Paul Auster’s Brooklyn: between fiction and reality

brooklyn: a city within great New York City, a place associated with top-notch artists such as Walt Whitman, Hart Crane or quite recently Woody Allen; and one of New York boroughs where one cannot ignore the ongoing process of multiculturalism. But why did I choose brooklyn as the topic of my research? Besides the classes about New York, I wish to discover another aspect of New York city through literature, and I hit my goal when I thought about paul auster. I think it is interesting to study New York through the work of a real New Yorker writer and to consider how the man appropriates his own city, not only through his life but also through his work. I never read paul auster's novels before, so I could work without any preconceived ideas which might influence my reading or my perception. To face with the expanse of my topic, I had to confine my research to one novel to improve the accuracy of my work: I chose THE brooklyn FOLLIES, his latest novel which came out in 2005. Therefore I focused on the borough of brooklyn, ant I tried to study the many facets of the place and to reproduce them faithfully. And so, there are two brooklyn which are superimposed : the real brooklyn - with its restaurants, its business... the day to day life in brooklyn for paul auster and his characters; and another brooklyn, a literary and fictive one. The two brooklyn end up merging into one another in the novel, hence emerges a new original idea of brooklyn.