Paul Auster dies: one day there is life | Culture

In the hour of sadness, I remember the “madness of grief” from which Paul Auster speaks to us in Baumgartnerbut also from a moment without regret in moon, S Palace in which, after a storm, Marco Stanley Fogg becomes another person, as if he had gone beyond his limits and it were possible to walk and cross through the middle of a storm and then access the light of an unknown place.

Walks along unknown paths punctuate Auster’s work. One day, in his brownstone Brooklyn, in Park Slope, back in October many years ago, on a day in the past when the world still seemed whole, Auster suddenly commented that he was fascinated by the snow, and also by the silence that usually accompanied it. The snow, he told us, allowed him to see life in a different way, because it changed the environment and that made it easier for one to rediscover it.

If I had to rediscover one of his books, I would choose The invention of loneliness. It is an autobiographical set divided into two parts (Portrait of an invisible man and The book of memory), with no apparent connection between the two, although, when reading them, we see that the connection may be casual, but it is total.

In the first part he talks about his father’s death, a fascinating text that begins with memorable words: “One day there is life. For example, a man in excellent health, not even old (…) spends his days taking care of only his own affairs and dreaming of the life that lies ahead of him. And then, suddenly, death appears.”

The death of the father is so sudden that there is no room for reflection, the mind does not have time to find a word of consolation (and we all know that, even if it existed, we would not find it either). It is in that same first part where Auster told the true story of how his grandmother murdered her grandfather: a tremendous story, of course.

The second part, The book of memory, talks about when in Paris, in 1965, the very young author discovered for the first time the infinite possibilities that a limited space could provide. He never again saw a room as small as the one in Paris, but he discovered the excessive and unfathomable limits of that space in which an entire universe fit, a miniature cosmology that contained within itself the most extensive, distant and unknown.

The book of memory could very well have been called The writers roombecause that is what it is about when approaching the fourth minimums of Dickinson, Hölderlin and other geniuses.

The invention of loneliness It was the real starting shot of his work, the catalyst that unleashed the Auster novelist. He wrote it with the aim of trying to understand who his father had been. “And what is fiction if not the attempt to understand the lives of others?” He asked himself from an unknown place, where he was going to discover that, by not taking his steps anywhere, they were leading him towards the interior of himself. .

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