Paul Auster, a celebrated American author known for his love of typewriters, has died at 77. He gained fame for his “New York Trilogy” and was a notable figure in postmodernist fiction.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947, Auster’s writing career began at the age of eight when he missed out on getting an autograph from his baseball hero, Willie Mays — who was outside the players’ locker room after a game — to not having a pencil. From then on, he always carried a pencil with him, and his writing journey began. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris, where he began translating French literature and publishing his own work in American journals.
Auster’s big break came in the mid-1980s with the publication of “”City of Glass,” the first novel in his “New York Trilogy.” This trilogy cemented his reputation as a master of postmodernism, as he blended detective fiction with existential questions about identity, space, language, and literature. The trilogy brought him worldwide acclaim and established him as one of the signature New York writers of his generation.
A major theme in Auster’s work was the role of chance and coincidence. This fascination can be traced back to a life-changing event he witnessed at the age of 14 while hiking during a summer camp. He saw a boy standing just inches away get struck by lightning and die instantly. This experience profoundly impacted Auster, and it became a recurring motif in his fiction.
While Auster was born in New Jersey, he became synonymous with Brooklyn, where he settled in 1980. He was seen as a guardian of the borough’s rich literary past and an inspiration to a new generation of novelists who flocked there. His works often used New York as a backdrop, with Brooklyn featuring prominently and his characters grappling with life’s randomness and chance occurrences.
Auster’s body of work includes over 30 books, ranging from novels to memoirs, poetry, and screenplays. His notable works include “Moon Palace,” “The Music of Chance,” “The Book of Illusions,” “Leviathan,” “4 3 2 1,” and, of course, the “New York Trilogy.” His writing imposed a sense of irreality, inviting readers into a world where the lines between reality and fiction blurred.
Paul Auster’s passing is a reminder of the profound impact writers can have on our lives. His words will continue to resonate with readers for generations to come, and his influence on contemporary literature will forever be felt. As he once said, “If there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it.”
Well tie me to a cactus and call me Prickly Pete, it seems this Nick McDonell fella has ruffled some feathers with his new book that’s part memoir and part critique of the hoity-toity upper crust.
Now I ain’t one to judge a book by its cover or a bloke by his bank account, but it does raise my eyebrows a smidge that ole Nick lays bare how much moolah he got paid for scribbling his personal reflections, even as he aims to interrogate the entitled elite he was born into like a baby blue blood. Makes me wonder if his conscience is as heavy as his wallet after cashing that fat check.
From what I gather, Nick regales us with tales of his rarefied upbringing among the impressively pedigreed – schmoozing at Harvard, crewing on yachts, and mixing with Ivy Leaguers whose folks have more money than Scrooge McDuck. He winces at the memories like he’s swallowed a lemon peel, making sure we know his eyes are wide open now to the highfalutin hypocrisy of exclusive clubs and such.
But some reviewers grumble that Nick’s personal stories don’t pack much of a revelatory punch or dig deeper into the whys and wherefores of elite entitlement than a kid shoveling sand on a beach. Shoot, I reckon Nick’s just doing what a fellow naturally does when he wakes up one day and realizes the cherry privileged bubble he grew up in maybe wasn’t the whole pie. No sin in feeling conflicted about your gilded youth once them golden blinkers come off.
Yet the cynical side of me (and Lord knows I’ve nurtured that ornery cuss) can’t help noting that Nick is monetizing hisnewfound conscience just as surely as he’s milked his status since his diaper days. He may have left the plush parlors of privilege for the straight and narrow, but cold hard currency didn’t get left behind. The more things change the more they line the same pockets, or so it seems to this plain old tax-paying Joe.
But who am I to judge? A man’s gotta make his way and Nick’s found his – scribbling about the good ole boy networks with one hand while cashing their checks with the other. At least the public’s getting a glimpse behind the brocade curtain of the upper upper crust, even if Nick’s personal revelation seems more soft whimper than deafening bang. But there’s value in coming clean about your conflicted past, and in reminding the pedigreed that their privilege casts a mighty long, deep shadow. Here’s to more light finding its way in, and a few more conscience-scrubbings all around. Now where’d I stash my copy of The Great Gatsby?
Watercolor by Hermann Hesse
My Room
In late 2000 I wrote a letter to Don DeLillo asking him what kind of typewriter he used. I’d read in the Paris Review interview that he used a manual typewriter. A page from said typewriter (from his novel Libra) was also reproduced in the article, and I found it fascinating because it showed evidence of hard labor — typing and lots of inked-in corrections. Plus, the type style was beautiful and I wanted that typewriter. So I wrote the letter. A few months later I received a letter (unfortunately damaged) in reply from this most reclusive literary genius, who identified his typewriter as an Olympia “SM-something.” The above photo clearly shows an Olympia SM9, manufactured in the early 1970s. A great and reliable machine, one of which I now own. Here’s a link to the manual.
Novelist Harry Crews has died from complications from neuropathy. Crews, who died at his home in Gainesville, Florida, was 76. “He had been very ill,” his ex-wife, Sally Crews, tells the Associated Press in this report. “In a way it was kind of a blessing. He was in a lot of pain.”
The AP report describes Crews as follows: “A wild man and drunken sage in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson, he wrote bloodied, freakish stories drawn directly from his own experiences, including boxing and karate. Crews sported a tattoo with a line from an E.E. Cummings poem, ‘How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mister Death,’ on his right bicep under the tattoo of a skull.” According to a brief earlier write-up in a New York Times obituary: “Though his books captivated many reviewers (they bewildered others and repelled still others), they attracted a cadre of readers so fiercely devoted that the phrase “cult following” seems inadequate to describe their level of ardor.”
Crews was the son of sharecroppers in Bacon County, Georgia. Growing up was rough, and when his father died when Crews was two, the boy was marked for life. As the AP report details,
His childhood alone tested the imagination. His mother married his father’s brother, a violent drunk. Crews suffered from infantile paralysis and once fell into a vat of boiling water, confining him to his bed for months. Still, he managed to become the first member of his family to graduate from high school, after which he joined the Marine Corps. In the book “Getting Naked with Harry Crews,” he explained to interviewer Hank Nuwer that his military service was crucial.
“If I hadn’t gone in the Marine Corps, I wouldn’t be a professor in the university. I’d be in the state prison because I was a bad actor and a bad boy.”
After a stint in the Marines, Crews began writing, and eventually his publications earned him a spot on the faculty of the University of Florida, where he taught from 1968 through 1997. As recalled by his students, he was mesmerizing on the topic of writing.
He told one interviewer what he told his students; “If you’re gonna write, for God in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a rich and darkly morbid story that showcases Hawthorne’s art at its most sensuous and florid. It is the story of a beautiful young woman in a poisonous garden, and its gorgeous and lethal beauty are wonderfully done. The story is a sinister one in that the growing signs of the deadliness of Beatrice, and inevitably of Giovanni himself, accumulate with a horrid insistence.
Beatrice’s father is Professor Rappaccini of Padua, who raised her from childhood among deadly plants and flowers of his own creation in order to endow her with “marvellous gifts against which no power or strength could avail an enemy.” Giovanni, a young student, unaware of the secrets of the garden, is deeply attracted to her extraordinary beauty and her intimate tending to the beautiful plants. Gradually he becomes aware of the deadliness of the garden, and despite the warnings of Rappaccini’s rival, Baglioni, Giovanni continues to pursue her until he eventually takes on her deadly power. When he finally realizes the extent of his contamination, he urges her to drink with him the antidote prepared by Baglioni. She drinks it first, and “as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death.” The story ends with Baglioni’s horrified yet triumphant cry: “ ‘Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your experiment?’ ”
Trailer for the German musical “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
For “The Dead” James Joyce drew upon an incident in Galway in 1903. There a young man named Michael (“Sonny”) Bodkin was courting Nora Barnacle (Joyce’s eventual wife), but he had tuberculosis and was soon bedridden. When Nora resolved to leave Galway for Dublin, the boy stole out of his sickbed and in the rain under an apple tree sang to Nora . Later, in Dublin, Nora learned that Bodkin was dead. When Nora first met Joyce, as she told her sister, what attracted her to him was his resemblance to “Sonny” Bodkin.
Apparently, Joyce was jealous of the dead suitor and grilled Nora ceaselessly about him. What bothered him was that her heart was still moved by the recollection of the boy’s love for her. This notion of a man in rivalry with a dead boy lying in a cemetery appears to be the genesis of Joyce’s most famous story.
Besides basing his story only on this incident, Joyce borrowed heavily from the ending of a book which is hardly read anymore, George Moore’s Vain Fortune. In that book a young bridal couple learn that a young woman whom the groom jilted has committed suicide. Both are tormented, and the bride asks her husband not to kiss her. She falls off to sleep, their marriage unconsummated, and the husband stares out the window at “the melancholy greyness of the dawn.” In that instant he realizes that his life is a failure and that his wife lacks the passion of the girl who killed herself. He does, however, achieve a sort of redemption through his agony: a resolution to try to make his wife happy. This is clearly the situation from which Joyce adroitly lifted: the dead lover who comes between the living lovers, the husband’s realization of his failure, his acceptance of mediocrity, the resolve to be at least sympathetic — it all came from this other book. Nonetheless, Joyce rarefies the story by having it arise not from the suicide of a former love but from the simple memory of the young love itself.
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