Baumgartner (Hardcover)
Staff Reviews
This is a beautiful chronicle of aging, loss of spouse, and finding hope to move forward with one's life. Baumgartner, a 73-year-old Princeton philosophy professor on the verge of retiring, is still coping with the drowning death of his wife Anna nine years earlier. He wanders from room to room, often forgetting why amidst constant distractions and reliving memories. He is supposed to be finishing his final book, but keeps thinking about Anna's largely unpublished collection of poetry. A short, atmospheric novel that quietly impresses.
— AliceDescription
A taut yet expansive novel of love, memory, and grief from Paul Auster, best-selling, award-winning author and "one of the great American prose stylists of our time" - New York Times
Paul Auster's brilliant eighteenth novel opens with a scorched pot of water, which Sy Baumgartner -- phenomenologist, noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor - has just forgotten on the stove.
Baumgartner's life had been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals of memory and reminiscence, delineated in episodes spanning from 1968, when Sy and Anna meet as broke students working and writing in New York, through their passionate relationship over the next forty years, and back to Baumgartner's youth in Newark and his Polish-born father's life as a dress-shop owner and failed revolutionary.
Rich with compassion, wit, and Auster's keen eye for beauty in the smallest, most transient moments of ordinary life, Baumgartner asks: Why do we remember certain moments, and forget others? In one of his most luminous works and his first novel since the Booker-shortlisted tour-de-force 4 3 2 1, Paul Auster captures several lifetimes.