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Paul Auster waited, silently, at the beginning of the 80s, in the heart of a bookshop on the Côte d’Azur, which had no longer existed for years; a sober edition, of Actes Sud, a happy title, which he couldn’t help but recall to me: L’invention de la solitude. There was talk of a father, of a difficult relationship, of a sudden death. The second part of the book narrated the vicissitudes of a writer confined to New York, in an apartment that was hot during the day and freezing at night, on Varick Street. I bought it without hesitation, I already felt like I had met an interlocutor, someone with whom you can understand each other instinctively, without effort or pain. Reading the book confirmed my first impression, I felt a mysterious sincerity, a man who spoke to me directly, who knew which chords to touch, without false poses, someone who knew how to interest me, master of a style, and endowed with a wonderful essentiality, capable of concentrating one’s gaze on individual absolute facts, isolating them from the surrounding superfluity. The description of a father, sincere and raw, without shying away from unpleasant details, is still powerful, re-emerging from memory as if intact, retaining its undoubted truth.
Paris
I was faced with a real, quality author who could have stopped writing and would have already left a lasting impression. However, I had the sensation of having also met a man of value, a generous man, through the pure honesty of his pages, through his gaze, which I sensed was brotherly, through the simple impression that flowed from his words. I still lacked proof, another book in which to find the same assonance, the same feeling of brotherhood. That’s when I read City of Glass. And, despite the demands of a plot and a literary construction, I found the same voice that had spoken to me in The Invention of Solitude, the same familiarity, the same understanding, the same consonance. What certainly united us was the importance given to memory, and in some subtle way also the relationship with the city of Paris, which had been foundational for me too, in the formation of an identity and in the accumulation of precious memories. City of Glass would then have a wonderful adaptation as a graphic novel in ’94: in the hands of Paul Karasik, David Mazzucchelli and Art Spiegelman the novel would really take flight towards a new dimension, absolutely precious, and in no way inferior to that of the page written.
In 2009, in Pordenone, which invited Auster for the “Dedica” event, dedicated every year to an author, I received a wonderful cartoon/dedication from Karasik’s pen, which embellishes my copy of the book. Time, silently, brought us together: from Prague, to Paris, to Pordenone, to Buenos Aires, confirming the first fundamental impressions, those obtained by reading the Invention of Solitude, of a fraternal, affable and generous man, of great pleasantness. In Paris, in the Metro, there were blow-ups with his eyes, and at the Salon du livre, queues lasting hundreds of meters to receive an autograph. A true rock star, who had conquered the French beyond all imagination.
Son Daniel
Recently, he had suffered the irruption of tragedy in a full and rich life: first the death of his ten-month-old granddaughter, who had ingested drugs found in the house, and then the death of his beloved son Daniel, accused of death of daughter. A cruelty of fate that had hurt him deeply, and which he did not want to talk about in interviews. Removing the tragedy was impossible, and within months of his son’s death, April 2022, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in December of the same year. He had started fighting the disease, with great strength, at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, but the tumor, according to the doctors, was unique and not easy to treat. He had responded, through a secretary, to my encouraging emails, until October, then he delegated the task of responding to the secretary, always affectionately. The secretary’s last response dates back to April 4th. In recent days I have been thinking about her Winter Diary, which incredibly dates back to 2012, 12 years ago.
Memory deceives us, digs invisible trenches around us, makes us forget the measure of time: already in that book Auster brings an unusually dark gaze to things, a meditation on the facts of his own life which contrasts with his smiling air, with the its apparent success. A ruthless analysis of the events that occurred, reported with extreme dryness, almost as if they didn’t belong to him, hadn’t happened to him. A worrying, pessimistic book, without any compassion for itself. Instead, a gesture of great generosity, as if to compensate an unfortunate colleague, is the monumental biography he dedicated to Stephen Crane: with marvelous recklessness, a book that had started out in his intentions to be of normal size, has developed in the course of ‘work in a tome of a thousand pages, obeying a river inspiration, a joy in telling which tells us a lot about his generosity. The world traversed by Auster is a world governed by chance, by the blindest fate: perhaps the various autobiographical books explain more than novels the “music of chance”: the red notebook, for example, which collects strange cases, coincidences bordering on the incredible. As he says, the fact that most struck the author happened in the past, during high school, in ’60 or ’61: during an excursion in the countryside, his group of scouts was surprised by a powerful storm; they decided to move to a clearing, where it was safer to stop, away from the plants. We had to pass under barbed wire. With order, they prepared to pass, their friend Ralph before him. When Ralph touched the barbed wire, lightning struck. Paul stood half a meter behind him. Fate had acted, without replying. Ralph died at that time, Paul survived, to a long life. Perhaps, in these last days, besieged by illness, he will have thought about his partner Ralph. Perhaps he will have concluded that every life, although full of events and successes, is similar in duration to the journey imagined by Kafka, on horseback, to the next village.