live within "civilization" again.

Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Herman Melville have also had a strong influence on Auster's writing. Not only do their characters reappear in Auster's work (such as William Wilson in City of Glass or Hawthorne's Fanshawe in The Locked Room, both from The New York Trilogy), Auster also uses variations on the themes of these writers.

Paul Auster's reappearing subjects are:

• coincidence
• frequent portrayal of an ascetic life
• a sense of imminent disaster
• an obsessive writer as central character or narrator
• loss of the ability to understand
• loss of language
• depiction of daily and ordinary life
• failure
• absence of a father
• writing and story telling, metafiction
• intertextuality
• American history
• American space

Coincidence

Instances of coincidence may be found throughout Auster's work. (Citation needed) Auster claims that people are so influenced by the continuity among them that they do not see the elements of coincidence, inconsistency, and contradiction in their own lives:

“

This idea of contrasts, contradictions, paradox, I think, gets very much to the heart of what novel writing is for me. It's a way for me to express my own contradictions.

”

Failure

Failure, in Auster's works, is not just the opposite of the happy ending. In Moon Palace and The Book of Illusions it comes from the individual's uncertainty about the status of one's own identity. The protagonists start a search for their own identity and reduce their life to the absolute minimum. From this zero point they gain new strength and start their new life and they also are able to regain contact with their surroundings. A similar development also may be seen in City of Glass and The Music of Chance.

Failure in this context is not the "nothing" - it is the beginning of something all new.

Identity/Subjectivity

Auster's protagonists often go through a process that reduces their support structure to an absolute minimum: they sever all contact with family and friends, go hungry, and lose or give away all their belongings. Out of this state of "nothingness" they either acquire new strength to reconnect with the world or they fail and disappear for good.

But in the end, he manages to resolve the question for himself - more or less. He finally comes to accept his own life, to understand that no matter how bewitched and haunted he is, he has to accept reality as it is, to tolerate the presence of ambiguity within himself." - Paul Auster about the protagonist of The Locked Room

On Writing

"I remain in the room in which am writing this. I put one foot in front of the other. I put one word in front of the other, and for each step I take I add another word, as if for each word to be spoken there were another space to be crossed, a distance to be filled by my body as it moves through this space. It is a journey through space, even if I get nowhere..." -Paul Auster

Ctitical reception

"Over the past twenty-five years," opined Michael Dirda in The New York Review of Books in 2008, "Paul Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature." Dirda also has extolled his loaded virtues in The Washington Post:

Ever since City of Glass, the first volume of his New York Trilogy, Auster has perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set disoriented heroes in a seemingly familiar world gradually suffused with mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination. His plots — drawing on elements from suspense stories, existential récit, and autobiography — keep readers turning the pages, but sometimes end by leaving them uncertain about what they've just been through.

Critic James Wood, however, offers Auster little praise in his piece "Shallow Graves" in the November 30, 2009, issue of The New Yorker:

What Auster often gets instead is the worst of both worlds: fake realism and shallow skepticism. The two weaknesses are related. Auster is a compelling storyteller, but his stories are assertions rather than persuasions. They declare themselves; they hound the next revelation. Because nothing is persuasively assembled, the inevitable postmodern disassembly leaves one largely untouched. (The disassembly is also grindingly explicit, spelled out in billboard-size type.) Presence fails to turn into significant absence, because presence was not present enough.

File:Paul Auster John Ashbery BBF 2010 Shankbone.jpg

Auster with John Ashbery at the Brooklyn Book Festival

Recognition

Awards

• 1989 Prix France Culture de Littérature Étrangère for The New York Trilogy
• 1990 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction finalist for The Music of Chance
• 1993 Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan
• 1996 Bodil Awards - Best American Film: Smoke
• 1996 Independent Spirit Award - Best First Screenplay: Smoke
• 1996 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence
• 2003 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature
• 2006 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Literature
• 2007 Honorary doctor from the University of Liège
• 2007 Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
• 2010 Médaille Grand Vermeil de la ville de Paris

In popular culture

• On the album As Smart as We Are by New York band One Ring Zero, Auster wrote the lyrics for the song "Natty Man Blues" based on Cincinnati poet Norman Finkelstein.
• In 2005 his daughter, Sophie, recorded an album of songs in both French and English, entitled Sophie Auster, with the band One Ring Zero. The lyrics of three of the songs (in English) are by Paul Auster; and he also provided for the accompanying booklet translations of several French poems which form the lyrics of other songs on the album.
• In 1993, a movie adaptation of The Music of Chance was released. Auster features in a cameo role at the end of the film.
• In 1994 City of Glass was adapted as a graphic novel by artist David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik. Auster's friend, noted cartoonist Art Spiegelman, produced the adaptation.
• Jazz trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler's album Hide and Seek uses words by Auster from the play of the same name.
• Paul Auster's voice may be heard on the 2005 album entitled We Must Be Losing It by The Farangs. The 2 tracks are entitled "Obituary in the Present Tense" and "Between the Lines".
• In 2006 Paul Auster directed the film The Inner Life of Martin Frost, based on an original screenplay by him. It was shot in Lisbon and Azenhas do Mar and starred David Thewlis, Iréne Jacob, and Michael Imperioli as well as Auster's daughter Sophie. Auster provided the narration, albeit uncredited. The film premiered at the European Film Market, as part of the 2007 Berlinale in Berlin, Germany on February 10, 2007, and opened in New York City on September 7 of the same year.
• The lyrics of Fionn Regan's 2006 song Put A Penny In The Slot mention Auster and his novella Timbuktu.
• Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth's composition ... ce qui arrive ... (2004) combines the recorded voice of Paul Auster with ensemble music and live electronics by Markus Noisternig and Thomas Musil (Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM)). Paul Auster is heard reading from his books Hand to Mouth and The Red Notebook, either as straight recitation, integrated with other sounds as if in a radio play, or passed through an electronically realized string resonator so that the low tones interact with those of a string ensemble. A film by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster runs throughout the work featuring the cabaret artist and actress Georgette Dee.
• Paul Auster narrated "Ground Zero" (2004), an audio guide created by the Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva) and Soundwalk and produced by NPR, which won the Dalton Pen Award for Multi-media/Audio, (2005), and was nominated for an Audie Award for best Original Work, (2005).
• In the 2008 Russian film Плюс один (Plus One), the main character is in the process of translating one of Auster's books.
• In the 2009 documentary Act of God, Auster is interviewed on his experience of being struck by lightning as a boy.

Publications

Poetry

• Disappearances: Selected poems. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1987.
• Ground Work: Selected poems and essays, 1970-1979. London & Boston: Faber, 1990.
• Selected Poems. London: Faber, 1998.
• Collected Poems. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2004; London: Faber, 2004.

Fiction

• Squeeze Play (as "Paul Benjamin". New York: Alpha / Omega, 1982; London: Faber, 1991.
• The New York Trilogy. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1986; London: Faber, 1986.
  • City of Glass. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1985.
  • Ghosts. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1986.
  • The Locked Room. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1986.
• In the Country of Last Things. New York: Viking, 1987; London & Boston: Faber, 1987.
• Moon Palace. New York: Viking, 1989; London & Boston: Faber, 1989.
• The Music of Chance. New York: Viking, 1990; London & Boston: Faber, 1990.
• Auggie Wren's Christmas Story. New York: Holt, 1990, 2004; London: Faber, 2009.
• Leviathan. New York: Viking, 1992; London: Faber, 1992.
• Mr. Vertigo. New York: Holt, 1994; London: Faber, 1994.
• Timbuktu: A novel. New York: Holt, 1999; London: Faber, 1999
• The Book of Illusions: A novel. New York: Holt, 2002; London: Faber, 2002.
• Oracle Night. New York: Oracle Night, 2003; London: Faber, 2004.
• The Brooklyn Follies. London: Faber, 2005; New York: Holt, 2005.
• Travels in the Scriptorium. New York: Holt, 2006; London: Faber, 2006.
• Man in the Dark. New York: Holt, 2008; London: Faber, 2008.
• Invisible. New York: Holt, 2009; London: Faber, 2009.
• Sunset Park. London: Faber / New York: Holt, 2010.

Screenplays

• The Music of Chance (film tie-in). New York & London: Penguin, 1993.
• Smoke & Blue in the Face: Two films. New York: Hyperion, 1995; London: Faber, 1995.
• Lulu on the Bridge: A film. New York: Holt, 1998; London: Faber, 1998.
• The Inner Life of Martin Frost: a film. New York: Picador, 2007.

Non-fiction

• The Invention of Solitude. New York: Sun, 1982; London: Faber, 1982.
• Why Write?. Providence, RI: Burning Deck, 1996.
• The Red Book: True stories. New York: New Directions, 2002.
• The Art of Hunger: essays, prefaces, interviews ; and, The red notebook. New York & London: Penguin, 1993.
• Hand to Mouth: A chronicle of early failure. New York: Holt, 1997; London: Faber, 1997.
• The Story of My Typewriter (paintings by Sam Messer). New York: D.A.P. / London: Turnaround, 2002.
• Collected Prose: Autobiographical writings, true stories, critical essays, prefaces, and collaborations with artists. London: Faber, 2003; New York: Picador, 2005.
• Winter Journal. New York: Holt, 2012; London: Faber, 2013.
• Report from the Interior. New York: Holt, 2013; London: Faber, 2013.
• James M. Hutchison, Conversations with Paul Auster. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.

Translated

• André Du Bouchet, The Uninhabited: Selected Poems. New York: Living Hand, 1976.
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Life / Situations: Essayw written & spoken (translated with Lydia Davis). New York: Pantheon, 1975.
• Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A selection. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983.
• Stéphane Mallarmé, A Tomb for Anatole. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983.
• Maurice Blanchot, Vicious Circles: Two fictions & After the fact'.. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1985.
  • reprinted in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1999.
• Translations. New York: Marsilio Publishers / EW Books, 1997.
• Pierre Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians. New York: Zone Books, 1998.

Edited

• The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry. New York: Random House, 1982.
• I Thought My Father Was God, and other true tales from NPR's National Story Project. New York: Holt, 2001.

Letters

• Here and Now: Letters, 2008-2011 (with J.M. Coetzee). New York: Viking, 2013; London: Faber, 2013.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

Paul Auster Interview The Meanness of New York

• List of U.S. poets

References

• Franchot Ballinger Ambigere: The Euro-American Picaro and the Native American Trickster. MELUS, 17 (1991–92), pp. 21–38.
• Dennis Barone (ed.): Beyond the Red Notebook. Essays on Paul Auster. Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia (2. ed. 1996)
• Dennis Barone Auster’s Memory. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 32–34
• Charles Baxter The Bureau of Missing Persons: Notes on Paul Auster’s Fiction. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 40–43.
• Harold Bloom ed. Paul Auster. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publ.; 2004.
• Martine Chard-Hutchinson Paul Auster (1947- ). In: Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub (eds.). Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997, pp. 13–20.
• Gérard de Cortanze, James Rudnick: Paul Auster's New York. Gerstenberg, New York; Hildesheim, 1998
• Robert Creeley Austerities. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 35–39.
• Scott Dimovitz, 'Public Personae and the Private I: De-Compositional Ontology in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy.' MFS: Modern Fiction Studies. 52:3 (Fall 2006): 613-633.
• Scott Dimovitz, 'Portraits in Absentia: Repetition, Compulsion, and the Postmodern Uncanny in Paul Auster's Leviathan.' Studies in the Novel. 40:4 (Winter 2008): 447-464.
• William Drenttel (ed.) Paul Auster: A Comprehensive Bibliographic Checklist of Published Works 1968-1994. New York: Delos Press, 1994.
• Allan Gurganus How Do You Introduce Paul Auster in Three Minutes?. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 7–8.
• Anne M. Holzapfel: The New York trilogy. Whodunit? Tracking the structure of Paul Auster’s anti-detective novels. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1996. (= Studien zur Germanistik und Anglistik; 11) ISBN 3-631-49798-9
• Bernd Herzogenrath An Art of Desire. Reading Paul Auster. Amsterdam: Rodopi; 1999
• Bernd Herzogenrath Introduction. In: Bernd Herzogenrath. An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999, pp. 1–11.
• Gerald Howard Publishing Paul Auster. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 92–95.
• Peter Kirkegaard, Cities, Signs, Meanings in Walter Benjamin and Paul Auster: Or, Never Sure of Any of It in Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 48 (1993): 161179.
• Barry Lewis The Strange Case of Paul Auster. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 53–61.
• James Marcus Auster! Auster!. The Village Voice, 39 (August 30, 1994), pp. 55–56.
• Brian McHale Constructing Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Patricia Merivale The Austerized Version. Contemporary Literature, 38:1 (Spring 1997), pp. 185–197.
• James Peacock Carrying the Burden of Representation: Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions. Journal of American Studies, 40:1 (April 2006), pp. 53–70.
• William Riggan Picaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981.
• Mark Rudman Paul Auster: Some ‚Elective Affinities‘. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 44–45.
• Motoyuki Shibata Being Paul Auster’s Ghost. In: Dennis Barone (ed.). Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, pp. 183–188.
• Carsten Springer: Crises. The works of Paul Auster. Lang, Frankfurt am Main u.a. 2001. (= American culture; 1) ISBN 3-631-37487-9
• Carsten Springer: A Paul Auster Sourcebook. Frankfurt a. Main u. a., Peter Lang, 2001.
• Eduardo Urbina: Reading Matters: Quixotic Fiction and Subversive Discourse in Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions Critical Reflections: Essays on Golden Age Spanish Literature in Honor of James A. Parr. Eds. Barbara Simerka and Amy R. Williamsen. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006. 57-66.
• Various Authors. Special edition on Paul Auster. Critique. 1998 Spring; 39(3).
• Aliki Varvogli "World That is the Book: Paul Auster's Fiction". Liverpool University press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-85323-697-9
• Curtis White The Auster Instance: A Ficto-Biography. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 26–29.
• Eric Wirth A Look Back from the Horizon. In: Dennis Barone (ed.). Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, pp. 171–182.
• John Zilcosky The Revenge of the Author: Paul Auster’s Challenge to Theory. Critique, 39:3 (Spring 1998), pp. 195–206.

External links

Poems

• "White Nights"
• Paul Auster b. 1947 at the Poetry Foundation

Prose

• I want to tell you a story, The Guardian

Quotes

• Paul Auster quotes at Goodreads

Audio / video

• Paul Auster presents Winter journal in Barcelona and talks about Mexico, Turkey, Iran and Occupy Wall Street movement, very interesting, book channel Canal-L
• Interview with Auster, discussing Man in the Dark with George Miller in November 2008 (audio)
• 'Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt in conversation' at the Key West Literary Seminar in September 2007 (audio)
• 'The mechanics of reality', discussion between Paul Auster and school students in January 2009 (includes audio)
• Paul Auster at YouTube

Books

• Paul Auster at Amazon.com

About

• Poetry Critique
• Paul Auster at NNDB
• Paul Auster Official website.
• Paul Auster: Bio, excerpts, interviews and articles in the archives of the Prague Writers' Festival
• 'Dossier - The Brooklyn Follies', a collection of essays on Paul Auster's The Brooklyn Follies (English and French), on La Clé des Langues
• Paul Auster at the Internet Movie Database
• Inside Voices: The poetry of Paul Auster

Interviews

• 'The Searcher', interview with The Guardian in May 1999
• 'An Interview with Paul Auster', interview with 3:AM Magazine in November 2001
• 'Dem old Bush blues', interview with The Times in April 2004
• 'The Tyrannies and Epiphanies of Chance', interview in the Oxonian Review in June 2004
• George Dunford interviews Paul Auster, interview with Cordite Poetry Review in August 2008
• 'Interview: Paul Auster on His Newest Novel, Man in the Dark', interview with Village Voice in September 2008