The American writer Paul Auster, who has died aged 77 from complications of lung cancer, once described the novel as “the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy”. His own 18 works of fiction, along with a shelf of poems, translations, memoirs, essays and screenplays written over 50 years, often evoke eerie states of solitude and isolation. Yet they won him not just admirers but distant friends who felt that his peculiar domain of chance and mystery, wonder and happenstance, spoke to them alone. Frequently bizarre or uncanny, the world of Auster’s work aimed to present “things as they really happen, not as they’re supposed to happen”.
To the readers who loved it, his writing felt not like avant-garde experimentalism but truth-telling with a mesmerising force. He liked to quote the philosopher Pascal, who said that “it is not possible to have a reasonable belief against miracles”. Auster restored the realm of miracles – and its flip-side of fateful catastrophe – to American literature. Meanwhile, the “postmodern” sorcerer who conjured alternate or multiple selves in chiselled prose led (aptly enough) a double life as sociable pillar of the New York literary scene, a warm raconteur whose agile wit belied the brooding raptor-like image of his photoshoots. For four decades he lived in Brooklyn with his second wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt.
