Novel which arrives as a precious gift since we know that Paul Auster is suffering from cancer, Baumgartner could have been a sad and twilight story. But that would be without the finesse of the humor, the sometimes terrible, sometimes amused lucidity, and of course the intelligence as elegant as it is formidable.
Baumgartner is a journey into the “memory palace” of an aging university professor, Sy Baumgartner, whose wife died a decade earlier. Alone in his big house, he wanders through the twists and turns of his memories, and the whole novel is constructed like this, in the image of this sometimes confused and often agitated brain.
We thus circulate in a tangle of stories which bring Baumgartner back to his meeting with his wife Anna Blume – a recurring character in the work of Paul Auster –, to texts she wrote, to Baumgartner’s recent hope of new loves, to his childhood and even that of his parents.
In the tortuous path of mourning, images appear. Little by little, the life of a man takes shape, from his roots to the new bud that blooms, when a young academic enters the scene who is interested in Anna’s writings. The result is a powerful and profound book about love and attachment, what remains and what is forgotten.
We don’t know if Baumgartner will be Paul Auster’s last book, but it should be seen less as a testament than as a novel driven by hope. It is a luminous work, which shines with a dark radiance, certainly, but we come away nourished and touched, and once again amazed by its formal talent and its understanding of the human soul. It is all the art, intact, of Paul Auster.
Baumgartner
Actes Sud/Leméac
208 pages