Bibliography
See C. Springer, A Paul Auster Sourcebook (2001); studies by D. Barone, ed. (1995), A. Varvogli (2001), I. Shiloh (2002),and H. Bloom, ed. (2004).
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Paul Auster |
Bibliography
See C. Springer, A Paul Auster Sourcebook (2001); studies by D. Barone, ed. (1995), A. Varvogli (2001), I. Shiloh (2002),and H. Bloom, ed. (2004).
| Works: Works by Paul Auster |
| 1985 | City of Glass. The first part of Auster's acclaimed New York trilogy plays with the conventions of the detective story, posing questions about human identity that are intensified in the ambiguous arena of New York City. Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1987) would follow, variations on Auster's version of the postmodern detective novel. |
| 1986 | Ghosts. The second novel in Auster's New York trilogy is another takeoff on the detective novel genre. Blue, a detective, is hired by White to follow Black. All three allegorical characters merge, as Blue spends years watching Black writing a book in a room across the street. Why? The answer is never clear, though critics suggest that Auster's theme is precisely the unresolved nature of reality, which detective stories usually resolve with a closed plot and simplified characters. |
| 1987 | The Locked Room. The final volume of Auster's New York trilogy, concerns Fanshawe, a brilliant writer who has disappeared and is presumed dead. Critics praise this novel as both the most accessible and brilliantly conceived in the trilogy because it fuses Auster's philosophical concerns with the creation of riveting characters and a suspenseful plot. |
| 1988 | In the Country of Last Things. Set in a devastated apocalyptic future, the novel depicts Anna Blume's search for her brother in a vast city. As details accumulate, it becomes clear that what seems at first to be a foreign setting in the future is actually the urban present, intensified and piercingly examined. Critics praise Auster for his melding of philosophical and aesthetic concerns with the creation of vivid settings and characters. |
| 1989 | Moon Palace. Auster, who often presents innovative versions of traditional genres, this time creates a picaresque novel with a hero's search for an inheritance on a cross-country drive. This bildungsroman contains the classic elements of an orphan questing to become a man and to establish an independent identity. |
| 1990 | The Music of Chance. The novel is about Jim Nashe, who sets out on travels meant to define himself. He falls in with Pozzi, a gambler, and the two men end up in debt. Gambling and traveling become Auster's metaphors for the role of chance and coincidence in individual lives. The novel impresses critics, who see in it an extension of his early philosophical speculations detailed in the New York trilogy. |
| 1997 | Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure. Auster writes about the period before his great success as a novelist, when he tried to live only by his pen and confronted considerable failure, almost relishing it as a sign of his seriousness. He reveals little about his personal life, except insofar as it impinges on his literary ambitions. Critics admire Auster's spare prose and stark, unflinching look at his own literary ambition. |
| Quotes By: Paul Auster |
Quotes:
"We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread."
| Wikipedia: Paul Auster |
| Paul Auster | |
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Paul Auster, September 2008 |
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| Born | Paul Benjamin Auster February 3, 1947 Newark, NJ, United States |
| Pen name | Paul Benjamin |
| Occupation | Novelist and poet |
| Nationality | American |
| Writing period | 1974 – present |
| Genres | Absurdist fiction, crime fiction, mystery fiction |
| Literary movement | Postmodernism |
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Influences
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Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American author known for works blending absurdism and crime fiction, such as The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989) and The Brooklyn Follies (2005).
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Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey[3], to Jewish middle class parents of Polish descent Samuel and Queenie Auster. He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey[4] and graduated from Columbia High School in adjoining Maplewood.[5] After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris, France where he earned a living translating French literature. Since returning to the U.S. in 1974, he has published poems, essays, novels of his own as well as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.
He married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, in 1981, and they live in Brooklyn.[3] Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer Lydia Davis. They had one son together, Daniel Auster.
He is also the Vice-President of PEN American Center.
Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely-connected detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, space, language and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process.
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 men 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, Oracle Night (2004), The Brooklyn Follies (2005) and the novella Travels in the Scriptorium have also met critical acclaim.
Two strong elements in Paul Auster's writing are Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis and the American transcendentalism of the early to middle 19th century, namely amongst others Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau.
In short Lacan's theory declares that we enter the world through words. We observe the world through our senses but the world we sense is structured (mediated) in our mind through language. Thus our subconscious is also structured as a language. This leaves us with a sense of anomaly. We can only perceive the world through language, but we have the feeling of a lack. The lack is the sense of a being outside of language. The world can only be constructed through language but it always leaves something uncovered, something that can not be told and be thought of, it can only be sensed. This can be seen as one of the central themes of Paul Auster's writing.
Lacan is considered to be one of the key figures of French poststructuralism. Some academics are keen to discern traces of other poststructuralist philosophers throughout Auster's oeuvre - mainly Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Michel de Certeau - although Auster himself has claimed to find such philosophies 'unreadable' [3]
The transcendentalists believe in the fact that the symbolic order of civilization separated us from the natural order of the world. By moving into nature - like Thoreau in Walden - it would be possible to return to this natural order.
The common factor of both ideas is the question of the meaning of symbols for human beings.[6] Auster's protagonists are often writers who establish meaning in their lives through writing, and they try to find their place within the natural order to be able to live again in civilization.
Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Herman Melville have also had a strong influence on Auster's writing. Not only do their characters reappear in Austers work (like William Wilson in New York Trilogy or Hawthorne's Fanshawe in The Locked Room). Auster also uses variations on the themes of these writers.
Paul Auster's reappearing subjects are:[7]
Instances of coincidence can be found all over Auster's work. Auster himself claims that people are so influenced by all the consistent stories that surround them, that they do not see the elements of coincidence, inconsistency and contradiction in their own lives:
| “ | This idea of contrasts, contradictions, paradox, I think, gets very much to the heart of what novel writing is for me. It's a way for me to express my own contradictions.[9] | ” |
Failure in Paul Auster's works is not just the opposite of the happy ending. In Moon Palace and The Book of Illusions it results from the individual's uncertainty about the status of his own identity. The protagonists start a search for their own identity and reduce their life to the absolute minimum. From this zero point they gain new strength and start their new life and they are also able to get into contact with their environment again. A similar development can also be seen in City of Glass and The Music of Chance.
Failure in this context is not the "nothing" - it is the beginning of something all new.
Auster's protagonists often go through a process that reduces their support structure to an absolute minimum: They sever all contact with family and friends, go hungry and lose or give away all their belongings. Out of this approximation of their nil they either acquire new strength to reconnect with the world or they fail and disappear for good.
| “ | But in the end, he manages to resolve the question for himself - more or less. He finally comes to accept his own life, to understand that no matter how bewitched and haunted he is, he has to accept reality as it is, to tolerate the presence of ambiguity within himself. | ” |
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—Paul Auster about the protagonist of The Locked Room, quoted in Martin Klepper, Pynchon, Auster, DeLillo.[10] |
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"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."[11] Dirda has also 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.[12]
Respected book critic James Wood, however, offers Auster little praise in his piece "Shallow Graves" in the November 30, 2009 issue of The New Yorker:
What Auster often gets instead is the worst of both worlds: fake realism and shallow skepticism. The two weaknesses are related. Auster is a compelling storyteller, but his stories are assertions rather than persuasions. They declare themselves; they hound the next revelation. Because nothing is persuasively assembled, the inevitable postmodern disassembly leaves one largely untouched. (The disassembly is also grindingly explicit, spelled out in billboard-size type.) Presence fails to turn into significant absence, because presence was not present enough.[13]
On March 12, 2009, Paul Auster gave the sixth annual Lewis Mumford Lecture on Urbanism at the City College of New York (CCNY), with the title "City of Words."
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| Sophie Calle (photography) | |
| In the Country of the Last Things (2007 Science Fiction Film) | |
| Jeff Gardner (Jazz Artist, '80s-2000s) |
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Mentioned in
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.

- Paul Auster