Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002) and The Brooklyn Follies (2005).
Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle class parents of Polish descent, Samuel and Queenie Auster.
ولد لابوين يهوديان من بولندا
He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey and graduated from Columbia High School in adjoining Maplewood.
نشأ في نيوجرسي
After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris, France where he earned a living translating French literature.
بعد تخرجه من جامعة كولومبيا عام 1970 سافر الى فرنسا وعمل في ترجمة الادب الفرنسي
Since returning to the U.S. in 1974, he has published poems, essays, novels of his own as well as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.
عاد الى الولايات المتحدة عام 1974
He and his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, were married in 1981, and they live in Brooklyn.
تزوج للمرة الثانية عام 1981 وعاش مع زوجته في بروكلن
Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer Lydia Davis. They had one son together, Daniel Auster.
He is also the Vice-President of PEN American Center.

Writing
Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude,
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Thee Invention of Solitude is the debut work of Paul Auster, a memoir published in 1982.
The book is divided into two parts, Portrait of an Invisible Man, which concerns the sudden death of Auster's father,
في مذكراته التي نشرت عام 1982 يكتب اوستر عن وموت والده المفاجيء
and The Book of Memory, in which Auster delivers his personal opinions concerning subjects such as coincidence, fate, and solitude, subjects that have become trademarks of Auster's works.

Portrait of an Invisible Man


This first part is a meditation on the nature of absence in relation to Auster's recently deceased father, Samuel Auster. "Even before his death he had been absent, and long ago the people closest to him had learned to accept this absence".


الكتاب الاول في مذكراته يعالج موت والده المفاجيء والذي كان غائبا منذ زمن بعيد وقد تعلم الناس الاقرب اليه ان يتعاملوا مع فكرة غيابه


Auster reconstructs his father's life from artifacts he has left behind, using his judgement of the dead man's failings as a father to justify his own life and relationship with his own son.


The Book of Memory


The second part of the book comes across as more of a critical essay concerning many of the themes found in Auster's works: the order of events, absurdism, chance as well as the overarching theme of the relationship between father and son.


"For this act of saving people is in effect what a father does: he saves his little boy from harm. And for the little boy to see Pinocchio... become a figure of redemption, the very being who saves his father from the grips of death, is a sublime momentof revelation. The son saves the father." Although The Book of Memory may be seen as less autobiographical than Portrait of an Invisible Man due to the characterisation of Auster as "A.", it is his personal account of concepts and feelings and contains references to his life.


The opening pages of The Book of Memory make mention of mnemotechnics (the ancient art of memory), and some of the earliest writers on the topic - Raymond Lull, Robert Fludd and Giordano Bruno.

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Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, space, language and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process. Comparing the two works, Auster said, "I believe the world is filled with strange events. Reality is a great deal more mysterious than we ever give it credit for. In that sense, the Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude."[7]
The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between men and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. Auster's more recent works, Oracle Night (2003), The Brooklyn Follies (2005) and the novella Travels in the Scriptorium have also met critical acclaim.

Themes

According to a dissertation by Heiko Jakubzik at the University of Heidelberg, two central influences in Paul Auster's writing are Jacques Lacan'spsychoanalysis and the American transcendentalism of the early to middle 19th century, namely amongst others Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In short Lacan's theory declares that we enter the world through words. We observe the world through our senses but the world we sense is structured (mediated) in our mind through language. Thus our subconscious is also structured as a language. This leaves us with a sense of anomaly. We can only perceive the world through language, but we have the feeling of something missing. This is the sense of being outside language. The world can only be constructed through language but it always leaves something uncovered, something that cannot be told or be thought of, it can only be sensed. This can be seen as one of the central themes of Paul Auster's writing.
Lacan is considered to be one of the key figures of French poststructuralism. Some academics are keen to discern traces of other poststructuralist philosophers throughout Auster's oeuvre - mainly Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Michel de Certeau - although Auster himself has claimed to find such philosophies 'unreadable'[3].
The transcendentalists believe that the symbolic order of civilization separated us from the natural order of the world. By moving into nature - like Thoreau in Walden - it would be possible to return to this natural order.
The common factor of both ideas is the question of the meaning of symbols for human beings.[8] Auster's protagonists are often writers who establish meaning in their lives through writing, and they try to find their place within the natural order to be able to live within "civilization" again.
Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Herman Melville have also had a strong influence on Auster's writing. Not only do their characters reappear in Auster's work (like William Wilson in City of Glass or Hawthorne's Fanshawe in The Locked Room, both from The New York Trilogy), Auster also uses variations on the themes of these writers.
Paul Auster's reappearing subjects are:[9]

· coincidence


· frequent portrayal of an ascetic life


· a sense of imminent disaster


· obsessive writer as central character/narrator


· loss of the ability to understand


· loss of language


· depiction of daily and ordinary life


· failure


· absence of a father


· احد الافكار الرئيس التي تتكرر في كتاباته هي غياب الاب


· writing/story telling, metafiction


· intertextuality


· American History


· American Space


Coincidence

Instances of coincidence can be found throughout Auster's work[ Auster himself claims that people are so influenced by the continuity among them that they do not see the elements of coincidence, inconsistency and contradiction in their own lives:

“

Failure in Paul Auster's works is not just the opposite of the happy ending. In Moon Palace and The Book of Illusions it comes from the individual's uncertainty about the status of his own identity. The protagonists start a search for their own identity and reduce their life to the absolute minimum. From this zero point they gain new strength and start their new life and they are also able to regain contact with their surroundings. A similar development can also be seen in City of Glass and The Music of Chance.
Failure in this context is not the "nothing" - it is the beginning of something all new.

Identity/Subjectivity

Auster's protagonists often go through a process that reduces their support structure to an absolute minimum: They sever all contact with family and friends, go hungry and lose or give away all their belongings. Out of this state of "nothingness" they either acquire new strength to reconnect with the world or they fail and disappear for good.

“

"Over the past twenty-five years," opined Michael Dirda in The New York Review of Books in 2008, "Paul Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature." Dirda has also extolled his loaded virtues in The Washington Post:
Ever since City of Glass, the first volume of his New York Trilogy, Auster has perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set disoriented heroes in a seemingly familiar world gradually suffused with mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination. His plots — drawing on elements from suspense stories, existential récit and autobiography — keep readers turning the pages, but sometimes end by leaving them uncertain about what they've just been through.
Respected literary critic James Wood, however, offers Auster little praise in his piece "Shallow Graves" in the November 30, 2009, issue of The New Yorker:
What Auster often gets instead is the worst of both worlds: fake realism and shallow skepticism. The two weaknesses are related. Auster is a compelling storyteller, but his stories are assertions rather than persuasions. They declare themselves; they hound the next revelation. Because nothing is persuasively assembled, the inevitable postmodern disassembly leaves one largely untouched. (The disassembly is also grindingly explicit, spelled out in billboard-size type.) Presence fails to turn into significant absence, because presence was not present enough.[15]

Published works

Fiction

· Squeeze Play (1982) (Written under pseudonym Paul Benjamin)


· The New York Trilogy (1987)


o City of Glass (1985)


o Ghosts (1986)


o The Locked Room (1986)


· In the Country of Last Things (1987)


· Moon Palace (1989)


· The Music of Chance (1990)


· Auggie Wren's Christmas Story (1990)


· Leviathan (1992)


· Mr. Vertigo (1994)


· Timbuktu (1999)


· The Book of Illusions (2002)


· Oracle Night (2003)


· The Brooklyn Follies (2005)


· Travels in the Scriptorium (2006)


· Man in the Dark (2008) [19]


· Invisible (2009)


· Sunset Park (2010