Gary Shteyngart remembers the novelist Paul La Farge, one of his best friends. “He inspired within me the capacity for something like brotherhood, but perhaps without the tension of having shared parents and shared trauma.”
,” and into worlds as disparate as the strange society of lovers of H. P. Lovecraft and the life of a nineteenth-century Parisian urban planner who changed the face of Paris, but, in La Farge’s retelling, died full of regret. Only a nature as unruffled but curious as his could create “
,” on the face of it a love story between a post-bubble tech worker and a young woman from his past, which was praised—correctly, I believe—by Kathryn Schulz, writing for the,” even though its emotional remit extended far beyond that tragedy. Paul, who died on January 18th, at the age of fifty-two, was one of my best friends. He felt like a brother to me even though I have known him for only twenty years or so. He inspired within me the capacity for something like brotherhood, but perhaps without the tension of having shared parents and shared trauma. My friends nicknamed him Gentle Paul because he was one of the kindest people anyone had ever met. He was the opposite of the “ornery writer” that lives in some imaginations .
He was an excellent writer and also an excellent reader—I used to give him a draft of everything I wrote, which he would quickly return with comments that would often end up saving my rear—but he was also an amazing cook, bratwurst griller, driver , party d.j., swimmer, and hiker. Lately, I learned he was something of an expert fisherman, and that did not surprise me at all.
And, of course, he was one of the best writers of my generation. His works contained worlds that he fashioned out of language and, often, out of years of historical research, which he then combined with the kindness and optimism that he brought to everyday life, even after he fell ill with cancer.
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