What a bizarre, strange, rambling little book! From the beginning it’s clear this is not an ordinary book that will follow any organized structural rules. At first we find the protagonist, Baumgartner (who basically is the only character in the book except those he describes to us) sitting alone in his tiny office writing about some esoteric, philosophical ideas related to Kierkegaard, when he finds that a book left downstairs is needed for him to complete his thoughts. After heading downstairs to retrieve the book, he then veers off in varying directions and does a myriad of things, becoming the poster child for attention deficit disorder or mere senility.

Thank goodness the entire book didn’t go on quite like this, not nearly as irrational and incoherently. However, it mostly does consist of not much more than the rambling thoughts of a71 year old man. At times there is clarity, like his haphazard meeting and subsequent friendship with a young meter reader who enters his home, and the majority of the book consists of his remembrances of his wife of approximately 40 years, Anna, who has been gone for almost 10. These thoughts are truly lovely. He loved her deeply, and their love obviously was mutual. Reading about their relationship is a nice interlude from the divergent ramblings of his mind.

At the end, he looks forward to meeting a young woman academically interested in his wife’s prodigious but unpublished writings. After his wife’s death, he uncovered hundred of poems, essays, and prose written by her and successful published approximately 80 of her poems. The young woman is the student of a friend of Baumgartner, and both the professor and Baumgartner see a lot of Anna in this young student in a myriad of ways, and after spending months getting to know the young woman through email, over the phone, and on video calls he starts to feel paternalistic towards her. He prepares to share his home with her so that she can have unhindered and unlimited access to Anna’s writings. When the time of her arrival finally comes, he is as nervous as any parent, disapproving of her stubborn decision to drive hundreds of miles in potentially dangerous conditions. He then sets off on one of his own. The ending is nearly as confounding as the beginning.

This is the first book (of 18) that I’ve read by Paul Auster, “his first
novel since the Booker-shortlisted tour-de-force ‘4 3 2 1.’” Apparently his writing style is idiosyncratic to him, and he has many fans and supporters. After reading this one book, I can’t say I’m one of them. Perhaps after reading one of his other works, perhaps even “4 3 2 1,” I might change my mind.

In any event, I am extremely grateful to Mr. Auster, Atlantic Monthly Press, and NetGalley for giving me an advanced, digital copy of this book to read. My review is 100% voluntary.

I absolutely love Paul Auster and his last book does not disappoint. I found this story to be vulnerable, endearing and have all of the realistic wonder that make it a trademark book of his. I will miss his writing with all of my heart and am so grateful we got to see the world the Baumgartners aging eyes as Auster’s own farewell to this world.

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

A very moving and profound novel. One that can easily be re-read; it is amazing how this highly interior story remains compelling.

An elderly philosophy professor muses about his life, both past and present. The book begins and ends with a painful accident. Why does he remember seemingly insignificant events so vividly? How can he go on, following the death of his wife a decade ago? How must he accommodate advancing age? Some of his musings struck a cord with me. However, muchof the book seemed banal. I’ve read only one other book by this author, and I had mixed feelings about it too. Maybe I just haven’t encountered his best work yet, but I’ll keep trying. In any event, this book held my interest, and some parts were really excellent. 3.5 stars

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

This was a great book! I very much enjoyed it and I look forward to reading more by this author! Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

Sad but totally absorbing. The story of a man and his wife and how they differently perceived their common lives.

“Does an event have to be true in order to be accepted as true, or does belief in the truth of an event already make it true, even if the thing that supposedly happened did not happen?”

This quote stuck with me for a week as it haunts me throughout my days.
This book blew me away and made me go through an existential crisis. It made me reflect a lot about my life and about aging.
Absolute wonder to read, would recommend!

This novella is about aging philosophy professor, S.T. Baumgartner, who is grappling with grief and late love after the death of his wife. In a story that seems to be filled with autobiographical elements (I need to read more about Auster’s life), Baumgartner experiences a series of mishaps, leading to a surreal phone call from his late wife about the afterlife.

Auster’s short book weaves a narrative of love, loss, and late-life insights, reminiscing on snippets of memories…but I did want more! I hope there is a follow up to this book. 4⭐️

I like Auster’s writing style - and will definitely be seeking out some of his earlier novels.

Thank you to @netgalley and @groveatlantic for the ebook in return for an honest review.

#americanliterature #americanwriter #literaryfiction #contemporaryliterature #fiction #novella #paulauster #baumgartner #netgalleyreads #ebook #kindlebooks

I am sorry for the inconvenience but I don’t have the time to read this anymore and have lost interest in the concept. I believe that it would benefit your book more if I did not skim your book and write a rushed review. Again, I am sorry for the inconvenience.

This is the second Paul Auster book I read. 4 3 2 1 is among my favorite novels so I might be biased but I really enjoyed this one too!

In Baumgartner there's really no solid plot, just the day to day of an old man who is constantly reflecting back on his life and the people in it, telling their stories too, which makes us understand him better.

It's a lovely tale that allows to observe the wisdom and maturity we acquire as we age and how some of the littlest mundane moments we experience throughout life remain stored in our memory and come back to us every so often.

Distinctively, inserting a story within the story is something the author did here and also did in 4 3 2 1 (of course I remember Sole Mates). Needless to say he's very good at it.

And so I've confirmed it and I can confidently say that Paul Auster is a remarkable storyteller and he writes beautifully. I want more of his work in my shelves.

Thank you, NetGalley and Grove Atlantic, for this wonderful ARC!

To my shame I’d never read Auster and I’ve only recently read my first Hustvedt - eeek! I mean these two are New York literary royalty! Don’t worry, obviously I now intend to read absolutely everything I can get my hands on by BOTH of them.

All this to say I was delighted to read Auster’s latest novel, Baumgartner - his 20th!

And what a lovely book it is! It took me a minute to get into his writing style, but I was quickly immersed in the life of our protagonist, Sy Baumgartner, a 71 year old writer and professor who’s on the cusp of retirement. A decade ago Anna, his beloved wife of 40 years, died suddenly, and he’s still grappling with this grief.

The novel is essentially the story of Baumgartner’s life, and the love story between him and Anna - and given this is a slim volume, only 200 odd pages, that’s quite a feat. But Auster is in control from the start, using Baumgartner’s memories as well as poems and short stories written by Anna to help it all unfold.

The result is a clever, poignant and often funny insight into an ordinary man. That’s not to infer this is some sort of basic book - Auster’s love of language is clear, and he writes with real compassion and empathy.

There are big themes in this little book - memory, ageing, mortality and grief as I mentioned. I was really impressed by how much we manage to learn about Sy in such a short amount of time. For that reason you’re never bored, and the vignette style of writing keeps things moving along. And it felt TRUE to a real life, one in which there are regrets and setbacks, but also moments of extraordinary happiness and real love.

Sy Baumgartner, a professor of philosophy, is a widower in his early 70s. His wife Anna, a poet, translator and writer of prose, had died 10 years before. This absorbing novel explores memory, grief and aging. Sy’s area of research is the mind-body problem, which I have never understood. The book he is writing uses the analogy of a motor car to explain the human condition. Unlike his previous novel 4,3,2,1 Auster’s new novel is short and easily read in a day.

My first encounter with Paul Auster's work was the epic 4 3 2 1, spanning across the life of one character. In contrast, Baumgartner is restrained and quiet, but also epic on a different scale. Baumgartner is 71, living alone, and, when we first meet him, beset by a series of unfortunate events. In the days, weeks, and months that follow, Baumgartner reflects on his earlier years, particularly his life with his wife who has passed away.

As you would expect from Auster, the writing here is impeccable. There were many sentences that I sat with for a couple of minutes. I also really enjoyed the fluidity of time in the story. Baumgartner jumps between different parts of his life as he reflects and even the time in the present jumps around unexpectedly. I get this sense that this is a very personal novel for Auster, who is also in his 70s.

This is by no means a fast or plot-driven novel. Instead, it is one that demands you sit with the story as it goes along. That said, I felt that some parts of it dragged a little bit, mostly parts of the story I was less interested in.

Overall, I really enjoyed this and it made me want to read more of Auster's backlist.

First book I have read by Paul Auster. Would definitely look to read some of his other books. Very esoteric story. Quite lovely as he interacts with others and thinks about time with his wife. Would definitely recommend to some of my readers/friends.

I really wanted to read this mainly because I know this is an author I should read. I own a couple books I haven’t gotten to and the ARC formatting was messed up so I’m going to put this aside and buy a copy at some point.

Let’s just get this out of the way for people for whom this is important. Nothing happens in Baumgartner, Paul Auster’s newest novel. It’s a quietly amiable, meandering, somewhat disjointed, study of character, aging, and grief. While it had some issues, I mostly fell into the voice of Sy, the main character, as he went through his mundane existence, the sort of existence that is not particularly exciting, but is the existence that all of us will (or have) gone through, since none of us can escape either aging or loss.

Sy’s loss came ten years ago when the love of his life, Anna, drowned, leaving him feeling her loss like “phantom limb pain” ever since. A poet, Anna is mostly idealized in Sy’s memories, his perfect soulmate, the two of them writing together but separate in their shared home, she on her poems and he on his philosophy books (he also teaches at Princeton). The novel moves back and forth in time between Sy”s present day battles with getting old (a nastily fall, fading short-term memory, possible retirement) and loneliness (a series of dalliances then a proposal) and his memories, mostly of Anna but also of a trip to Ukraine, home to an ancestor.

Individually, the segments are hit and miss. The opening to the book is absolutely wonderful, with Sy’s charming voice effortlessly engaging and the introduction of two wonderfully depicted side characters, the UPS delivery woman Sy has a crush on and a hapless rookie gas meter man, though sadly neither makes a substantive appearance afterward. The Anna memories vary in their success. Interestingly, the most vivid one for me was her memory of an old high school boyfriend. This is somewhat telling in that while some of the memories of her and Sy were effective, overall the relationship didn’t fully come alive for me. I felt his sense of loss keenly, but less so just what he had lost.

Meanwhile, the Ukraine segment felt more than a little shoehorned in, and the segment of phantom limb pain as a metaphor for loss felt somewhat pedestrian for a philosophy professor at a Princeton. On the other hand, a fable on a prisoner being sentenced to a life sentence of crafting sentences, and then staying in his cell even when he could walk out, was more sharply and wryly effective, and Baumgartner’s newest book making a connection between cars and human existence was more thought-provoking and interesting than the phantom pain book.

So a mixed bag in the end. I loved the first 30-40 pages, was mostly still happy to go along with Sy’s thoughts after, though the book felt like it stalls out in places before coming back to life. And of course, the craft on a sentence/syntax level remains high, as one by now expects of any Auster work. I confess I was hoping for a bit more based both on my love of other Auster works and on the opening scene of this one, but Baumgartner is still a worthy read,
3.5

Witty and knowing about what we choose to remember.
Many thanks to Grove Atlantic and to Netgalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

A short and sweet novel about an old writer and his fading memory and the things he does remember. There’s beauty and kindness to be found in all sorts of ordinary things and events.

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on November 7, 2023

It’s customary for authors to write a meditation on aging as they cope with their own journey into twilight. Paul Auster is 76 and thus of an age that encourages writers to contemplate their mortality. Yet his prose is still sharp, his insights as strong as ever. If, like Sy Baumgartner, Auster sometimes forgets to zip up his fly, he hasn’t forgotten how to write. Like Baumgartner, “he can still think, and because he can think, he can still write, and while it takes a little longer for him to finish his sentences now, the results are more or less the same.”

Baumgartner begins the novel as a philosophy professor on leave from Princeton. He lives a “day of endless mishaps,” beginning with a pan that scorched because he forgot to turn off a burner, a burned hand as he picks up the pan, and a tumble down the basement stairs as he tries to guide a new meter reader. The unfortunate events take his memory back to his first apartment at the age of twenty and his first purchase of cooking utensils, including the pan that is now ruined, and his first glimpse of Anna. They married five years later and his true life began, a life that ended with her death nine years ago.

Much of Baumgartner’s current life is spent coping with grief. Learning that someone’s fingers were severed in a work accident, Baumgartner begins to think of phantom limb syndrome as “a metaphor of human suffering and loss.” He views the loss of Anna as having severed his arms and legs from his torso, leaving him “a human stump, a half man who lost the half of himself that had made him whole.” He learned to put on a game front in the years following her loss, even learned to chase women, but the artificial appendages he has attached to his limbless torso feel nothing when he catches one. A year after his tumble down the stairs, he has learned to understand that “if you are the one who lives on, you will discover that the amputated part of you, the phantom part of you, can still be a source of profound, unholy pain.” He has been hiding from that pain — slowly replacing everything in his house that might remind him of Anna — but “to live in fear of pain is to refuse to live.”

Baumgartner has a dream — or he assumes it’s a dream — about answering a disconnected telephone and listening to Anna explain the dark void of the afterlife, a void she breaches only because he still thinks about her. The dream propels him into motion, reinvigorates dormant limbs, eventually allows him to open his heart to Judith, “something altogether different and new, and how could anyone who has lived as long as he has ask for anything more than that?” He later prepares to give access to Anna’s literary work to a college student who he sees as a surrogate daughter, a young woman who embodies Anna’s spirit and whose reverence for Anna’s work matches Baumgartner’s veneration of Anna’s life.

Baumgartner spends much of the novel’s second half recalling his family history (including a nostalgic examination of his mother’s life, a woman whose maiden name was Auster). He writes an essay about a trip to Ukraine, where his grandfather Auster lived before emigrating to America. He hears a haunting story about the city of his grandfather’s birth, a city that was taken over by wolves after all its residents had been killed or fled. He chooses to believe the story, for its symbolism if not for its absolute truth. Auster’s point (in this and other parts of the novel) seems to be that the stories we hold in our memory are the stories we need, even if they are not factually precise.

Apart from the novel’s exploration of its title character, Baumgartner is a celebration of good people, from the kind meter reader who helps Baumgartner when he falls down his basement stairs to a carpenter who learned Spanish to converse with Latin American teammates when he played minor league baseball and “has a gift for spreading life wherever he happens to go.” Most good people will not make it into history books, but they are no less important in the overall scheme of human existence. Despite the evil that wiped out the city of his grandfather’s birth, despite the darkness of political leaders that threatens to overshadow decency, Auster’s focus is on the positive, however tenuous positivity might be in a life that inevitably mixes joy with pain.

The novel ends on an ominous note of ironic ambiguity that nicely sums up Baumgarter’s approach to life. What happens next is for the reader to imagine. In the course of a single life, a life full of love and loss, what happens next is relatively unimportant. Baumgartner’s story is only one of billions. However it might end, its importance lies in the fact that Baumgartner existed, that he contributed, that he loved and was loved in return. As Baumgartner asks, how could anyone “ask for anything more than that?”

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Very enjoyable, nicely paced, makes me scared of getting old but I did like the character a great deal and thought the writing was terrific.