fiction.wikisort.org - Writer

Search / Calendar

Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American writer and film director. 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.[1]

Paul Auster
Auster at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival
BornPaul Benjamin Auster
(1947-02-03) February 3, 1947 (age 75)
Newark, New Jersey, U.S.
Pen namePaul Benjamin
Occupation
  • Novelist
  • poet
  • filmmaker
  • translator
Alma materColumbia University (BA, MA)
Period1974–present
GenrePoetry, literary fiction
Spouse
Children2, including Sophie Auster
Website
paul-auster.com

Early life


Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey,[2] to Jewish middle-class parents of Polish descent, Queenie (née Bogat) and Samuel Auster. He is the first cousin of the late political writer Lawrence Auster, with whom he attended high school and university, two years apart.[3][4][5] He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey,[6] and Newark,[7] and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood.[8]


Career


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.

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

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."[9]

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, 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,[10][11] and Vice President during 2005 to 2007.[12][13]

In 2012, Auster said in an interview that he would not visit Turkey, in protest of its treatment of journalists. The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan replied: "As if we need you! Who cares if you come or not?"[14] 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".[15]

One of Auster's more recent book, 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.[16]

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.[17]


Themes


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. 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."[18] 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:[19]


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."[21] 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.[22]

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.[23]

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." Wood also bemoaned Auster's 'b-movie dialogue', 'absurdity', 'shallow skepticism', 'fake realism' and 'balsa-wood backstories'.[citation needed]

Auster with John Ashbery at the Brooklyn Book Festival
Auster with John Ashbery at the Brooklyn Book Festival

Personal life


Auster was married to the writer Lydia Davis. They had one son together, Daniel Auster,[24] who was arrested and charged with manslaughter and negligent homicide in the death of his 10-month old infant daughter on April 16, 2022, who consumed heroin and fentanyl he was using.[25][26] On April 26, 2022, Daniel, who was found to be in possession of drug paraphernalia, died from an overdose.[27][28]

Auster and his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt (the daughter of professor and scholar Lloyd Hustvedt), were married in 1981, and they live in Brooklyn.[2] Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster.[29]

He has said his politics are "far to the left of the Democratic Party" but that he votes Democratic because he doubts a socialist candidate could win.[30] He has described right-wing Republicans as "jihadists"[31] and the election of Donald Trump as "the most appalling thing I've seen in politics in my life."[32]

In September 2009, he signed a petition in support of Roman Polanski, calling for his release after he was arrested in Switzerland in relation to his 1977 charge for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.[33]


Awards



Published works



Fiction



Nonfiction



Poetry



Screenplays



Edited collections



Translations



Miscellaneous



Other media



Notes


  1. This reprints both Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark, together in a single volume
  2. "The Inner Life of Martin Frost" is a fictional movie that is described in full in Auster's novel The Book of Illusions. It is the only film that the protagonist watches of Hector Mann's later, hidden films. It is the story of a man meeting a girl – an intense relationship with a touch of supernatural elements. Auster later created a real movie of the same name (see "Other Media" section below).
  3. A Christmas story that first appeared on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on December 25, 1990. It led to Auster's collaboration on a film adaptation, “Smoke”.

References


  1. "Theater Rigiblick – Spielplan – Kalenderansicht – Paul Auster liest". Theater Rigiblick. Retrieved April 23, 2015.
  2. Freeman, John. "At home with Siri and Paul" Archived March 9, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, The Jerusalem Post, April 3, 2008. Retrieved September 19, 2008. "Like so many people in New York, both of them are spiritual refugees of a sort. Auster hails from Newark, New Jersey, and Hustvedt from Minnesota, where she was raised the daughter of a professor, among a clan of very tall siblings."
  3. Auster, Paul (March 2013). Conversations with Paul Auster – Google Books. ISBN 978-1-61703-736-8. Retrieved April 20, 2013.
  4. Taub, Michael; Shatzky, Joel (1997). Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-critical Sourcebook. Greenwood. pp. 13–20. ISBN 978-0-313-29462-4.
  5. "Paul Auster (The Definitive Website)". www.stuartpilkington.co.uk. Retrieved April 9, 2022.
  6. Begley, Adam. "Case of the Brooklyn Symbolist", The New York Times, August 30, 1992. Retrieved September 19, 2008. "The grandson of first-generation Jewish immigrants, he was born in Newark in 1947, grew up in South Orange and attended high school in Maplewood, 20 miles southwest of New York."
  7. Auster, Paul. Winter Journal (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 2012), p. 61.
  8. Freeman, Hadley. "American dreams: He may be known as one of New York's coolest chroniclers, but Paul Auster grew up in suburban New Jersey and worked on an oil tanker before achieving literary success. Hadley Freeman meets a modernist with some very traditional views", The Guardian, October 26, 2002. Retrieved September 19, 2008. "Education: Columbia High School, New Jersey; 1965–69 Columbia College, New York; '69–70 Columbia University, New York (quit after one year)"
  9. Mallia, Joseph. ""Paul Auster", "BOMB Magazine", Spring, 1988.
  10. "Board of Trustees: 2004–2005 | PEN American Center". www.pen.org. August 28, 2012. Retrieved January 15, 2016.
  11. "Board of Trustees: 2008–2009 | PEN American Center". www.pen.org. August 28, 2012. Retrieved January 15, 2016.
  12. "Board of Trustees: 2005–2006 | PEN American Center". www.pen.org. August 28, 2012. Retrieved January 15, 2016.
  13. "Board of Trustees: 2006–2007 | PEN American Center". www.pen.org. August 28, 2012. Retrieved January 15, 2016.
  14. "Turkish PM criticizes US writer Paul Auster over human rights comments, Guardian, 01.02.2012". The Guardian. Associated Press in Ankara. March 27, 2013. Retrieved April 20, 2013.
  15. Itzkoff, Dave (February 2012). "Paul Auster Responds After Turkish Prime Minister Calls Him 'an Ignorant Man', The New York Times, 01.02.2012". Turkey: Artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com. Retrieved April 20, 2013.
  16. "A Life in Words by Paul Auster in Conversation with I B Siegumfeldt". Penguin Random House. Retrieved June 5, 2017.
  17. Dehghan, Saeed Kamali (June 23, 2017). "Why Iran has 16 different translations of one Khaled Hosseini novel". The Guardian. Retrieved December 25, 2018.
  18. Auster, Paul (2017). A Life in Words. Seven Stories Press. pp. xv.
  19. 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)
  20. Dirk Peters: Das Motiv des Scheiterns in Paul Austers "City of Glass" und "Music of Chance". unpublished MA dissertation, Christian-Albrechts Universität Kiel, 1998
  21. Dirda, Michael (December 4, 2008). "Spellbound". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved November 12, 2019.
  22. Dirda, Michael (December 21, 2003). "Strange things begin to happen when a writer buys a new notebook". The Washington Post. Retrieved November 12, 2019.
  23. Seaman, Donna (November 15, 2016). Booklist review: 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster. Booklist.
  24. Goodyear, Dana (March 17, 2014). "Long Story Short". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved January 15, 2016.
  25. Schrader, Adam (April 16, 2022). "Author Paul Auster's son charged with manslaughter for death of infant daughter". UPI. Retrieved April 28, 2022.
  26. "Novelist Paul Auster's son busted for manslaughter in baby's drug death: Cops". April 16, 2022.
  27. Muzaffar, Maroosha (April 27, 2022). "Son of acclaimed author Paul Auster dies of overdose while awaiting trial for daughter's death". The Independent. Archived from the original on May 25, 2022. Retrieved April 28, 2022.
  28. Kennedy, Dana; Marino, Joe (April 28, 2022). "Paul Auster's son Daniel dead at 44 from OD while facing charges over baby's drug death".
  29. Denes, Melissa (February 3, 2006). "The dark side of happiness". The Guardian.
  30. Marlowe, Lara (September 15, 2012). "Auster feels US marginalises writers as film stars shape opinion". The Irish Times.
  31. Maitlis, Emily (November 3, 2016). "Paul Auster on US election: 'I am scared out of my wits'". BBC.
  32. Laity, Paul (November 29, 2017). "Paul Auster: 'I'm going to speak out as often as I can, otherwise I can't live with myself'". The Guardian.
  33. "Signez la pétition pour Roman Polanski !" (in French). La Règle du jeu. November 10, 2009.
  34. "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter A" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved April 16, 2011.
  35. "Paul Auster décoré par la France à New York sur le site de France 3". Archived from the original on November 20, 2007.
  36. Paul Auster décoré par Bertrand Delanoë from the website of L'Express June 11, 2010
  37. "NYC Literary Honors – 2012 Honorees". nyc.gov. Archived from the original on May 14, 2014. Retrieved April 23, 2015.
  38. McCrum, Robert (October 15, 2017). "Man Booker prize 2017: from Abraham Lincoln to Brexit Britain". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712. Retrieved October 26, 2017.
  39. Another Paul Auster novel, 'Man in the Dark', was due to be published by Henry Holt in the U.S. on Monday September 1, 2008.
  40. Flood, Alison (October 29, 2008). "Paul Auster talks to Alison Flood". The Guardian.
  41. Akbar, Arifa (October 30, 2009). "Innocence of youth: How Paul Auster excavated his own past for his latest novel – Features – Books". The Independent. Archived from the original on May 25, 2022. Retrieved April 20, 2013.
  42. "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on May 27, 2016. Retrieved May 20, 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  43. for more information about some of the poets included in this volume see:French Poetry since 1950: Tendencies III by Jean-Michel Maulpoix
  44. pdf version for download in http://pt.scribd.com/doc/46890380/Paul-Auster-and-True-Tales-of-American-Life
  45. Auster, Paul (December 25, 1990). "Opinion | Auggie Wren's Christmas Story". The New York Times.
  46. Auster, Paul (April 23, 2008). "The Accidental Rebel". The New York Times.
  47. "Amerikanske forfatterstjerner hjælper miniboghandel på Nørrebro". Politiken. April 21, 2015. Retrieved April 23, 2015.
  48. "NPR – Weekend All Things Considered: National Story Project". NPR.
  49. "NPR – Weekend All Things Considered: National Story Project". NPR.
  50. Michael Wood (Fall 2003). "Paul Auster, The Art of Fiction No. 178". The Paris Review. Fall 2003 (167).
  51. Auster, Paul; Reifler, Nelly (September 7, 2002). I Thought My Father Was God: And Other True Tales from NPR's National Story Project. ISBN 978-0-312-42100-7.
  52. Auster, Paul (2002). True Tales of American Life. ISBN 978-0-571-21070-1.
  53. Boxer, Sarah. "Sounds of a Silent Place" The New York Times. September 11, 2004. Retrieved September 12, 2009.
  54. Soundwalk Archived June 28, 2018, at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved September 12, 2009.
  55. Dalton Pen Communications Awards Archived September 29, 2008, at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved September 17, 2009.
  56. Audio Publishers Association. Retrieved September 17, 2009.

Further reading





На других языках


- [en] Paul Auster

[fr] Paul Auster

Paul Auster, né le 3 février 1947 à Newark, New Jersey, aux États-Unis, est un écrivain, scénariste et réalisateur américain. Une partie de son œuvre évoque la ville de New York, notamment le quartier de Brooklyn où il vit. D'abord traducteur de poètes français, il écrit des poèmes avant de se tourner vers le roman et à partir des années 1990 de réaliser aussi quelques films.

[ru] Остер, Пол

Пол Бенджамин Остер (англ. Paul Benjamin Auster, 3 февраля 1947, Ньюарк, США) — американский писатель и переводчик, сценарист, работающий в рамках постмодернизма, абсурдизма и экзистенциализма. Наиболее известен своей криминальной прозой, в которой развивает проблематику преступления, поиск себя и своего предназначения. Его «Нью-йоркская трилогия» (1985—1986) получила приз Prix France Culture de Littérature Étrangère, в 1986 была номинирована на Edgar Award Best Mystery Novel[1].



Текст в блоке "Читать" взят с сайта "Википедия" и доступен по лицензии Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike; в отдельных случаях могут действовать дополнительные условия.

Другой контент может иметь иную лицензию. Перед использованием материалов сайта WikiSort.org внимательно изучите правила лицензирования конкретных элементов наполнения сайта.

2019-2024
WikiSort.org - проект по пересортировке и дополнению контента Википедии