Paul Auster, American writer, screenwriter and film director, author of a prolific work that includes the ‘New York Trilogy’, ‘Brooklyn Follies’ and ‘The Invention of Solitude’, died this Tuesday at the age of 77. , as reported by The New York Times.
His work, which has as its background Brooklyn, the New York neighborhood where he lived and where he died, It had been translated into more than 40 languages and includes poetry, stories, essays or theater and film scripts, some directed by him.
Below we present five of his most recognized works:
The New York Trilogy (1985)
This trilogy is made up of three interconnected novels: “The City of Glass”, “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room”. The story follows a writer named Daniel Quinn, a private detective named Max Work, and a man named Peter Stillman, whose lives become intertwined in a mysterious and complex labyrinth of identity, obsession, and reality.
The Book of Illusions (2002)
After the tragic death of his wife and children in a plane crash, college professor David Zimmer plunges into a deep depression. However, his life changes when he discovers the films of legendary actor Hector Mann, who mysteriously disappeared in 1929. Fascinated by Mann’s story, Zimmer embarks on a journey to discover the truth behind his disappearance.
Leviathan (1992)
Leviathan follows the story of Peter Aaron, a writer who reflects on the life and death of his friend Benjamin Sachs, a brilliant and enigmatic poet who apparently commits suicide by blowing up his own house. As Aaron investigates Sachs’s past, he uncovers a complex web of secrets and connections that lead him to question his own perception of reality.
The Moon Palace (1989)
In this novel, Marco Stanley Fogg, a young orphan and amateur poet, embarks on a journey of self-discovery across America. While working as a babysitter for an eccentric man and caring for a mysterious girl named Kitty, Fogg encounters a series of peculiar characters and surreal events that challenge his understanding of the world.
Sunset Park (2010)
The novel follows the life of Miles Heller, a young man who drops out of college to work cleaning foreclosed houses in Florida. After a series of unfortunate events, Miles returns to New York and finds himself living in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, with a group of artists struggling to stay afloat amid the economic downturn. The story explores themes of loss, redemption, and the search for meaning in an ever-changing world.
Who was Paul Auster? A prolific American writer
Under the pseudonym Paul Benjamín, he published his first detective novel ‘Squeeze Play’ (1982) and then ‘The Invention of Solitude’ (1990), autobiographical. His breakout as a writer came, however, in 1985 with the novel ‘The City of Glass’, the first of ‘The New York Trilogy’ along with ‘Fantasmas’ (1986) and ‘The Locked Room’ (1986).
While a professor at Princeton University in New York, he edited ‘The Country of the Last Things’ (1987) and ‘The Moon Palace’ (1989). In 1990, ‘Pista de despegue-Poems and Essays’ and ‘The Music of Chance’ were released, in which he magnified the supposed advantages of uprooting.
With this book he was nominated for the Faulkner Prize for works of fiction. He scripted the film of the same name, directed in 1993 by Philip Haas, in which he also played the role of the chauffeur. His compilation of essays on poets and storytellers, written between the seventies and eighties, appeared in Spain in 1992 under the title ‘The Art of Hunger’. That last year she published ‘Leviathan’, awarded the Medici Prize for foreign novels. This was followed by ‘The Red Notebook’ (1993) and ‘Mr. Vertigo’ (1994).
Among his latest essays are ‘The Immortal Flame of Stephen Crane’ (2021), inspired by the life of this war correspondent in the last third of the 19th century; and ‘A country bathed in blood’ (2023), where he mixes biography, historical anecdotes and an analysis of data, from the origin of the United States to the armed conflicts of current news.
After it was announced that he suffered from lung cancer, Auster published ‘Baumgartner’ (2023), a story about love, desire, loss and memory. In poetry, he wrote several books such as ‘The Random House Book of Twentieth Century-French Poetry’ (1982), ‘White Spaces’ (1983) and ‘Fragments of the Cold’ (1988).
*With information from EFE
