Sad news this morning with the death of Paul Auster at 77. Like a lot of people, I suspect, I discovered his books in my late teens and early 20s. I read The Music of Chance at school after I’d spotted it at the library and, of all things, found the cover intriguing. Later, at university, I had a lecturer who was a serious Auster fan and was foolish enough to lend me his signed copies of Leviathan and Moon Palace. I say foolish – I treated those books like holy objects while I had them in my house.
For a few years I read everything he wrote, going backwards mainly. I loved his strangely serious playfulness – postmodernism was big at the time and this was his response, I think. I remember thinking it was incredibly freeing the way he would just drop a character with his name into one novel, and then another. I read his autobiographical stuff, which read like fiction, and his fiction which had these long stretches that felt like real life, and had probably come from real life.
Two books stick with me though: Moon Palace, which I think is the classic Auster, compact and roving, curious and distinctly miserable in spots, wildly inventive yet moving, somehow, within tight rules imposed by the author prior to writing. And Hand to Mouth, a memoir that I remember as being largely concerned with being really skint in your 20s.
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