Baumgartner

June 1, 2023

In the opening pages of this 18th novel from the sterling Auster, soon-to-retire philosophy professor Sy Baumgartner has just scorched a pot while trying to boil water, as he was dwelling (as he always does) on his beloved late wife, who died nine years previously in a swimming accident. The novel then unfolds Baumgartner's spiraling memories since 1968. Prepub Alert.

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August 15, 2023
An elderly philosophy professor sorts through grief, mortality, and late love. Raised by a mother surnamed Auster in Newark, New Jersey, educated at Columbia University and in Paris, married to a translator--for the title character of his latest, Auster dips often into the autobiographical well. As the book opens, S.T. Baumgartner, age 70, has been mourning his late wife, Anna, for 10 years when mishaps darken an otherwise ordinary day. He has a nasty fall, he learns that his cleaning lady's husband has severed two fingers in a work accident, and he burns a pot he's had since he first met his wife. Auster likes to stir up apprehension, but none of these misfortunes can match the frisson when a disconnected phone in his late wife's study impossibly brings a call from her, telling him about the afterlife and how they remain connected. As Baumgartner, amid typical worries about how much future he has, frequently revisits the past, the narrative of his falling for Anna and their marriage takes shape--yet the strange phone call also frees him to enjoy love again, with a colleague at Princeton. Then another woman appears and seems to promise a different sort of emotional investment, this one tied to his late wife. Auster is not as textually tricky here as he has been in previous novels. He does bring back publisher Morris Heller and son Miles from Sunset Park (2010). He has Baumgartner working on "a serio-comic, quasi-fictional discourse on the self in relation to other selves," which sounds like a study of Auster's fiction. Baumgartner's mind is full of late-life insights and angst, while his capacity for love provides a rich emotional seam. Auster packs a lot into this slim novel, including, alas, prose so prone to clich� that the mind winces. An always intriguing writer mostly playing to his strengths.

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October 1, 2023
Baumgartner is a well-published philosophy professor living alone in the wake of a freak beach accident that killed his wife, Anna, a translator and unpublished poet, a decade ago. A set of mishaps cues Baumgartner to the increasing underminings of age as he writes about phantom limb syndrome, a potent metaphor for grief, and summons the fortitude to finally read through Anna's papers. He ends up assembling and publishing a collection of Anna's poems, one of which we get to read along with enthralling swathes of her unfinished memoir. After two works of nonfiction Auster presents his eighteenth novel, a finely distilled tale of a charmingly self-deprecating and forthright intellectual and romantic. Given to long ruminations, Baumgartner remembers poignant scenes of two children on two different trains, each dealing with painful situations rife with implications. He muses over his embittered father and compassionate mother, his trip to his father's birthplace in Ukraine, and the reverberations of the bloodlands of Russia and Europe. He reflects on his early days with Anna and the start of his long fascination with "embodied consciousness and the doubleness of being." Auster's portrait of a thoughtful man embracing loss and love is a gorgeous, subtly suspenseful revelation of the covert dramas of a contemplative, kind, and expressive life.

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Starred review from October 9, 2023
Auster (The Brooklyn Follies) offers a profound character study of a man whose advancing years are shaped by mourning and memory. Sy Baumgartner is a 70-year-old philosophy professor at Princeton who, at the novel’s outset, has spent the past decade grieving his beloved wife Anna’s death in a swimming accident. Though he attends to a banal domestic routine, writes scholarly books, and even proposes marriage to a divorced colleague, Sy is so surrounded by effects of his old life with Anna (including manuscripts of her poetry, a book of which he shepherded into print posthumously) and so steeped in his reminiscences of her that at one point he becomes convinced she’s called him over a long-ago disconnected phone line to assure him “that the living and the dead are connected, and to be as deeply connected as they were when she was alive can continue even in death.” Sy lives simultaneously in both the present and the past, and Auster navigates these two narrative tracks nimbly: an uncovered box of Anna’s postgraduate papers leads to a reverie about her and Sy’s courtship decades earlier; a present-day moment of absentmindedness conjures recollections of Sy’s multigenerational family. The effect builds to a beautiful approximation of memory’s fluidity and allure. This is one to savor.