Paul Auster- Prediction

 

Paul Auster is easily one of my favourite novelists but is he a contender?

I first started reading Auster’s ‘New York Trilogy’ at college due to a teacher’s offhand recommendation.  I started it but didn’t finish it until later and the plot device certainly intrigued me. 

  The story is about a man who receives a call asking for the ‘Paul Auster Detective Agency’, the man is not Paul Auster and so puts down the phone.  The phone rings again asking for the ‘Paul Auster Detective Agency’ and this time the man accepts the case.  The man is not a detective but is, uncannily, a detective writer.  

The story leads the man to a place of uncertainty and narrative trickiness that is post-modern crime.  In this story narrative authority, word play and the question of identity are all explored in this misguiding three-part novel.  It’s a novel that had a big impact on me.  Never had I encounter a writer so willing to play games with genre and to question the text within the text I was indeed engaged and fascinated.

My first Auster book was ‘Oracle Night’ and what a splendid introduction that was to him.  Sidney Orr comes out of the hospital and buys himself a new notebook, he being, yes, a writer, and begins to write a new story from nowhere as if the book is possessing him.  It’s a ghost story without ghosts and it’s terrifying.  It will make you question the reality you live in and the happiness you have.  Its gut wrenching and emotional while also being clever and manipulative in the best sense.  Auster is also economical with words, being also a writer of poetry shows, for his use of words is exact and weighed for just the right impact.

  
There are other books ‘The Book of Illusion’ about silent film, ‘Leviathan’ about the deconstruction of a man’s identity, ‘In The Country of Last Things’ about a post-apocalyptic New York, just to name a few, all great books in different ways.  His talents as a storyteller are immense and it’s only as I write this post that I really realise just how remarkable he really is.  His done more or less everything: identity politics, literary games, grandfather-father-son relationships, growing up, art, language, sexual exploration and grief. 

  
He’s even written the ultimate post-modern novella with ‘The Scriptorium’ where a writer, seemingly Paul Auster himself, is tormented by the characters he has badly treated in his novels.  Incredibly self-indulgent and goes to the extreme of intertextuality, which is both good and bad in different ways.

  
And he keeps on writing: ‘Invisible’, ‘A Man in the Dark’ and ‘Sunset Park’ have all come out in recent years and I don’t think he’s going to slow down.

  
Is he good enough for the Nobel Prize?  There have been worse candidates and his commitment to writing stories dealing with serious ideas and serious emotions is not in question.  Also he has warmth, for which I hope the committee does not hold against him as I think it is one of his prized characteristics.  So I like to think that he could win it and I would be very happy to see him have it, but something in me says that in some ways he is unsuited for such a prize because of his down-to-earth nature, despite his dealings with abstractions and metafiction.

Does Paul Auster deserve the Nobel Prize?  Leave a comment to say why or why not.

Next week I will be looking at dramatist Howard Barker.

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