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The famous American novelist Paul Auster, who suffers from cancer, publishes Baumgartner, an elegiac and ironic novel which he confided to a journalist from the Guardian that it will undoubtedly be “the last”. This gives it an obviously autobiographical and tragic dimension. The narrator Sy Baumgartner is his doppelgänger.
This long almost-monologue is the book of farewell. Farewell to life, farewell to love. To his only love, Anna, met in 1969, and tragically disappeared, ten years ago, in their youth, on a bright day when they were happy on a beach.
“The being of life”
The narrator gathers his last strength to relive, from the first day, the years spent with his wife who drowned in an instant, before his eyes. This moment, constantly relived, when suddenly she was no longer there. Where she didn’t come out of the water to dry off beside him.
This novel of atrocious pain, of the loss of the one who was “his life being”as Thomas Bernhard wrote about Hedwig Stavianicek, who offered him a second existence when she invited him to live under her protection and next to whom he was buried.
Anna was good “the being of life” from Professor Sy Baumgartner who says he suffers as if he had had a limb amputated. He/she constantly and painfully feels his/her presence, but he/she is no longer there. Anna was a poet; he admired the only small collection of poetry that she had agreed to publish.
Professor of philosophy at the university, like Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick his elders, Baumgartner is originally from Newark, a very Jewish suburb of New York. Cloistered in the house where he lived for many bright years with his beloved, the reality of the everyday world imposes itself on him in an obsessive and macrophotographic way.
He observes, analyzes and comments in long digressions which maintain links with the recollections of Marcel Proust, but with the exception that they are more mechanical and brief than those of the inimitable author ofIn Search of Lost Time. Proust gave a poisoned gift to his admirers, because any writer following in his footsteps is led, unwillingly, to become his prisoner; not necessarily his equal.
Mourning and hope
Sy Baumgartner, who is getting old and can’t really get interested in his essay on Kierkegaard, falls down the stairs, hurts himself badly, burns himself while trying to heat a coffee, waits for the doorbell of anyone who comes along at his door. He is so alone that the delivery man and the postwoman bring him back to life.
For whole days, he remembers his meeting with young Anna, their sensual love, their shared life in the house where he endures, without rest, the pangs of mourning.
But suddenly there is no hope. Bebe Coen, a young academic who is devoting her thesis to Anna’s work, wishes to come and consult her manuscripts at his home. A reason to live gives Sy a burst of hope and energy.
Yes! He will receive it. He will even have a studio renovated, in order to accommodate her during the time when she immerses herself in the study of Anna’s unpublished poems and diary.
Sy and researcher Bebe Coen begin to maintain a rich correspondence via the internet. Sy impatiently awaits his arrival, and suggests that he take the train so as not to have to endure a long hazardous journey by car, in the middle of winter. Ironically, she precisely likes long car journeys. She keeps him at a distance, while she is still so far away.
The last chapter?
The second part of the novel could, in itself, constitute a short story in the manner of the Portraits of Fidelman by Bernard Malamud, as the narrator’s hyperactivity becomes, to no avail, as ridiculous as it is comical. Doesn’t Apollinaire write: “How slow life is / And how violent Hope is…”
While waiting for Bebe, to pass the time, Sy takes his car one evening in very bad weather and drives aimlessly in the darkness. To avoid a deer, dazzled by the headlights, he swerves into a ditch and smashes his car against a tree. He is injured in the forehead and is bleeding profusely. In the freezing cold, he walks towards a house and knocks on the door. We won’t know more. Except that the novelist concludes that it is a question “from the final chapter of the ST Baumgartner saga”. Is this a pirouette to put the final word in? Or the end of the end?
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