Paul Auster– Baumgartner – Comment.

 

Paul Auster died last month due to complications from his lung cancer therapy. The author’s body of work is vast including all genres from novels, short stories, biographies, screenplays, poetry, several translations, plays and an extensive collection of essays. Baumgartner, to my knowledge, is his last published novel. For me, reading an author for over 35 years creates an ostensive relationship, a manifest emotional connection that one imagines to be a close friendship. When hearing the news of his death, it felt as powerful as losing a close, physical friend. Reading his last novel on many levels was emotional though never mawkish or overly sentimental. Baumgartner is a truly honest and beautiful piece of fiction.  

Sy Baumgartner is a philosophy professor at Princeton University. He has lived in the same house for over forty years with his beloved wife, Anna. Although the last ten years have been without Anna, for she drowned in a freak accident while swimming in the sea. She died in his arms.  

The novel focuses on Sy and Anna’s extraordinary relationship through the memories of the protagonist. The grieving process is different for everyone, though it feels that Sy’s pain has only diminished slightly over the ten years since her death.  

Anna is a poet. She worked for a small publishing company in the city. Over the years she translated poetry for the company, publishing well-known and obscure poets and writers. Her adeptness of French and Portuguese is second to none. Anna is a gifted writer in her own right. We discover this when Baumgartner visits her little study rummaging through her extensive files. We are introduced to her poetry and snippets of her autobiographical pieces, describing meeting Sy and experiences as a child. Anna is a bright woman, true to herself, self-determined, and that special energy that most people are drawn to when around her.  

There is a scene in the novel where Baumgartner wakes up in the middle of the night. He hears a distinctive sound but cannot recognize it. He struggles out of bed and slowly moves down the stairs to find the sound coming from Anna’s study. It is her red phone ringing off the hook. This is of course impossible because the phone is not connected. Sy sits on her chair behind her desk and the ringing stops. A minute later the phone rings again, and reluctantly he picks up the receiver and answers, “Hello.” It is the voice of his wife describing her existence and how much she misses him. The conversation is an explanation or description of life after death. The absolute love she has for Sy has never abated despite her physical departure. The next day Sy rationalizes the scene as a hypnogogic experience, that space between dreaming and wakefulness. For me as the reader, the scene is another example of intense grieving and loss.  

Through Sy Baumgartner's memories the reader is shown the difficulties of a life and love worth living. The details in the trivial things that ignite memories of profound experiences are what makes this novel great.  

For Baumgartner to be Paul Auster’s last novel is prescient and profound, as we experience the feelings and thoughts of an elderly man at the end of his life, about literature, art, and poetry, the beauty of love in a life well lived.