Baumgartner by Paul Auster

Paul Auster, the highly acclaimed laureate of hip New York, author of The New York Trilogy and a lauded list of novels and memoirs (with a series of US awards, as well as the Prix Medicis Etranger and a shortlisting for the Man Booker Prize), published his first book in the early 1980s and his last, this one, in 2023.

Auster died at 77 in April a year ago and worked on this final book, Baumgartner, through the illness that killed him. You might imagine, in these circumstances, it being a sombre read. Instead it is engaging, exciting writing, funny, always deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking about life and literature. Reading it makes you glad to be alive, and communing with this character, even if you are in your 70s and forget what you went into another room for.

The voice of the book, Baumgartner, author and philosophy professor, is the lively, boundary-breaking Auster voice. It edges from scenes of the narrator’s – at times hilariously nerve-wracking – self-deprecation (such as the series of unlikely accidents that begins with a missed step on the cellar stairs and piles one mis-step on top of another to quickly incapacitate him, all because he is obsessing over his friend’s vulnerability as she sets out on a solitary drive), to a thought experiment involving disembodied consciousness that might be a dream or might be a communication with some after-world (he takes a phone call, in the dead of night on his disconnected landline, from his dead wife), through the ordinary human trials of living a long life, all as he struggles his way through his first widower’s year of loss, and finishes writing his latest novel (Baumgartner, that is, not Auster, but clearly there are crossovers).

The book is a meditation on aging and dying and an engrossing celebration of living. It is a triumph of acceptance, if death is what it finally takes to have the precious gift of life. Baumgartner is only 200 pages long and I hated coming to its end.

Reviewed by Judith Elen
SMSA Member