My memories of Paul Auster are inseparably linked to my mother. Our first meeting, (and let me talk about my relationship with his books as if it were a personal friendship), our first meeting, he said, took place on a summer day. I was in my early twenties and it had just been published Brooklyn Follies. My mother devoured the last pages of it and when she finished, I suppose already sensing my habit of wandering through the melancholic side of life, she looked at me and said: “You have to read this book. It is for you, because it is full of good people with whom you would want to be friends, of possibilities, of new beginnings, of optimism and the desire to live.
Until now, when writing these lines, I had not stopped to think that perhaps this was one of the great gifts that my mother has given me throughout my life.
As he announced to me, I wanted to live in that story, I wanted to be part of that new family that Nathan Glass was building, who after having gone through a divorce and survived lung cancer, the same disease that ended Auster’s life. , he retires to the neighborhood of his childhood to see his last days go by, and yet, what he finds is life.
The crush was such that I immediately started reading all his books: The New York Trilogy, The Book of Illusions, The City of Glass…
I imagine Auster as one of these observers who, from a bird’s eye view, show us the truth, the secrets, the paths and the beauty of life.
My mother often remembers a phrase by the French poet Paul Éluard that says: “There are other worlds, but they are in this one.” Paul Auster is precisely one of the writers who has worked the most on this concept, that of the plurality of different realities that can coexist in the same place, at the same time.
In Auggie Wren’s Christmas Carolbrought to the cinema in a splendid way in the film Smoke, expresses his peculiar way of understanding the world: everything seems the same, but everything changes, and the writer is a chronicler of that sometimes imperceptible change, where chance and coincidence acquire a fundamental role.
Recently, due to those causalities that sometimes change our lives, I was able to chat with the sculptor and poet Jaume Plensa. I asked him about a series of works that I especially like, those from the “Poets” series. Like sentinels, sitting on tall canes in different cities around the world, these poets observe life, squares, traffic, pedestrian crossings… “It is the idea of community, there must be someone who is alert at night to notify the community. The poet is the soul of society, art must illuminate life,” he said. And this is exactly how I imagine Auster, as one of these observers who from a bird’s eye view show us the truth, the secrets, the paths and the beauty of life.
“As long as there is a person who believes it, there is no story that cannot be true”
“As long as there is a person who believes it, there is no story that cannot be true.” It is the phrase that the tobacconist Auggie Wren says to the writer when he must write a Christmas story on request and I think that this has a lot to do with the meaning of literature, of cinema, of creation, in general: those stories in the ones you live, the ones that make you reflect, the ones that move you, the ones that you believe in.
Forgive me for returning to my mother, she has been precisely the inspiration for writing this column when, in the midst of the work stress that accompanies me and the number of interesting articles on all the current affairs of recent days, I wondered what the hell I could contribute today.
Going back, I remembered that it was my mother who also introduced me to Siri Hustvedt. “She is one of my favorite writers, I love her, I adore her, I love her,” she told me, emphasizing that enthusiasm. Then I thought that my mother was a wonderful woman, a woman that I really liked, and that beyond the dimension of mother-daughter love, I wanted to always be her friend.
In these two months we both have our birthdays. She is about to retire and this causes her deep sadness due to the vital connotations and the end of a stage that it entails. This weekend I’m going to take you Brooklyn Follies, mom, the same one that was yours and stayed with me when you lent it to me that summer day more than 20 years ago. This book is for you, because it is full of good people you would want to be friends with, possibilities, new beginnings, optimism and the will to live.
Thank you for everything, dear Paul Auster.
