I read his New York Trilogy and almost every book that came out after it. I saw him read once at a bookstore. I recently just read his latest novel Baumgartner. I didn't read his novel about his dog. And I looked over the list, and I haven't read Man In The Dark. I read his poetry, and his wife's novels, even a book his sister-in-law wrote about hysteria that was brilliant. You can listen to his daughter's music on Spotify. I've seen his movies Smoke (1995) and Blue In The Face (1995). We lost a great man today.
I'm learning about his today, it's a shame we wait till people die to talk about them. I didn't know he was next to someone who was struck by lightning and died.
Links:
NY Times (Obit)
Reddit (r/TrueLit):
"...he got this combination of postmodern games and simplicity of language from the French nouveau roman, especially from Michel Butor and Alain Robbe-Grillet. All the books in the New York Trilogy are basically nouveaux romans in English, and he's probably the author who did the most to carry that influence across the Atlantic. Which also explains why he's so popular in France." (source)
Wikipedia biography
NPR by Tom Vitale
Guardian (photos). Died of lung cancer complications, see his smoking a lot in photos.
Guardian (Other writers comments)
Guardian (Auster quotes): "‘Postmodern’ is a term I don’t understand … there’s an arrogance to all this labelling, a self-assurance that I find to be distasteful, if not dishonest. I try to be humble in the face of my own confusions, and I don’t want to elevate my doubts to some status they don’t deserve. I’m really stumbling. I’m really in the dark. I don’t know. And if that – what I would call honesty – qualifies as postmodern, then OK, but it’s not as if I ever wanted to write a book that sounded like John Barth or Robert Coover."
Guardian (Obit)
Guardian (review of Baumgartner)
Lucy Sante in NY Times: "Paul was fascinated by 19th-century melodrama, with its preposterous coincidences and bifurcating plots; by the avant-garde adaptation of such popular literary tropes in the early 20th century by authors like Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel; and by the systematic application of constraints in the writing process by Georges Perec and the Oulipo group in the 1960s and ’70s.
He was very French in his orientation — and the French repaid the favor, according him pop-star status. His books were sold in supermarkets there.
He also nailed a certain flavor of timeless French romantic melancholy, hence his affinities with the novels of Patrick Modiano and the drawings of Pierre Le-Tan. But Paul’s work was always all about story, about that feeling of being actually transported by reading."
NY Times book recommendations.
BBC Video (2021)
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