Hands of Fate; Best-Selling Author Paul Auster Explains How a Near- Death Experience in an Electrical Storm Sparked His Obsession with Chance

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WHEN Paul Auster was 14 he nearly died. It was the summer of 1961 and he was at camp in New York State for the third year in a row. One day he and the other boys in his group were taken on a hike. Soon it began to rain, lightly at first but it was not long before it was coming down in earnest. "Everyone," he recalls in his essay Why Write?, "got soaked, and the counsellors decided we should turn around and head back." But they were lost and they could hear claps of thunder, followed by lightning. It was the mother of all summer storms. It rained so hard it hurt and trees were struck.

The boys were scared and in their panic they tried to run away from the lightning, as it were a rabid dog. They decided it would be safer in a meadow than in the forest and they queued to crawl through a barbed wire fence. Auster was immediately behind a boy called Ralph, just two or three feet away from him, when he was hit. Ralph was electrocuted on the spot while Auster was spared. It was his first direct experience of death and he has never forgotten it. "You think you're standing on solid ground, and an instant later the ground opens under your feet and you vanish."

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Hands of Fate; Best-Selling Author Paul Auster Explains How a Near- Death Experience in an Electrical Storm Sparked His Obsession with Chance

Auster's work is full of such apocalyptic moments. "That incident," he says, "changed my life, there's no question about it." His latest novel, Oracle Night, is further proof of that fact. As is often the case with Auster it is a book about a writer writing a novel in which other writers are writing other novels, leading the increasingly disoriented reader into a Wonderland-like labyrinth in which the bound...

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