The French are Auster's most enthusiastic readers, for good Gallic reasons. And always, ever since critics first cheered The New York Trilogy, he has been markedly more popular abroad than in his native America.
Lately he has also been writing movies: Smoke, then Blue in the Face, and coming soon to a cinema near you, Lulu on the Bridge.Ī few things haven't changed the protean Auster is still thoroughly bookish (he's also an essayist, editor and translator) and thoroughly literary. Next came a big-picture, politically engaged novel, Leviathan, an American panorama then a fable about a boy who could fly, Mr Vertigo and now another fable, Timbuktu, about a dog. After a brief flirtation with dystopia, In the Country of Last Things, he shifted into the picaresque with Moon Palace and The Music of Chance. Then came The New York Trilogy, an intensely cerebral high-modernist triptych, short novels thick with literary allusion, aptly described as 'Kafka goes gumshoe'. He began as a poet and switched to prose in 1982 to write a memoir long before it was fashionable, a brilliant, unorthodox meditation on fatherhood called The Invention of Solitude.
But Auster isn't hopeless and metamorphosis is a constant feature of his career.
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