Complete, Inspiring Paul Auster

Reading the works of Paul Auster, you get a glimpse. Being a creative mind, I’m always astonished at just what Auster can do with the page on a daily basis. Sure, he’s a Brooklyn writer in the vein of Borges, with obvious French influences, French tastes for the certain ways that film makers, as an example, explore the depth of humanity. I love Paul Auster because, no matter how many stories he completes which are oddly similar, it’s as though you are turning the pages not because you have to, but because you must. What Paul Auster does better than many modern novelists is see the page, be the page, turn the page interesting, turn his characters inside out—pushing them to the extremes of humanity.

I first discovered Auster through a grad student who, through some circles, recommended the top novel “City of Glass” which is part of “The New York Trilogy,” a damn good title which fits the mold of what Auster is. Soon I went to the realms of outsiders looking into the madness of the world. Later in his career, his interests were far more plain, yet you could see the interest in this author from the beginning, intersest in what makes us be who we are.

So I look to Paul Auster, the author of so many fine novels, not a single poor one, perhaps flawed but not poor, and I see something akin to the literary sleuth, the kind of writer we need here in America to expunge us of all the finer details of a New York life, the kind you see on the road waiting for an idea to pop into his head. And as a novelist, Auster may have some peers. I would say, in terms of interest, the only comparable living author is Stephen King—and they are so far apart, there is plenty of room for both. I am missing out on many literary authors—Michael Chabon, John Updike—but I believe Auster has a more fascinating treatise on what it is to be in pain, living with all the bad and good of the world. Don’t look to closely too the French writers, because I believe Auster, who lived in Paris, wrote in Paris, and read of Paris, is one of another influences who learned his literary noir while living in the city—only to write about the city that rarely sleeps.

Article by Jacob Malewitz

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