The novelist played with reality and chance in tales of solitary narrators and mutable identities. Here’s an overview of his work.
Paul Auster, who died on April 30 at the age of 77, was an atmospheric author whose scalpel-sharp prose examined the fluidity of identity and the absurdity of the writer’s life. An occasional memoirist, essayist, translator, poet and screenwriter, Auster was best known for his metafiction — books that were characterized by their elusive narrators, chance encounters and labyrinthine narratives.
Consuming Auster’s genre-defying books is not unlike the experience of reading he describes in “The Brooklyn Follies”: “When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear,” he wrote. “For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.” Thankfully, Auster left us with many worlds and stories and realities to lose ourselves in.
These are the books that best represent his work.
The Invention of Solitude (1982)
Auster’s debut memoir, “The Invention of Solitude,” put him on the map as an exciting new voice in the literary world. Bold and inventive, it chronicles his life as the son of an absent father and the father of a young son. The book’s themes — grief, loss, identity, loneliness, coincidence — all became central in his later work, both fiction and nonfiction.
The New York Trilogy (1987)
This book is technically a triptych of novels (“City of Glass,” “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room”), each of which borrows elements from detective fiction by focusing on a man investigating a subject to the point of oblivion. But at its core, “The New York Trilogy” — likely his most popular work among academics, undergraduates and aspiring writers — is a meditation on the things that make a person who they are. It cemented Auster as a stylish writer, one whose distinctive narrators searched for meaning and identity, circuitously and in perpetuity, against the constraints of art and language.
