Collected Prose

Possessed of a towering international reputation but whose talents are frequently overlooked in his homeland, Paul Auster is a rare breed of American writer.

Generally classed as a postmodernist, with clear existentialist and even absurdist tendencies, he is obsessed with the strangeness of life, and is best known for such stylistically daring novels as The Music of Chance, The Book of Illusions and the acclaimed New York Trilogy.

Over the past 30 years, Auster has built a striking body of work that encompasses novels, poetry, screenplays, translations and memoir. Recent years have seen Faber diligently gathering his entire oeuvre in convenient, neatly-categorised volumes, and Collected Prose is a wonderful addition to the set. Not only does it shed light on the author’s plethora of influences — Beckett, Kafka, Hawthorne, Paul Celan, various voices from the French avant-garde movement — it also peels away layers of protective veneer to reveal much about Auster as a man.

Collected Prose is divided into easily navigable sections, but offers a further natural divide in that the book’s first half consists mainly of autobiographical pieces, while the second pulls together his critical essays, prefaces, and casual musings on such subjects as 9/11, New York City and Salman Rushdie.

This second half is rich in shining moments but its impact on the reader will probably depend on how familiar they are with the subjects at hand. The real treasure on offer here, though, is unfurled right from the beginning, with Auster’s masterful 1982 debut reprinted in its entirety.

The Invention of Solitude is a memoir that begins with the sudden death of his father, an aloof man who had been always disconnected from his

Paul Auster’s Collected Prose opens with The Invention of Solitude, an impressive piece of memoir writing after the death of his father. Picture: Dario Cantatore/Getty

son’s life but whose loss has left an enormous void.

The grief is unexpectedly overwhelming, but it is also the catalyst that gets Auster writing in serious fashion.

“I thought: my father is gone. If I do not act quickly, his entire life will vanish with him.”

In death, as never in life, elements of a character begin to reveal themselves, and are gradually, painstakingly pieced together.

Memories weigh the most minute of details, revelations of a small but insistently clandestine life serve to disturb, delight and confuse. A hidden past is exposed too, a murderous family secret that at once shocks and helps explain certain psychological kinks. And from here, with a shifting point of view, we move onto new terrain, rich with cryptic ruminations on the portentous and coincidental.

Ground that, across decades’ worth of novels, will become familiar to his ardent readers as the world in which Auster needs to walk.

The Invention of Solitude s a brave opening gambit that sets the tone, for a collection and an entire career, on a note of perfect pitch.