Thank you Paul Auster!
RIP Paul, still reading your work with enormous pleasure, 35 years in ....
I read “Die New York Trilogie” at age 18 when it came out in German translation and I’d credit this book (among very few others) for expanding my horizon beyond genre fare I was consuming at the time (SciFi and Horror primarily).
Of course there was high school, with Büchner (who I love now more than ever, incidentally) and all the Schillers and Goethes you can imagine, plus the Kleists and the Grillparzers. It was a “Deutsches Humanistisches Gymnasium” I attended after all.
And there was my mother - concerned about my obsession with Conan (the Barbarian) and Hellraise - who (gently) “pushed” Böll, Mann, Grass and Frisch on me, her personal favorites.
I read their works, to be nice/compliant, but did they resonate back then? Not really …
Now of course they are among my favorites too.
What Auster did at that age was open another world to me, a world that was so much bigger and it was real and unreal at the same time, very recognizable even as a German boy of Bavarian stock, the monsters in “The New York Trilogy” did not have faces full of pins and the heros did not wear loin clothes.
It was indeed the REAL world - at least in the physical sense - and most importantly, it was the world of big cities with all their required despair, dirt and danger that I - living in a boring monocultural suburb - longed for.
And voilà: overnight, kind of, Paul Auster made me a (livelong) connoisseur of literary fiction!
And even now he manages to mess with my schedule: I finally started on his grand finale “4 3 2 1” 👆although I am supposed to read/prepare a lot of other books (for the SL Book Club primarily…. 🥹)
So here I give you a little excerpt = page 157: Ferguson observes his parents reacting to Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech at the March on Washington, August 28th, 1963.
Thank you Paul! Rest in Peace ….
‘How strange, how deeply strange it was, to be alive’. Existential and so relatable. Thanks for sharing, Drax. I am enjoying the exposure to so many books and people I’d never encountered, through following your literary leadings.
friend of the SL Book Club, Jonathan Lethem, wrote a piece about Auster in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/may/02/paul-auster-jonathan-lethem-tribute-author