novels

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. The New York Trilogy (Formentor Library) The price could vary. We earn commission from these links 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. The invention of solitude (Formentor Library) The price could vary. We earn commission from these links 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. The Palace of the Moon: 185 (Panorama of narratives) The price could vary. We earn commission from these links 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. Leviathan: 283 (Panorama of narratives) The price could vary. We earn commission from these links 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 … Read more