It has been a good while since I have found the time to sit down and write up my thoughts on a book. So the books I want to review keep piling up on all the windowsills of our house and if I don’t start working my way through these soon, it won’t be long until we will find ourselves unable to open a window. Though it is true what they say and once you start working in publishing, you won’t have time to read books anymore – on top of the five to ten books a week you will be reading for work, that is. So when I decided this week might be the one to start tackling those unreviewed piles and wandered from window to window trying to decide which book to start with, what jumped out at me was Paul Auster’s Baumgartner.
The novel was published in November, just five months before the literary heavyweight’s death. His last novel, then, was my first encounter with his work and though I have heard since that Baumgartner is not Auster’s best work, I was certainly sufficiently impressed to now want to start my journey through his backlist. But what is it all about?
Baumgartner is a novel about loss and grief, old age and new love, living and dying. And for a book covering themes this heavy and profound, the novel is surprisingly light and slim. We join the eponymous Sy Baumgartner at his New Jersey home, where the writer in his seventies lives has been living a quiet life ever since his wife’s death ten years prior. We get to know him in a moment of confusion, he has left the hob on, forgotten what he’d come in a room for, vaguely remembers he is meant to call his sister, someone is knocking on the door, Baumgartner falls.
This opening segment is simply exquisite. Fast-paced and delightfully witty, it builds up to a crescendo that ends in the fall and once the fog of the confusion has cleared gives way to a calmer, more reflective pace of the rest of the book. And here is where it might fall flat for some readers though to me it started unfolding a quiet force that kept me turning the last pages of this gentle man’s life. A life, that is, that has been determined and defined by his unending love and deep admiration for Anna, his late wife. Through flashbacks and memories, a poem, even, we get to know their love story in between witnessing the widower deal with being the surviving spouse.
There are clunkier passages in here, thinly veiled and not obviously fitting allusion to Auster’s life and background, for example. But perhaps a novel by a man in his seventies diagnosed with cancer about a man in his seventies dealing with loss of life, his loved one’s as well as his own, little by little, was always going to be autobiographical. Maybe it should have been more determinedly so. A lot of stories are told on not that many pages, so that certain themes and strands of the story remain quite broadly sketched and to me that felt like a very authentic representation of how the mind and memory works. In a way, it almost feels scrap-booky at times which I found surprisingly charming.
So do pick this one up if you like a short and reflective read, a brief foray into someone else’s loves and fears, or, of course, if you are an Auster completist. His final novel published before his death might not be the most obvious to start with, but it worked really for me.
First published by Grove Atlantic, 2023
My edition: Rowohlt, 2023 translated into German by Werner Schmitz
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