title: Baumgartner by: Auster, Paul published: 2023-11-07 read: 2023-12 preview

The last published book by Paul Auster. It describes the life of Sy Baumgartner. He’s a noted author, and husband of Anna who died many years ago.

As one would expect of Auster, the book makes one feel at home immediately. It starts off with describing how Baumgartner wants to get a book he left in the kitchen, and decides to call his sister. There he discovers he left a pan on the stove, then burns his hand, he cools it with water, the phone rings, it’s the meter reader, then the mail brings yet another book, the phone rings again, it’s the cleaner’s daughter who is in the hospital because of an accident with a saw, the doorbell rings again, it’s the meter reader, and Baumgartner falls down the stairs to the basement.

We are now 20 pages into the book, and one knows Baumgartner like oneself, so it seems. And becomes to know his view of Anna, who was perhaps the better author but never published. She wrote hundreds of poems, and the book develops towards relating their love and their lives, towards perhaps the culmination where a PhD student wants to visit him, for her research on a book on Anna’s work. Nothing suits Baumgartner more than that, and he does all he can to make her visit perfect.

Paul Auster had a very distinctive style, and perhaps there’s hardly an author who writes more openly, more accessibly, more simple.

Once he settled into his chair, the young man looked over at me and said: “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?” “Know might be an exaggeration,” I replied, “but we did see each other once. Months and months ago at a secondhand store about ten blocks south of here. As I remember it, you were knee-deep in a barrel of pots.” “That’s it!” he said. “The old rag-and-bone joint on Amsterdam and Ninety-eighth! We smiled at each other, didn’t we?”

The book sometimes entertains with excerpts of Anna’s poems or stories, like the above.

As always: a beautiful Auster novel.

and when he comes to the first house and knocks on the door, the final chapter in the saga of S.T. Baumgartner begins.