Paul Auster

Yeah. The details surrounding it are fucking awful too but not anything I could/would share. Just unimaginably tragic.

And now the man himself.

As always with Auster, profound coincidences:

Amidst police violence at Columbia, CUNY and UCLA, the news that my friend Paul Auster has died. In 1968 he was one of the Columbia student occupiers, fleetingly captured by British filmmaker Peter Whitehead in a documentary called The Fall pic.twitter.com/9G98p0hTM1

— Hari Kunzru (@harikunzru) May 1, 2024

It’s weird to me that all the obits describe him as the literary avatar of Brooklyn. I’ve only read a handful of his books but Brooklyn as setting or theme is not something that I would point to.

It’s kind of superficial, but I think Smoke and Blue in the Face, combined with his physical presence in Park Slope, tie him to Brooklyn. I mean, Blue in the Face was practically a tourism-board sponsored film, emerging at the same time as Brooklyn Brewing and the rise of Williamsburg and all those things that made it acceptable for a maturing consumer to live there.

I’ve never heard of those movies but that makes sense.

I don't remember much about Music of Chance (something to do with trimming hedges, or I might be getting it confused with The Restraint of Beasts?) but I definitely remember the brutal ending.

New York Stories is "a good one, a boring one, a confusing one"

Ah OK now I get some of the IG stories I was seeing last night. I'm still so angry at his son. Sucks though. RIP.

Never specifically thought of him as Brooklyn, more just NYC. When I think Brooklyn writers, I think Jonathan Lethem.

Anyway, RIP. In my college and post-college years, Auster loomed very large for me. I eventually found him a bit repetitive, but City of Glass remains all time for me. I should reread.