Tribute: We know Paul Auster’s novels, but there was a Jewish otherness in his persona as a poet
Auster’s poignant reflection of a self is withdrawn and unsure of one’s place in the world. This reflects the postwar Jewish migrant condition of the 1950-60s.
Paul Auster died on May Day 2024 at 77 of lung cancer. He is famous for his novels, The Invention of Solitude (1982), City of Glass (1985) that is part of The New York Trilogy, and 4 3 2 1 (2017), among others. The New York Times obituary mentions in passing that Auster wrote poems, and The Guardian does not even mention his poetry. A major reason behind it is probably that Auster published poetry till the end of the 1970s, when he was in his 30s, and abruptly stopped thereafter. He perhaps felt he had explored the contours of what he sought to express in poetry and wished to concentrate on prose.
I have not read Auster’s prose. So I shall limit this obituary to his special poetry.
I bought his Collected Poems (Faber and Faber, 2004) at the International Book Fair in Delhi two years ago from a secondhand books dealer at less than half the price. There is a strange literary guilt in buying a good edition of a famous writer’s work cheaply. The guilt lies in the pleasure. You feel lucky to have cheated the capitalist standard of exchange and the market value of its product, but there is a gnawing feeling you have lowered the status of the book.
A French poet in English
An American Jew brought up...
