Auster Paul: U zemlji posljednjih stvari

Paul Auster: In the Land of Last Things 

In her long letter home, Anna Blume reports on her search for her long-lost brother, which brings her to an unnamed, desolate town collapsing in a catastrophic economic crisis. Let's imagine an American metropolis in the near future, inhabited almost exclusively by homeless people, squatters in half-demolished buildings and looters of the dead lying in the streets. Suicide clubs offer various possibilities and conveniences for dying, the rich have left the city, and the rest survive in a tangle of robberies, primitive commodity exchange and petty earnings.

Among the many post-apocalyptic novels, which again and again flood the literary market, the novel "In the Land of Last Things" by Paul Auster is something completely different: it is a dreamy, enchanting fable about an inhumane and reckless society, which is in many ways ours. recognizable. Auster, an outstanding stylist and one of the greatest American writers of today, once again perfectly fused realism and wonder, this time to present the tone and mood of the world's nightmare, terror and entropy.

Paul Auster, one of the most important contemporary American writers, was born in Newark, New Jersey, on February 3, 1947. He completed his studies in literature at New York's Columbia University, and then went to France, where he stayed for four years. After returning to the USA, he published mainly literary criticism and poetry, which he later collected in the collection "Disappearances". He translates French poets. In the mid-eighties, he wrote the "New York Trilogy", which consists of three short novels: "Glass City", "Ghosts" and "Locked Room". Then follow the novels "In the Land of Last Things", "Moon Palace", "The Music of Chance", "Leviathan", "Mr. Vertigo", "Timbuktu" and "The Book of Obsession", and the autobiographical books "The Art of Starvation", "The Red Notebook", "The Invention of Solitude", "Hand on Mouth" and "I Thought My Father Was God". He is the author of the screenplays for the films "Smoke" (directed by Wayne Wang) and "Smoke in the Face" (directed by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster). He directed the film "Lulu na mostu", shot according to his own script. "The Music of Chance", one of Auster's most important novels, was adapted for the screen in 1993. The film was directed by Philip Haas. Paul Auster lives in Brooklyn. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages.