This debut work by New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy), a memoir, established Auster’s reputation as a major new voice in American writing.
His moving and personal meditation on fatherhood is split into two stylistically separate sections. In the first, Auster reflects on the memories of his father who was a distant, undemonstrative, and cold man who died an untimely death. As he sifts through his Father’s things, Auster uncovers a sixty-year-old murder mystery that sheds light on his father’s elusive character.
In the second section, the perspective shifts and Auster begins to reflect on his own identity as a father by adopting the voice of a narrator, “A.” Through a mosaic of images, coincidences, and associations “A,” contemplates his separation from his son, his dying grandfather, turning the story into a self-conscious reflection on the process of writing.
Paul Auster was born to Jewish middle class parents by the name of Samuel and Queenie. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to France where he lived translating for French writers. Sincе he returned to America in 1974, he has published his own poems, essays, novels and translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.
He married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, in 1981. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer Lydia Davis. He is a father of two children - Daniel and Sophie.
Paul Auster is known as the most unorthodox and philosophical writer of crime fiction. His work can be best described as a fusion of existential theories, absurdism and criminal plots – his characters are usually people on the verge of society, complete outsiders, who try to start life from zero and reinvent the conditions under which the human situation revolves. The collection of detective stories “The New York Trilogy” brought him to international success, mesmerizing the audience with its fathomless quest for identity and meaning beyond the surface of our well-ordered and sterile modern lives. Paul Auster has been awarded the France Culture Prize for Foreign Literature in 1989 and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991. His postmodern twist of genres and themes has made it possible for the crime fiction to enter the reserved realm of serious literature. Paul Auster is also the Vice-President of PEN American Center.
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