Baumgartner by Paul Auster
“… why some fleeting, random moments persist in memory while other, supposedly more important moments vanish forever.
…flotsam from the unvanished but long vanished past”
“If the story turns out to be so astounding and so powerful that your jaw drops open and you feel that it has changed or enhanced or deepened your understanding of the world, does it matter if the story is true or not?”
Paul Auster’s last novel is moving, upsetting and open ended; it leaves you wondering about nothing and everything and with the feeling of having just read an obituary. It talks about life, death and fate, about getting old and above all, about how we deal with grief and how our minds think and create the narrative of our lives, present and past. Why do we remember some things and not others? How can fiction help so much with reality? Do we remember real memories, or do we create them? These and other similar questions aren’t answered in Auster’s intimate novel. You must think the answer yourself.
The tone changes along the narrative; it begins with a bit of comedy with the everyday mishaps Sy Baumgartner, the protagonist, faces in his lonely life. This is followed by a surreal dream sequence with Ann, Sy’s dead wife, phoning him for a chat. Later we get deep into “the lost world of Then” to finally arrive to the world of now. We don’t get to peek into the near future, as the book ends with, surprise surprise, the beginning of a final chapter.
LRB
Critical perspective:
… Baumgartner sometimes reads as a summation of everything Auster has sought to achieve in his work: the examination of America and the American way of life through a metaphysical, even absurdist lens, rather than through social realism.
Auster’s writing is rightly lauded for its propulsive narrative energy, and Baumgartner is no exception. But it’s hard to agree with the view of the New York Times that Auster is ‘one of the great American prose stylists of our time’. His writing tics can become obvious – for example, the accretion of clauses and subclauses which say the same thing in different ways (‘the most feeble ones, the out-and-out duds’; ‘A man who ran at the mouth at the least provocation, a fulminating word-bag’). There is also the occasional reliance on cliché, which undermines the vibrancy of his sentences: ‘Why go back and beat that dead horse when he is supposed to be crawling around in the woods with a hand rake and a toy shovel digging up little treasures from the Neolithic past.’
Baumgartner feels like a late novel in its emphasis on memory and nostalgia, its sense of life entering the final phase. But it doesn’t feel like Auster’s valediction. The conclusion of the novel is unexpected, Auster leaving us with the distinct impression that there are more stories to come. In the almost forty years since the publication of the New York Trilogy, Auster has proved himself to be one of the most interesting and exhilarating novelists of his generation.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-red-telephone
Paul Auster’s best novels balance intricate and absorbing stories, with deconstructions of the art of narrative in a manner that rarely detracts from the flow or fun of the narrative itself. Unlike the machinations of many metafiction authors, the games Auster plays with storytelling never seem to get in the way of the stories themselves—except, of course, in moments when he stops compelling stories dead as with the gripping blue notebook tale unspooling in Oracle Night. As much as those moments might frustrate a reader—and it’s worth noting that even Auster’s finest works like 4 3 2 1 are rarely satisfyingly-ended—they also remind the reader that some stories aren’t meant to satisfy.
Auster’s newest novel, Baumgartner, ends perplexingly with the promise of a final chapter just beginning—a strange conclusion to a book that begins in a life’s third act.
(…) Baumgartner remains deeply and strangely affecting. More than any Auster novel in memory, it relies on the transporting grace of Auster’s hypnotic, magnificent run-on sentences to hold the reader in its sway.
In one bit of self-conscious fable-writing, Baumgartner describes the last half-century of his life as the result of being long ago sentenced by a judge to “a life of making sentences”—a sentence he has carried out faithfully in an open cell.
If Paul Auster regards himself as similarly sentenced, it’s been a sentence extraordinarily well-served.
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2023/11/20/stories-within-stories-in-baumgartner/
As the novelist Fiona Maazel noted in The New York Times Book Review, “Baumgartner” is replete with many classic Auster touches that bring to mind his earlier works: the earnest, bookish male protagonist, the narrative instabilities. But it is also a novel that reflects the inner struggles of an author in his later years dealing with age and grief.
“At its heart, ‘Baumgartner’ is about warring states of mind,” Ms. Maazel wrote. “Our hero is a philosophy professor (for clarity I’ll call him Sy, as his friends do) who lost his wife nearly 10 years ago in a freak accident and has been caught between hanging on and letting go — or even pushing away — ever since.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/30/books/paul-auster-dead.html
About the author:
Paul Auster, who has died at the age of 77, grew up in New Jersey in the post-war years of the 1950s, where a bookless household laid the foundations for his obsessional focus on human behaviour and the complexities of the shifting world.
As “a young Jew in New York” with a voracious appetite for literature and a fascination with writing, Auster attended Columbia University, where he studied English Literature, influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Samuel Beckett.
In 1982, Auster planted himself on the literary scene with The New York Trilogy – a genre-bending work that deftly merges elements of hard-boiled detective fiction with an effortless postmodernist style via a classically Austerian lens of existentialism and angst.
City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room – three connected novellas – engross readers with deliciously complex plotlines, enigmatic characters and philosophical thoughts on language and identity. The New York Trilogy established Auster as a literary genius, earning him international acclaim through his masterclass in storytelling. His relationship to his characters is unmatched.
In interviews, he revealed a paternal love for his craft:
The novelist is not a puppeteer. You’re not manipulating your characters. You’ve given birth to them, but then they take on an independent life. I think your greatest requirement in writing fiction is to listen to what they’re telling you and not force anything on them that they wouldn’t do. They call the shots.
When I first read The New York Trilogy I instantly wanted to become a creative writer. I felt inspired by Auster’s unparalleled explorations of chance and coincidence, fact and fiction, and his use of innovative techniques to blur the boundaries between author, narrator and character. In the plot of The New York Trilogy, Daniel Quinn is mistaken for the character/author Paul Auster.
His remarkable sophistication, innovation of genre and embodiment of the city flaneur (someone who wanders observing life) is folded into multi-layered plots that mask as existential invitations to question reality and reflect on the way fate shapes our lives.
Essays, memoirs and films
Alongside his novels, Auster prolifically penned numerous essays and memoirs, showcasing his versatility and intellect. The detailed and cinematic quality of his noir-esque writing also made for sumptuous storytelling on screen. His success as a writer brought opportunities to realise his youthful ambitions to become a film director.
In 1995 he adapted a Christmas story he’d written for The New York Times and, alongside Wayne Wang, co-directed Smoke, a film set in a Brooklyn smoke shop that interweaves the stories of the people who cross paths there. Auster went on to co-direct the follow-up Blue in the Face (1996) – again with Wang – which he wrote about in Smoke & Blue in the Face: Two films (1995). His debut feature as sole director was Lulu on the Bridge (1998), about a saxophonist whose life changes after he is shot on stage.
Autobiographical books such as The Invention of Solitude (1982), Winter Journal (2012) and Report from the Interior (2013) offer poignant reflections on grief, fatherhood and the passage of time.
Written in the second person – a rarity in literature and a publisher’s arch nemesis – the memoirs use of the awkward viewpoint cleverly deny the reader comfort, qualifying them as further examples of Auster’s lessons on how to start living uncomfortably.
Auster’s distinctive authorial voice, characterised by vividly realised gestures, wit, intellect and existential angst, masterfully and universally resonate, leaving the reader spellbound. Permeating popular culture, the author continues to inspire new generations of writers and artists.
It took him more than three years to write 4 3 2 1 – a book set in the US in the 1950s and 1960s which follows Archibald Isaac Ferguson through a life which takes four simultaneous but entirely different paths. It was his first book for seven years.
‘The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle’
The last years of Auster’s life were mired by the tragedy of the death of his grandchild, and then his son, Daniel, at 44 years old. He spent the pandemic locked down in his brownstone house in Brooklyn, but continued to write, reflecting in an artistic essay which travelled the borderlands of far Eastern Europe in which he explores the mythical Wolves of Stanislav (a Ukrainian folk story) as a parable for Coronavirus.
In December 2021, Auster’s wife Siri announced his battle with lung cancer while he was penning his last novel, Baumgartner (2023). A most tender book on love, ageing and loss, it describes newly widowed 71-year-old Sy’s reaction to the death of his wife, Anna Blume (who is the narrator of his 1987 post-apocalyptic novel In the Country of Last Things).
Auster’s legacy is not merely confined to the pages of his novels or frames of films that were adaptions of his work. He transcends boundaries of art and literature and defied genre, leaving an indelible print on contemporary literature.
Through unparalleled storytelling – labyrinthine narratives where chance and fate intersect, unravel mysteries and blur identities – Auster’s literary testament bequeaths the power of imagination, the inimitable ability to capture the human experience, and the inexhaustible possibilities of language.
Reviews by our book club members:
"Paul Auster´s latest novel, Baumgartner, discusses true love based on the respect, loyalty, and admiration that the protagonist and his wife feel for each other.
It´s a well-written, introspective, and delicate book that captivates you for the first moment, in which the author plays with many themes that run through Auster´s novels: the fleeting nature of time, the ephemeral nature of lineal events, the surprise of the unexpected, the miracle of love, the death, etc.
Don´t miss his reflections on what he calls "phantom limb syndrome" as a metaphor for loss and human pain. Or how he gave us his religious explanations of the mystery of death as a "paradoxical state of conscious nonexistence".
Summarising, Baumgartner is one of the most tender, spiritual, and philosophical books I´ve ever read in a long time. In addition, it´s quick and easy to read.
It´s a book that you should give a try.
it´s worth reading calmly and reflecting."
JLJG
Praise:
“[A] slender, ruminative novel . . . Auster writes movingly about seeming to recover after great loss.” —The New Yorker
“A captivating portrait of a man who has loved and lost and is preparing for his last stage of life . . . Baumgartner proves fascinating and endearing for having the ability to examine his own history—where he came from, what he has experienced and where he has ended up . . . a late-career triumph.”—Malcolm Forbes, Los Angeles Times
“A profound character study of a man whose advancing years are shaped by mourning and memory. . . . Sy lives simultaneously in both the present and the past, and Auster navigates these two narrative tracks nimbly [and] . . . . the effect builds to a beautiful approximation of memory’s fluidity and allure. This is one to savor.”—Publishers Weekly
https://groveatlantic.com/book/baumgartner/
Interviews:
In BP Ávila:
- In the catalogue: click here.
- In EBiblio: click here.
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