All the poetic justice in the world is coming these days to The invention of loneliness, the book that so many admirers of Paul Auster point out as one of the most outstanding of his work. Published in New York in 1982, it appeared discreetly in Spain eight years later. Perhaps because it brings together two essays in it, they call it non-fiction on social media. Quite one more misunderstanding that, of course, Eduardo Jordá does not fall into in an article that I have just read and experienced with emotion and in which, after praising the book, he recalls a distant, cold Sunday morning in Brooklyn and a walk on a bicycle with Peggy O’Shea, who suddenly raised her hand and shouted: “We are entering Austerland.” At the end of the hill, Jordá says, was Sunset Park and on one of those side streets flanked by sycamores lived Auster and Siri Hustvedt. They pedaled uphill and Jordá remembered the dead father and the woman murdered in Wisconsin and the baby named Daniel. And he comments: ‘We are entering Austerland!’ “I don’t think there could be a more beautiful tribute to a writer’s legacy.”
I have always found curious the preference that some readers have (and I was the first in the case of Auster) for the first book they read by an author whom they later continued reading, but for whom the impact of the first was irreplaceable. Within this phenomenon of the first book read, there are extreme cases such as that of a neighborhood resident who told me that he had read only one book in his life, one of the adventures of Jack London that seemed so absolutely insurmountable that he never bothered to read it anymore. no other, not even from London.
If in Quevedo there are a man stuck to a nose, there is no shortage of novelists who are made to feel attached to a supposed “best book” among their own. What’s more, wherever they go, they are associated with that indelible title, and they can do nothing to remedy it. Auster has usually been associated with The New York Trilogy that made him known throughout the world and that he, in recent years, saw as youthful texts that marked the end of a certain phase of his life. But the sambenito stuck (“Paul Auster, author of The New York Trilogy“), as well as “meta-literary writer” when, given the long shadow of Don Quixote in his work, it would have been more appropriate to simply say “Cervantine writer.”
Auster himself was amazed that he had been tied to The trilogy: “Look at Lou Reed. does not support Walk on the Wild Sidebut the song is so famous that it has followed him everywhere throughout his life.”
Perhaps what lies in the enigma of the invention of a writer’s “best book” is the fact that, by being seduced by his first work, we affiliate ourselves with the new atmosphere that comes to us with it and in which we would like to settle. persistently. Perhaps what we admire most about that first dazzling reading is not the novel, but the work, the ghost of the complete work that is yet to come and that one day we will access by climbing the slope of Sunset Park.
All the culture that goes with you awaits you here.
Subscribe
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
RECEIVE IT
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Sunset #Park #Slope