His most iconic novels and how to read them

Paul Auster is one of the most influential writers in contemporary literature, with works translated into more than forty languages. Despite his fame, delving into his work can be difficult given how precise and refined his prose is. To avoid unnecessary frustrations with Auster, we have prepared a reading guide for you: a tour in 10 easy steps so as not to miss any of the author’s key works.

Where to start reading Paul Auster

Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Auster studied French, Italian, and English literature at Columbia University before settling in Paris for three years, where he worked as a translator of Mallarmé, Sartre, and Simenon. His arrival on the American literary scene in the eighties was a breath of fresh air for a narrative that needed renewal: his work, impregnated with influences from the old continent, fused the best of North American and European traditions.

His narrative universe, characterized by the exploration of chance, identity and metafiction, established a unique style that has inspired countless writers in aspects such as fiction that contaminates reality. To delve into his work, the ideal path begins with ‘The New York Trilogy’. This volume not only established him internationally, but also reinvented the detective genre with metafictional games, characters that unfold, and investigations that become existential searches.

From there, two possibilities open up. On the one hand, the path of autobiography, with works such as ‘The Invention of Solitude’, written after the death of his father. On the other hand, Auster continues to explore the possibilities of pure narrative, with works such as the contemporary serial ‘The Moon Palace’ or ‘Leviathan’, a political reflection on the ravages of Vietnam on an entire generation. Finally we will stop at the ambitious ‘4 3 2 1’, which narrates four parallel lives of the same protagonist.

The best novels by Paul Auster, in order

1. The New York Trilogy (1987)

Consecrating work published between 1985 and 1987, which includes ‘Crystal City’, ‘Ghosts’ and ‘The Locked Room’, and which launched Auster to international recognition and marked a new starting point for the North American novel. Postmodern reinvention of the police genre where detective investigations are transformed into existential inquiries about identity, language and reality. In ‘City of Glass’, a crime novel writer named Daniel Quinn receives a wrong call that confuses him with a detective named Paul Auster, which leads him to accept the case and meet the real Auster, who is a writer, not a detective.

‘Ghosts’ presents a private detective named Blue watching a man called Black on behalf of White, in a claustrophobic urban universe where the watcher and the watched write identical reports sitting face to face, questioning who is watching whom and who is writing the other’s life. ‘The Closed Room’ closes the trilogy with the disappearance of a writer modeled after Auster himself, whose life, work and wife are inherited by the narrator, which makes him explore whether living the life of another corrodes to the point of destruction. Three seemingly independent stories that are interconnected with cross references.

2. The invention of solitude (1982)

After that first instruction manual of the Austerian universe, we delve into the emotional engine of his work. Written after his father’s death, he explains why narrative games are not exercises, but rather tools for processing trauma. It is divided into two complementary texts that make up an autobiographical exploration of fatherhood, memory and loneliness. ‘Portrait of an invisible man’ is based on the impact of the news of the father’s death and the act of confronting the objects of the deceased to reconstruct a father who was absent even in life, including the reconstruction of a crime. In ‘The Book of Memory’ he distances himself from the initial grief and links reflections on his role as a son with his own early fatherhood. An unclassifiable text that establishes the emotional foundations of his later work.

3. The Palace of the Moon (1989)

After ‘The New York Trilogy’, Auster tackled this contemporary serial about paternity and imposture. It established Auster in Europe and for many it is his masterpiece because of how it grabs the resources of the nineteenth-century adventure novel and makes them his own. Marco Stanley Fogg (Marco Polo + the journalist who found Livingstone + Phileas Fogg from ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’) is an orphan who is left destitute after the death of his uncle. He will end up working for an old paralyzed painter, for whom he writes a biography for the son he never met. The novel is structured in a network of metaphors about the moon and light, in a journey of self-discovery full of stories within stories.

4. Leviathan (1992)

Auster’s most political novel is a reflection on the broken dreams of the Vietnam generation. The narrative begins at its end: in 1990, a man has a bomb explode in his hand and fly into pieces, an anonymous dead man that the FBI cannot identify. A writer suspects that it is his missing best friend, and decides to write his biography before the official story does so. The subject of the book is another writer, a conscientious objector imprisoned during Vietnam, the author of a youth novel that briefly turned him into a cult author, and also a possible murderer and urban terrorist who blew up replicas of the Statue of Liberty.

5. The Music of Chance (1990)

One of Auster’s most absorbing works, about destiny and freedom, which begins as a purely American road novel and mutates into Gothic literature. A Boston firefighter is abandoned by his wife and receives an unexpected inheritance from a father he never knew. He quits his job and starts wandering around the country, driving 17 hours a day, in almost complete solitude. After a year of wandering, when he barely has ten thousand dollars left, chance crosses him with a very young, beaten-up professional poker player, and they team up to play a game that could make them rich. But there are still turns towards the unexpectedly sinister, towards the isolation and mystery of chance.

6. The book of illusions (2002)

Very accessible and popular, this tribute to silent cinema is set in the late eighties, when a writer loses his family in an accident and is only brought out of depression by a short film by an enigmatic silent film comedian born in Argentina who disappeared without a trace in 1930. It becomes his lifeline and he dedicates himself to living by tracking down his films and writing about him. He soon discovers that the actor is alive and that he has filmed films that no one has seen and that will be destroyed after his death. But things get complicated with encounters and disagreements with other characters, in a book about creation and the responsibility of artists with their work.

7. Brooklyn Follies (2005)

Auster here creates a change of register in which, however, he does not renounce his usual obsessions, but all in a brighter and more accessible key. We find ourselves here, a sexagenarian recently divorced after three decades of marriage who returns to the Brooklyn of his childhood. He announces that he will write ‘The Book of Human Derangement’, compiling all his mistakes and acts that he regrets. We will continue his daily life visiting bookstores, going to eat and meeting characters like his nephew, with whom he develops a friendship that is enriched with fascinating subplots such as a scam with a forged page of ‘The Scarlet Letter’.

8. Invisible (2009)

With this novel, Auster returns to a more complex terrain, full of stories that branch off: divided into four overlapping parts with three different narrators and changes of narrative person, it begins in 1967, when a twenty-something man meets a French couple, a meeting from which a sophisticated narrative is threaded that jumps in time and changes point of view, with surprises such as that everything read to a certain point is something that another character reads in turn. The truth is blurred in literary creation, while Auster raises topics such as youthful frustration or the search for justice.

9. Winter Diary (2012)

Before facing his latest work, let’s stop at this atypical autobiography written by an Auster who was already in his sixties. It is not a diary as the title says, but a series of fragments of the author’s life, narrated in the second person, which evoke all his memories. It has no chronological order, but everything is told as a chaotic flow. From the 21 homes where he lived when his parents died, through his devotion to New York, his two marriages and his years in France. Essential to trace the autobiographical elements hidden in previous novels.

10. 4 3 2 1 (2017)

Auster’s most ambitious novel covers the four parallel lives of Archie Ferguson, in a book that directly alludes to two of his fetish themes: chance and identity. Almost a thousand pages written during three and a half years of intensive work, creating a puzzle with a very orderly structure: the chapters are numbered 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 (Ferguson aged 3-5), then 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4 (Ferguson aged 7-9) and so on until the age of 20-22, when one of the Fergusons dies. But the other three continue to diverge, with intimate or superficial changes. One of them ends up writing ‘4 3 2 1’ itself. Auster takes the opportunity to review the history of his country in the second half of the 20th century and serves as a synthesis of his entire universe.

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