The books of Paul Auster

"Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days."

Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, on February 3rd, 1947. Auster grew up in the Newark suburbs of South Orange and Maplewood. He read books enthusiastically and developed an interest for writing. After graduating from Columbia University (M.A., 1970), Auster moved to France, where he began translating the works of French writers and publishing his own work in American journals.

His first "serious" novel was City of Glass, the first novel in the New York Trilogy. Completed in 1987, the trilogy marked him as a talent to watch. Auster's more recent works, Oracle Night (2004), The Brooklyn Follies (2005) and the novella Travels in the Scriptorium have also met critical acclaim.

"My dream was always to write novels. Absolutely. From the beginning. Writing novels gives you the opportunity to explore all sides of yourself--more than anything else I can think of."

Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis
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. (Thanks Wikipedia)

Transcendentalists believe in the fact that the symbolic order of civilization separated us from the natural order of the world. By moving into nature 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.

• 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.


• 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.

"You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky."

• a sense of imminent disaster


• an obsessive writer as central character/narrator


• loss of the ability to understand


• loss of language


• depiction of daily and ordinary life


• failure


• absence of a father


• writing/story telling, metafiction


• intertextuality


• American History


• American Space

The New York Trilogy is a particular form of postmodern detective fiction which still uses well-known elements of the detective novel (the classical and hardboiled varieties, for example) but also creates a new form that links "the traditional features of the genre with the experimental, metafictional and ironic features of postmodernism."

The first story, City of Glass, features a detective-fiction writer become private investigator who descends into madness as he becomes embroiled in a case. It explores layers of identity and reality, from Paul Auster the writer of the novel to the unnamed "author" who reports the events as reality to "Paul Auster the writer", a character in the story, to "Paul Auster the detective", who may or may not exist in the novel, to Peter Stillman the younger to Peter Stillman the elder and, finally, to Daniel Quinn, the protagonist.

The second story, Ghosts, is about a private eye called Blue, trained by Brown, who is investigating a man named Black on Orange Street for a client named White. Blue writes written reports to White who in turn pays him for his work. Blue becomes frustrated and loses himself as he becomes immersed in the life of Black.

The Locked Room is the story of a writer who lacks the creativity to produce fiction. Fanshawe, his childhood friend, has produced creative work, and when he disappears the writer publishes his work and replaces him in his family. The title is a reference to a "locked room mystery", a popular form of early detective fiction.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The 60-year-old Nathan Glass returns to Brooklyn after his wife has left him. He is recovering from lung cancer and is looking for "a quiet place to die".

In Brooklyn he meets his nephew, Tom, whom he has not seen in several years. Tom has seemingly given up on life and has resigned himself to a string of meaningless jobs as he waits for his life to change. They develop a close friendship, entertaining each other in their misery, as they both try to avoid taking part in life.

When Lucy, the daughter of Tom's sister, a little girl who refuses to speak, comes into their lives there is suddenly a bridge between their past and their future that offers both Tom and Nathan some form of redemption.

The Brooklyn Follies contains the classic elements of a Paul Auster novel. The main character is a lonely man, who has suffered an unfortunate reversal. The narrative is based on sudden and randomly happening events and coincidences. "It is a book about survival" as Paul Auster says.

The Brooklyn Follies on Wikipedia.

Moon Palace was first published in 1989.The plot is set in Manhattan and the U.S. Midwest, and centers on the life of the narrator Marco Stanley Fogg and the two previous generations of his family.

He doesn't know his father. His mother dies because of a car accident when he is eleven years old. He moves in with his Uncle Victor, who raises him until Marco goes to a boarding school in Chicago. When he reaches college age, he goes to Columbia University in New York City. After spending his freshman year in a college dormitory, he rents an apartment in New York.

Uncle Victor dies, which makes Marco lose track. After paying the funeral costs, Marco realizes that very little of the money that Uncle Victor gave him is left. He decides to let himself decay, to get out of touch with the world. Marco has to leave his flat, and finds himself on the streets of Manhattan.

Central Park becomes Marco's new home. He finds shelter from the pressure of the Manhattan streets. He finds food in the garbage cans. Marco even manages to stay in touch with what is going on in the world by reading newspapers left by visitors. Although life in Central Park is not very comfortable, he feels at ease because he's enjoying his solitude and he finds a balance between the inner and the outer self.

Eventually, Marco finds a job at Effing's, where he is hired for reading books to Effing and driving the old, blind and disabled man through the city of New York in his wheelchair. Effing is a strange man who tries to teach Marco in his own way, taking nothing for granted.

Read more about Moon Palace on Wikipedia.

In academic courses Paul Auster's novels are, I read, taught under the forbidding heading of meta-fiction. We are talking here about stories within stories, unreliable narrators, authors who appear as characters in their own tales.

City of Glass, his first published novella, was certainly of this school, more fun to think about, frankly, than to read. It came out in 1985 and its tricksiness - "Kafka goes gumshoe," as it was summarised by an early editor - initially put me off its author. Fortunately, his books have been getting less tricksy and more heartfelt ever since.

His latest novel The Brooklyn Follies, recently on Radio 4's Book at Bedtime and selling very nicely here, is his most straightforward yet. I am happy to admit that I am one of his fans, a disparate and sometimes desperate lot who have necessitated New York book stores removing Auster from their open shelves for fear of theft. Nevertheless, I tell him when we meet in Brooklyn, that first stunt, in which Auster slipped off the spine of the book and entered its plot, distracted people.

"Well, too bad for them," he says. "That's something you do only once. And I was mostly making fun of myself. Everything the Paul Auster character said in City of Glass, I don't believe. I have the opposite opinion on everything. His ideas are bullshit."

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