The famous novelist Paul Auster died, he also visited the Prague Writers’ Festival

A prolific novelist and descendant of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Auster became famous in the 1980s. He became the typical New York author of his generation. His stories often played with the themes of coincidence, chance and fate, adds the British newspaper The Guardian.

He wrote about anxiety, insecurities, illusion or memory. Although he placed his works almost exclusively in New York and the neighboring states, his protagonists found no peace either in the whirlwind of the big city, or in occasional trips beyond its borders. “Most of my books begin at a moment of crisis. Something happened. Someone lost a loved one. Someone else got sick. It is at such a moment that we reveal who we are,” he said in an interview for Xantypa magazine.

He came to the wider attention of readers with detective novels called the New York Trilogy, published in 1987. The trio of stories pays tribute to the so-called rough school of the American detective story. In addition, he was the author of the books The Invention of Solitude, Mr. Vertigo, Leviathan, Man in the Dark, Book of Illusions or Brooklyn Panopticon.

Many of them were also published in Czech translation, the most recent being the anti-utopian prose In the Land of the Last Things in 2014. In the form of a letter written by a young woman to her childhood friend, it introduces the reader to a bleak future in a decaying city where the law of the stronger and police repression apply. The book, translated by Jan Jirák, was published by Prostor.

In addition to literature, Paul Auster also devoted himself to screenplays, for example he wrote it for the film Smoke, which won the Silver Bear award at the Berlinale in 1995. He also wrote poetry, essays, song lyrics and translated. In recent years, he has published, among other things, a comprehensive biography of the American writer Stephen Crane. He published his final prose, titled Baumgartner, last year.

Czech readers could also get to know the renowned writer personally, in 2008 he was a guest at the Prague Writers’ Festival. At the time, he revealed his knowledge of the works of Václav Havel, Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal, but he also called the novel Life with a Star by Jiří Weil a masterpiece.

“I write with a pen. I write, I cross out, and when I think it’s done, I rewrite it on the typewriter. I don’t want to write on the computer keyboard,” he said at the time in an interview for Týden magazine. “What I like about mechanical typewriters is that you have to exert some physical effort to write something. No stroking of the keyboard, the typewriter offers resistance. Besides, I am not at risk of carpal tunnel inflammation, typing on the machine strengthens the finger muscles,” he added.

Auster screened his author’s film The Inner Life of Martin Frost for the audience in the City Library, for which he wrote the screenplay and also directed it.

At the festival evening in the Minor Theatre, Auster then debated with the beat poet Michael McClure, the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and the Czech poet Petr Král about the world events of 1968. The main motifs of their memories were the perception of the war in Vietnam, student protests in the United States and a general loss of confidence.

“I sympathized with the student movement, participated in it and was arrested. I was also carried away by hatred towards the government, the war in Vietnam and racism in the USA. But I never believed that we would make a revolution, of course it was not possible,” he explained to the MF daily Today a writer who studied history at Columbia University in the USA in the late 1960s.

Among other things, he explained the stormy social mood by the fear of being drafted into the army. “For a young American man, of course, the defining moment was the Vietnam War. The threat was hanging over us, and the moment we left university we were in the clutches of the military. It seemed there were only two options: go to prison or flee the country. If your world is in ruins like this, you probably won’t be as rational as if you could see the future in front of you,” Auster said in Prague.