Published: 26 June 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
I MET PAUL AUSTER outside his Park Slope brownstone. Maestro was dressed entirely in black, down to black slippers. It was late December, and the home, where he lives with his wife, novelist Siri Hustvedt, was decked out with a Christmas tree.
On the exposed brick walls in the living room there were surrealist paintings of typewriters—only appropriate, given that, as Auster told me, he still writes everything by hand, and receives his emails by fax from his assistant.
One of the foremost American experimentalists, author of nearly 20 novels and novellas, and recipient of numerous major prizes, Auster had ambitions to become a successful novelist from an early age. In his teens he wrote hundreds of pages of prose, which, he felt, were a failure at the time.
To maintain his sanity, he began to devote his attention solely to writing and translating poetry. It was then that he realised he “wanted to go against everything that everyone was doing around me,” Auster told me.
“What I set for myself as a goal is to simply try to make poetry out of nothing, with as few elements as possible. There was a philosophical and also personal rigour that I wanted to impose on myself, and to see if I can wring feeling out of stone. That’s what I wanted to do.”
There are many reasons why Auster’s poetry is not nearly as well known as his fiction. Auster, 73, stopped publishing new poems about four decades ago.
FULL STORY A conversation with Paul Auster, Jewish poet (Tablet)
