Auster and his pals | Culture | EUROtoday

I began studying Paul Auster within the very early '90s as a result of I used to be pals with Lou Reed they usually had dinner collectively in New York. If he was Lou Reed's favourite author, he needed to be learn with out excuse. They had been each united by an intimate and obsessive seek for the decision of an enigma referred to as New York. If Lou Reed launched an album titled New YorkAuster printed The New York Trilogy. The issues that Paul Auster stated on the dying of Lou Reed may now be stated on the dying of the creator of The ebook of illusions. The principal one: each Lou Reed and Auster had the key ingredient of modernity, their works had been new and totally different. They had been totally different.

The author Ana Merino launched me to Paul Auster on the Miami Book Fair in November 2013 and I had the chance to inform her that it was Lou who led me to his novels. Auster laughed and expressed sorrow for the dying of his pal. At that point it had been barely a month since Reed's dying, in October 13. Paul Auster had an iconic and cinematic face. Auster was a literary variant of the symbolic faces of Paul Newman and Robert Redford. In Europe, Auster was probably the most avant-garde and fashionable face of American literature. Cinema and music had been a part of his inventive world.

With his pal the movie director Wayne Wang he made an distinctive and great movie. I'm speaking about Smoke (nineteen ninety 5). Then, alone, he rolled Lulu on the Bridge (1998). But it’s Smoke which leads Auster's literature to a cinematic state, as a result of his literature was twinned with cinema. I consider that quickly somebody will convey his newest and wonderful novel to the display. Baumgartner, a visible novel to the best diploma. The nice Smoke It was fifty % cinema and literature. If you like cinema, and also you haven't seen it but Smokeyou're already late.

The common tribute that one will pay to Paul Auster at this time is to see once more Smoke. I see her every year. And I’m moved. Everything is love in that film, a austeriana expression of affection of life. Auster was not solely a author with a coronary heart filled with cinema. He additionally stuffed it with music. The finish of the movie is a track by Tom Waits, which he sings whereas Harvey Keitel tells the world's most stunning Christmas story. Auster was pure ironic love of life. And that was true not solely in his novels, which had a strong want to maneuver in direction of all up to date arts.

In the movie Blue within the Face, additionally directed by Auster, Lou Reed seems on the display speaking about Swedish tv that broadcasts reside eye operations with suffocating realism. I keep in mind that Sweden issued a press release censoring that second within the movie. New York was at all times a celebration. Tom Waits, Harvey Keitel, Lou Reed, Stockard Channing, probably the most engaging one-eyed lady on the earth, along with her patch over her left eye that she wears in the identical fashion as our Ray Loriga, and, after all, William Hurt, Auster's alter ego on this film.

I have to say that it is rather handy to recollect Smoke within the dying of Paul Auster, as a result of there we’re advised issues that can stay alive for a lot of a long time. It's a film in regards to the pure goodness of individuals. And that was Auster: goodness, magnificence and magic.

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