Baumgartner by Paul Auster review – amiable aimlessness
I suspect anyone who was ever spellbound by the existential gumshoe shenanigans of The New York Trilogy – postmodernism in a fedora – will always take a chance on a new Paul Auster novel, however much he has tested that faith with the fiction he has produced in the decades since. He’s been struggling to get his gifts to align for some time – at least since 2007’s dourly Kafka-ish Travels in the Scriptorium – and while the Booker-shortlisted 4321 had admirers, its life-afterlife premise (four takes on a single Auster-adjacent protagonist) felt to me void of spark.So I wanted to love Baumgartner
– all the more after the news this year that Auster was being treated for cancer – and for some 40 glorious pages I did. Starting in 2018, the book gives us two years in the life of the titular protagonist, a septuagenarian writer (what else?), almost a decade widowed when we join him at his desk at home in New Jersey. He needs to fetch a book from another room, but suddenly remembers the hob is still on from breakfast – and hadn’t he promised to call his sister? But there’s a UPS delivery at the door… and then the phone rings: his cleaner’s young daughter in distress because papá just sawed off two fingers at work. Another call at the door: someone to read the meter. Baumgartner descends to the cellar to show the way when – wallop – he tumbles downstairs…Winningly farcical and fast-moving, it’s a terrific opening, a cascading comedy of perpetually interrupted thought, built on a clausal onrush of period-shy sentences in the manner of German writer Heinrich von Kleist, praised by Auster as “one of the greatest prose writers of the early 19th century”. The syntax – always more, more, and still more – is poignant as well as manic when, easing off the gas, with Baumgartner’s knee on ice, the novel’s pile-up of incident gives way to a passage in which he is seen obsessively unfolding and refolding the clothes of his late wife, Anna, garment by garment by garment.Yet even in the most involving