Why Paul Auster’s reflections on loss and death is about life

After Salman Rushdie was repeatedly stabbed with a knife at a book event in Chautauqua, New York in August 2022, writers came out on the steps of New York Library and read from his works. He had a chance to beat the cancer, Auster told Rushdie, and said he hoped to do better than Vaclav Havel, “also a heavy smoker, ended up with only half of one lung after surgery, but kept going pretty well on that.” Many characters in Auster’s novels are over-marked by death, but by contemplating on life’s only certainty, he also tells readers how to live — and cope. “If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known.” TheNew York Trilogy, which contains three novellas, City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room, published in a single volume in 1987, made him famous, but many more astonishing works were to follow, including The Music of Chance, Timbuktu, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions, 4 3 2 1, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017, and his last, Baumgartner, published last October. At the same time, it cannot be said that he is happy to be alive.” All he knew was that motion was of the essence: “the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body.” In The Brooklyn Follies, set against the contested American election of 2000, Auster tells the story of an uncle and nephew, Nathan and Tom, and through it maps contemporary America too with its follies and desperate dreams. Nathan’s lung cancer is in remission, and there’s reason for “guarded optimism” despite the fact that he is “looking for a quiet place to die.” When someone recommends Brooklyn, he decides to “scope out the terrain.” Tom is hiding away from his career as a teacher and also from life; and in Brooklyn, uncle and nephew find a new life, and reasons to go on living.