The news this morning broke my heart. Paul Auster has passed away.
He was not only “the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn”. *
Perhaps not everyone realises this but Auster was widely read and deeply loved across the world. All across Europe and beyond. In Turkey, too.
His fiction was important to me in my own literary journey.
The New York Trilogy, Timbuktu, Moon Palace, the Book of Illusions, The Invention of Solitude, Baumgartner…. Did you know that the brilliantly crafted City of Glass was rejected 17 times before it was taken by a publisher?
* The New York Times
He was a prolific novelist—the author of 34 brilliant books. And he was a great reader too. He eloquently spoke about the joy of reading and “the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating inside your head.”
No other novelist understood the power of chance, twist of fate and coincidence in our lives the way he did. He was incredibly wise and brutally honest about what literature captured—and also failed to capture. “The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again.”
I respected his writing immensely.
Today I am thinking of his family and readers everywhere.
I am thinking of my dear friend, the novelist and public intellectual Siri Hustvedt.
I saw a beautiful flower mandala online around the same time that I learned about Paul Auster’s death. It is created by the artist Mayumi Nakabayashi.
A flower mandala about the pendulum of life, blue and purple, wisdom and love.
I hope the artist will not mind that I am sharing this exquisite mandala as I wanted to send it out to the universe in memory of Paul Auster.
May he rest in love and stories and books…..
That’s very sad… RIP Paul Auster, one of my favorite authors 🖤
Thank you for giving me another story teller to read.