Paul Auster

Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American writer and film director.

Auster himself has denied these influences and has asserted in print that "I've read only one short essay by Lacan, the 'Purloined Letter,' in the Yale French Studies issue on poststructuralism—all the way back in 1966."

Other scholars have seen influences in Auster's work of the American transcendentalists of the nineteenth century, as exemplified by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The transcendentalists believed that the symbolic order of civilization has separated us from the natural order of the world, and that by moving into nature, as Thoreau did, as he described in Walden, it would be possible to return to this natural order.

Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Nathaniel Hawthorne have also had a strong influence on Auster's writing.

Auster has specifically referred to characters from Poe and Hawthorne in his novels, for example William Wilson in City of Glass or Hawthorne's Fanshawe in The Locked Room, both from The New York Trilogy.

Paul Auster's recurring themes include:

After graduating from Columbia University with B.A. and M.A. degrees in 1970, he moved to Paris, France, where he earned a living translating French literature.

Since returning to the United States in 1974, he has published poems, essays, and novels, as well as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.

Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir titled The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy.

Although these books allude to the detective genre, they are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues.

Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential questions of identity, space, language, and literature creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process.

According to Auster, "...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.

His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017).

His books have been translated into more than forty languages.

Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle-class parents, of Austrian descent, Queenie (née Bogat) and Samuel Auster.

He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, and Newark, and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood.

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, from Oracle Night (2003) to 4 3 2 1 (2017), have also met with critical acclaim.

He was on the PEN American Center Board of Trustees from 2004 to 2009, and Vice President during 2005 to 2007.

"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."

Writing about Auster's most recent novel, 4 3 2 1, Booklist critic Donna Seaman remarked:"Auster has been turning readers' heads for three decades, bending the conventions of storytelling, blurring the line between fiction and autobiography, infusing novels with literary and cinematic allusions, and calling attention to the art of storytelling itself, not with cool, intellectual remove, but rather with wonder, gratitude, daring, and sly humor. ... Auster's fiction is rife with cosmic riddles and rich in emotional complexity. He now presents his most capacious, demanding, eventful, suspenseful, erotic, structurally audacious, funny, and soulful novel to date. ... Auster is conducting a grand experiment, not only in storytelling, but also in the endless nature-versus-nurture debate, the perpetual dance between inheritance and free will, intention and chance, dreams and fate. This elaborate investigation into the big what-if is also a mesmerizing dramatization of the multitude of clashing selves we each harbor within.

... A paean to youth, desire, books, creativity, and unpredictability, it is a four-faceted bildungsroman and an ars poetica, in which Auster elucidates his devotion to literature and art.

He writes, 'To combine the strange with the familiar: that was what Ferguson aspired to, to observe the world as closely as the most dedicated realist and yet to create a way of seeing the world through a different, slightly distorting lens.' Auster achieves this and much more in his virtuoso, magnanimous, and ravishing opus."

The English critic James Wood, however, offered Auster little praise, criticizing his "Clichés, borrowed language, bourgeois bêtises... intricately bound up with modern and postmodern literature"; he drew a distinction between Auster- "probably America's best-known postmodern novelist"- and "Beckett, Nabokov, Richard Yates, Thomas Bernhard, Muriel Spark, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace", who to Wood "have all employed and impaled cliché in their work", where Auster, who "clearly shares this engagement with mediation and borrowedness- hence, his cinematic plots and rather bogus dialogue", "does nothing with cliché except use it".

Considering this "bewildering", Wood opines that "Auster is a peculiar kind of postmodernist", going on to question "is he a postmodernist at all?", observing that "Eighty per cent of a typical Auster novel proceeds in a manner indistinguishable from American realism; the remaining twenty per cent does a kind of postmodern surgery on the eighty per cent, often casting doubt on the veracity of the plot".

Wood however noted that "One reads Auster's novels very fast, because they are lucidly written, because the grammar of the prose is the grammar of the most familiar realism (the kind that is, in fact, comfortingly artificial), and because the plots, full of sneaky turns and surprises and violent irruptions, have what the Times once called "all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller." There are no semantic obstacles, lexical difficulties, or syntactical challenges. The books fairly hum along."

He stated that "The reason Auster is not a realist writer, of course, is that his larger narrative games are anti-realist or surrealist."

In 2012, Auster said in an interview that he would not visit Turkey, in protest at its treatment of journalists.

The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan replied: "As if we need you! Who cares if you come or not?"

Auster responded: "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 Ragıp Zarakolu, whose case is being closely watched by PEN Centers around the world".

One of Auster's more recent books, A Life in Words, was published in October 2017 by Seven Stories Press.

It brought together three years of conversations with the Danish scholar I.B. Siegumfeldt about each one of his works, both fiction and non-fiction.

It has been considered a primary source for understanding Auster's approach to his works.

Auster is willing to give Iranian translators permission to write Persian versions of his works in exchange for a small fee; Iran does not recognize international copyright laws.

Much of the early scholarship about Auster's work saw links between it and the theories of such French writers as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and others.