Faber Remembers Paul Auster
1 May 2024
Faber Remembers Paul Auster: 3 February 1947–30 April 2024
Paul Auster was a towering figure on the Faber list and among the truly great innovators of the literature of the past half century.
We are a company of Paul Auster fans and many of us will be thinking today of our first Paul Auster book and the path it led us on.
We have so many happy memories of time spent with Paul and his wife Siri Hustvedt in his thirty-six years publishing with Faber. Our thoughts are with Siri and his family and friends.
Stephen Page remembers Paul Auster
Paul Auster was a writer of singularity and global renown, a keystone of literature at the end of the last century and the first decades of the twenty-first, both in American letters and around the world. At Faber, he was a defining voice for the list over several generations at the company, and a powerful, inspirational presence. Best known for his novels, Paul was also – in fact, first – a poet, as well as a biographer, screenwriter, essayist and writer of non-fiction, including his first prose book, The Invention of Solitude, an affecting and brilliantly insightful memoir of his father and the deeper roots of his family.
We first published Paul in 1987 when he worked with Robert McCrum, Faber’s editor-in-chief, to bring his three short New York novels, City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room, into one volume. I was a bookseller at the time, and experienced the impact of the book on readers first hand. He arrived as a strikingly original and confident writer, whose innovations for the novel were bold. However, while his themes were postmodern, the natural music of his sentences and the gripping, unfolding of stories within stories that characterised so much of his work, brought his books a wide readership alongside a near obsessive fan base. His novels came regularly from 1987, always literary events and tent poles in Faber’s publishing story. I found reading his last novel, Baumgartner, as compelling as reading his first, a book of wisdom and tenderness, preoccupied, as ever, with the chance events of life, and how to make sense of living and of making art. The consistent brilliance of his substantial canon is remarkable, and a measure of his genius as both storyteller and thinker.
Paul was also a writer who shared Faber’s love of physical books, of the artisanal beauty and craft of their design. His work always inspired co-creation in our publishing and his passion for this side of our work was a further inspiration. Visiting his home in Brooklyn is to enter a library where he and his wife, Siri Hustvedt, honoured and housed books in an enchanted setting. I was in Oslo with Paul and his editor, Walter Donohue, in the early 2000s when we discussed bringing Paul’s work into a series of collected volumes, and his delight and engagement with the project spoke to his sense of relationship to publishing’s long history. I looked at those books on my shelf this morning, and marvelled at the scale of his work, and also his romance with the book as a beautiful way to carry stories and ideas into people’s lives.
Public readings by Paul, especially in the UK and Europe, had the feel of rock ‘n’ roll about them, though Paul certainly neither courted nor sought this. He was much more at ease in conversation over a dinner, or in walking and talking in the streets of a city. Many of us at Faber had the great joy of being in his company. He was brilliant to be with, bringing deep thought about literature, film, society and politics to every occasion, not to mention baseball, where we did our best, most of our education in the game he loved lying in the pages of his own books!
We will all miss him greatly. Paul Auster was a towering literary figure, but also a friend to Faber in our endeavours, always in our corner. We will be proud to continue to bring him to readers, as fresh now as when he first burst into view in 1987. When I think of reading his books in the 1980s, I recall being euphoric that such work was being written in my lifetime. I, like so many, was star-struck. To get to know Paul at Faber had the feeling of one of his novels, where the chance events that led to knowing him seemed so unlikely to my younger self. But I did, and as for so many, was blessed with the company of a man who was charming, present, funny and forceful in his argument, but also an artist of rare and singular voice and view. As such it was hard not to remain, in some important way, star-struck.