Paul Auster (1947-2024) He is one of the great American authors who has written the most and best about New York, and at the same time he is probably the writer who has best connected with the Spanish-speaking public. He is an author of a magnificent and extensive literary work, among his novels include The invention of loneliness, written in 1982, the year he married his wife, Siri Hustvedt, and who shared with him since then an insatiable curiosity, a passion for literature and his family. Then books like The trilogy from New York (1987); Moon, S Palace (1989); Leviathan (1992); Timbuktu (1999); The book of illusions (2002); The night of the oracle (2003); Brooklyn Follies (2005); Sunset Park (2010); Diary of winter (2012), they are monumental 4 3 2 1, (2017) that crowned at the age of 70 a literary project focused on the fascination with chance. In recent years she wrote the literary study The immortal flame de Stephen Crane (2021) and an extraordinary analysis of the use of weapons in the United States in A country bathed in blood (2023), in collaboration with photographer Spencer Ostrander.
The good reception of his latest and wonderful novel, Baumgartner (2024), has once again highlighted the appreciation of Spanish-speaking readers and the undoubted respect of international critics for the most European of the great contemporary American authors. Paul Auster has given us in Baumgartner to one of the most unforgettable protagonists of his career, a retired professor who explores love in the different stages of life and reflects on what grief means when we lose a loved one.
«These days Paul Auster was telling me that he wrote the luminous Baumgartner in a strange state of meditation while grieving the tragic loss of his son and granddaughter. All the love collected between the pages of this incredible novel will now welcome the pain of her family. “Now I am Baumgartner”, Siri Hustvedt told me yesterday. “Now we are all a little Baumgartner”, I replied. We are left with the consolation of remembering him, and the possibility of returning to him by reading his novels. Elena Ramírez, director of Seix Barral.
Throughout his formidable literary career he has received numerous awards, among which the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters stands out, which had special relevance for him, given his close ties to Spain; the Médicis Prize and the Best Book of the Year Prize from the Madrid Booksellers’ Guild for The book of illusions. His work has been translated into more than forty languages (in Catalan, in Edicions 62) and will soon be published in a definitive edition by The Library of America, thus joining his name to that of the greatest American writers of all time such as Henry James or Mark Twain., news that he recently received with enormous emotion.
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