It reads like an obituary, written by the protagonist of a life whose end is imminent. Last March, writer Siri Hustvedt, wife of Paul Auster, announced that the author was suffering from cancer. Among the 18 novels of the American writer (New Jersey, 1947), the last, Baumgartner, recently published in the United States (Planeta will publish it in Spain), surprises for its emotional depth and the simplicity of its narrative depth. It’s as if it distilled everything that the author has integrated into his famous work of fiction over the years. After playing with every register available to fiction and exploring its limits, Baumgartner distills five decades of narrative wisdom. Paul Auster’s latest novel is a volume of almost 200 pages that contains subtle echoes of many of his earlier stories and recreates the danse macabre in Viajes por el Scriptorium (2006), a novel in which the author said goodbye to the ghosts of literary creation, who had been their characters.
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A little less than a year ago, Auster disappeared from public life after suffering from cancer. Shortly before his diagnosis, he was seen with other writers on the steps of the New York Public Library in support of his friend Salman Rushdie, who had been the victim of a brutal attack. There followed a long silence, occasionally broken by the advertisements his wife Hustvedt posted on Instagram in which she reported on her husband’s condition, celebrating his strength and resilience and undergoing devastating medical treatment. The images did not bode well and gave rise to speculation about his situation. His image was surrounded by a wall of concern, respect and compassion. Until then, Auster had never stopped writing a day in his life.
The monumental surprise, even to himself, was that after finishing The Immortal Flame, his imagination demanded that he breathe life into one of his most endearing characters: the septuagenarian Baumgartner, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University. Although he retains his autonomy as a character, Baumgartner is in more ways than one a doppelganger of his author, a creature late to the scriptorium festivities that is Auster’s fantasy. In this book, Auster eschews the artifice typical of other moments in his career. A variety of influences come together in the novel, one of the most tangible being that of Hustvedt, whose ideas on phenomenology resonate in the old professor’s thoughts. And surprisingly, there are echoes of the great Philip Roth. The pages devoted to the life of New Jersey’s Jewish communities bring to mind Roth’s novels set in Newark. There are also echoes of the historical recreations of another great, EL Doctorow. Effects of the late style? No. It’s about something deeper and more complex.
Princess Leonor welcomes the American writers Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster.Paco Paredes
In Baumgartner, all the Austers come together, even those who are not part of his fictional world but go back to the author’s family history. The novel contains texts from various areas, both from Baumgartner’s companion, who died 10 years before the start of the story (again echoes of Hustvedt in the outlines of his personality) and from the character himself. One of these was published by Auster under his name: The Wolves of Slivovitz. In the novel, Baumgartner takes on a memorable chronicle of the author’s trip to Ukraine in search of the origins of a branch of the Auster family. Author and character merge in a surprising alchemical ritual of imperceptible craftsmanship. In this sense, the novel reads like an obituary, as if Auster is telling us that he is the only one who has the right to shape his departure from life. Auster couldn’t and didn’t know how to stop writing. Baumgartner saw him helpless and immediately came to his aid.
Paul Auster, portrayed by his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, in their Brooklyn home this year. The photo appears in the American edition of the book Siri Hustvedt
After starting out as a poet in 1987, Auster published what is arguably his most influential work, the New York Trilogy, a philosophical detective story that ushered in a new way of writing novels. What followed was a series of titles celebrating the power of fiction from a dizzying array of angles, led by the Sign of Chance. Some: The Land of Last Things, The Palace of the Moon, The Music of Chance, Mr. Vertigo, The Book of Illusions, The Night of the Oracle, Journeys through the Scriptorium… Let us pause to highlight its caliber memorable. Contributions in the non-fiction area: The Invention of Loneliness, The Red Notebook, Winter Diary, Interior Reportage. This year’s list ends with “A Country Bathed in Blood,” about the insane massacres that ravage the United States with frightening regularity because of the free flow of weapons.
A suggestive filmography
One cannot talk about Paul Auster without referring to his evocative filmography, which includes such memorable titles as “Smoke”, “Blue in the Face” or “Lulu in the Bridge”… Back to the field of fiction, the focus of his work and Without exhausting the list, it is necessary to remember novels such as “A Man in the Dark”, “Sunset Park” or the monumental “4321”, a thousand-page novel in which he twisted the loop of his own narrative poetics and the story of Archie Ferguson told four possible perspectives. After publication, Auster announced that he was saying goodbye to the novel and turning to the biography of Stephen Crane, a brilliant poet who died at the age of 28. Similar in length to 4321, “The Immortal Flame” reads like a novel.
The action of this new novel takes place between 2018 and 2020, before the diagnosis that leaves his friends and admirers in suspense. Amid the speculation, the real obituaries are waiting to be released, archived in the editorial offices of newspapers around the world. I hadn’t dared to do it before, but when I read this unique and moving novel, different from anything Auster has written before, I decided to write a short message to Siri Hustvedt and ask her to help her husband find happiness achievement to congratulate Roman. After a few hours I received his answer. Paul thanks the email, writes Siri. He is doing well, recovering from the cruel treatment he has been undergoing for months. Hustvedt’s words make it clear that the future is uncertain. Everything is in the hands of chance. In the case of oyster it couldn’t be different. At the end of the novel, Baumgartner’s car crashes into a tree while trying to avoid a deer that got in his way in the middle of the night. The reader sees him get out of the car and walk toward the lights of a nearby house.
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