Paul Auster and the Book Club

Death of writer Paul Auster

Le grand écrivain américain Paul Auster, francophile averti, vient de nous quitter. Le Club lecture a souvent échangé autour de ses œuvres, et notamment L’Invention de la solitude, Pourquoi écrire ?, Bloodbath Nation, et Baumgartner, son tout dernier roman.

The great American writer Paul Auster, an avid Francophile, has just passed away. The Book Club has often discussed his works, including The Invention of Solitude, Why Write?, Bloodbath Nation, and Baumgartner, his latest novel.

The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster

Published in 1982, it is the author’s first work that is not a translation or a poetic text. Between autobiography and erudite reflection, the work is divided into two parts: “Portrait of an Invisible Man” and “The Book of Memory.”

In “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” Auster constructs the portrait of his recently deceased father, whose house he must empty to sell. Sorting through his father’s belongings in the house, whom he hadn’t seen much in many years, triggers both a quest, directed towards this man, his father, who proves to be more mysterious than he appeared, and introspection, as the author feels himself becoming even more of a father, since his own father has died and he himself has a young son, Daniel. In search of the lost father, Auster discovers a traumatic event from his father’s childhood, the murder of his grandfather by his own wife. Reflecting on his father’s habits and character traits, Auster understands the determining influence of this event, which made his father absent to others and almost absent from the world.

In “The Book of Memory,” the author rambles and, summoning his childhood memories, his experience as a father, and his culture, analyzes the functioning of memory (voluntary and involuntary), the relationships between father and son, or the role of chance. This informative and somewhat bewildering text constitutes the matrix for all the subsequent works, with texts as diverse as the postmodern detective novel “The New York Trilogy” or “Moon Palace.”

Why write?, Paul Auster

The author tells us five short stories that all fail to fulfill the program announced by the title. Except for the last one, or at least the last lines of this story.

In the first narrative, Auster recounts an anecdote involving one of his friends. Let us first recall that in Auster’s works, everything is autobiographical – baseball, Brooklyn, the attention given to ordinary individuals and mundane places – and yet nothing is entirely so: the atmosphere of a detective novel… To come back to this friend of Paul Auster, she broke her water after watching the first part of The Story of a Nun, a Hollywood film from the 1950s. A few years later, she broke her water and gave birth to her second child after stumbling upon the same film on television (there was no Netflix at that time, and viewers were dependent on the programming). She never had another child again.

In the second text, Auster tells us that his daughter, stumbling on the stairs, had almost gone through the window at the bottom of it, but he managed, almost miraculously, to catch her.

In the third story, Auster recounts a traumatic episode from his childhood (it is the most famous story in this book). While attending a summer camp – a kind of scouting camp – with counselors more concerned with improving their basketball throw than exploring the surrounding nature, he lost a friend who was struck down right next to him, just as the group had finally set off on an excursion.

In the fourth short story, a prisoner in a German camp during World War II is assigned a Belgian correspondent. After the war, he marries her. But when the two families meet on the occasion of their son’s marriage to a German woman, the two fathers recognize each other: one was the German guard in the camp where the Belgian father was imprisoned.

Finally, to conclude the collection, Auster recounts a visit, with his family, to the Giants’ stadium – the baseball team of New York City. Fascinated since childhood by all the great players of his time, he meets one of them that day. He manages, not without difficulty, to gather the courage to ask for an autograph. The player agrees and asks the child if he has a pen. He doesn’t have one, neither does his father, nor his mother, nor any of the people accompanying them. The player shrugs and leaves the eight-year-old boy to his regrets. The boy will cry throughout the journey back home. The author adds that since then, he always carries a pen with him. Because after all, one can always be tempted to use it, as he often reminds his children…

Bloodbath nation, Paul Auster

The texts by Auster alternate with the black and white photographs by Spencer Ostrander. The aim is to search for the underlying causes of the American addiction to firearms. According to the author, this phenomenon is linked to the two original sins of the American nation: the conquest of territories belonging to Native Americans and slavery. In both cases, firearms were necessary and had to be widely spread in order to maintain the domination of the early Americans over the lands they controlled. A third factor then worsened the situation, according to Auster. This is the fierce individualism promoted by American capitalism. Auster’s text may recall Voltaire’s crusade against religious intolerance in the Treatise on Tolerance, published in 1763. It offers multiple perspectives to demonstrate the need for societal reform.

Baumgartner, Paul Auster

In his latest novel, published in 2023, the author revisits some of the themes explored in “The Invention of Solitude,” his first narrative dating back to 1982. The main character, Baumgartner, a retired university professor, immerses himself in the memories of his married life and occasionally reconstructs the missing parts of his existence with the help of archives such as old letters or a rediscovered diary. The reader understands that the majority of his present life is now occupied by a dive into the past, and that few living beings populate his days. It is hard not to see in this narrative, which returns to the sources of his inspiration, a kind of literary testament for the author, who is now afflicted with cancer.