『ステージナタリー』の記事；
アメリカの作家ポール・オースターが77歳で死去、ニューヨーク三部作など手がける
5/1(水) 18:13配信
ステージナタリー
アメリカの作家ポール・オースター*1がアメリカ現地時間の4月30日、肺がんによる合併症によりアメリカ・ニューヨークの自宅で死去したと米メディアが報じた。77歳だった。
1947年、アメリカ東部のニュージャージー州に生まれたオースターは、コロンビア大学大学院で文学を学び、石油タンカーの乗組員を経てフランスへ。その後、文学作品の翻訳などに従事し、1974年に帰国した。帰国後は「ニューヨーク三部作」と称される「ガラスの街」「幽霊たち」「鍵のかかった部屋」を発表し、注目を集める。そのほかの作品に、1989年の「ムーン・パレス」、1990年の「偶然の音楽」、2002年の「幻影の書」など。また、映画「スモーク」*2では脚本も手がけた。晩年まで意欲的に創作活動に取り組み、邦訳も多数出版された。
（情報提供：共同通信）
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/f0beb47744b383981d22aa6b00bb7bb31e71956c
私が初めて読んだオースターの小説は『孤独の発明』だったと思う。この文庫本は1996年３月に上梓されているけど、どういう経緯で「
ポール・オースター」という人名を知ったのか、また、何故本屋
*3でこの本を棚かピック・アップして、買うためにカウンターまで運んで行ったのかも記憶が飛んでいる。夢中になったのだけど、当時驚きつつわくわくしたのは、小説の主人公が思索をし続けているということだった。
Tom Vitale “Bestselling novelist Paul Auster, author of 'The New York Trilogy,' dies at 77” https://www.npr.org/2024/05/01/1212212960/paul-auster-dead
“Auster, whose literary influences included Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, will be remembered for the purity of his language, and the seriousness of his intent.”というセンテンスで締め括られる記事。
Alys Moodyさん*4のコメント；
"I think he was a really exciting and compelling voice of his generation," says Alys Moody, a professor who teaches postwar American literature. "Auster will be remembered for being one of the leading figures in a post-modern tradition that's reimagining how central language is, and how central writing is, and how central above all storytelling is."
『ガラスの街』について；
In his 20s, Auster published his own essays, poems, and translations. A strange event in 1980 led to his first novel."I was living alone in Brooklyn. And I did receive a telephone call," he recalled. "And the person on the other end asked if he had reached the Pinkerton Agency. And, of course, I said no and hung up. But after the second or third time, I said, well, what if I said Yes? And that was the genesis of the novel."
The story of that novel, City of Glass, is set in motion when the main character, a detective fiction writer named Quinn, gets a late night phone call:
"There's no one here by that name.""Paul Auster. Of the Auster Detective Agency."
"I'm sorry," said Quinn. "You must have the wrong number."
"This is a matter of utmost urgency," said the voice.
"There's nothing I can do for you," said Quinn. "There is no Paul Auster here."
"You don't understand," said the voice. "Time is running out."
The writer in the novel takes on the identity of the detective, who sets out to solve the mystery of "what is reality?" He was sometimes criticized for the bizarre coincidences in his work, but the events of his life, he said, outstripped the implausibility in his fiction.
ただ、「最初の小説」というのはミスリーディング。オースターは1976年にポール・ベンジャミンという名前で探偵小説『
スクイズ・プレイ』を上梓している。
ポール・オースターとしての最初の小説は『孤独の発明』。
Ella Creamer “Paul Auster, American author of The New York Trilogy, dies aged 77” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/may/01/paul-auster-dies-aged-77-death-american-author-new-york-trilogy
曰く、
Auster became known for his “highly stylised, quirkily riddlesome postmodernist fiction in which narrators are rarely other than unreliable and the bedrock of plot is continually shifting,” the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote in 2010*5.His stories often play with themes of coincidence, chance and fate. Many of his protagonists are writers themselves, and his body of work is self-referential, with characters from early novels appearing again in later ones.
“Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature,” wrote critic Michael Dirda in 2008. “His narrative voice is as hypnotic as that of the Ancient Mariner. Start one of his books and by page two you cannot choose but hear.”*6
『孤独の発明』を巡って；
In January 1979, Auster’s father, Samuel, died, and the event became the seed for the writer’s first memoir, The Invention of Solitude, published in 1982. In it, Auster revealed that his paternal grandfather was shot and killed by his grandmother, who was acquitted on grounds of insanity. “A boy cannot live through this kind of thing without being affected by it as a man,” Auster wrote in reference to his father, with whom he described himself having an “un-movable relationship, cut off from each other on opposite sides of a wall”.
井上正昭氏；
倉数茂氏；
豊崎由美さん
*7；
Tatiana de Rosnayさん；
![SMOKE [DVD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41EZtZ8ivpL._SL500_.jpg "SMOKE [DVD]")
