Comment
Benjamin G. Rosado
Updated Friday, February 23, 2024-18:57
All the stories of Paul Auster (New Jersey, 1947) start from the same experience.
When he was 14 years old, during a summer camp, he saw a boy get hit by lightning.
"He died instantly right where I was," the author confessed in a recent interview with the
New York Times
.
"It could have been me, or any of the other kids, and the weight of that certainty has been with me ever since
. "
More than a gateway to fiction, that tragic event made him participate for the first time in the "many dangers that threaten us in the world", to which it is only possible, he says, "to pay all possible attention."
The
worst storm of his life
broke out on November 1, 2021 and lasted for several months.
The news of the death, under strange circumstances, of her ten-month-old granddaughter was followed by the arrest and subsequent death from overdose of her son Daniel, the result of her first marriage to the writer Lydia Davis.
Later, on March 11, 2023, her current wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, announced on her Instagram account that Paul Auster had lung cancer, which is why he was being "
bombarded with chemotherapy and immunotherapy »
.
And she added in another more recent
post
: «The terrain in Cancerland has been confusing and treacherous.
The patient, and I with him, have traveled straight down the road, experienced delays, and turned in circles.
"At the moment, we have not found the sign that marks the border."
Before the diagnosis, the writer planned to take a short literary break.
After the
considerable effort required by his two previous works
,
4321
and
Stephen Crane's The Immortal Flame
(of a thousand pages each, as required by the canons of the Great American Novel), Auster had given himself over to the pleasure of
"disorderly" writing. and somewhat chaotic"
of a story that did not know exactly where it would lead.
Its protagonist is called Sy, by Seymour, and although the choice of name is not justified in the book, we find an explanation in
The Book of Illusions
.
"I feel like my health is so poor that this could be the last thing I write," he said in an interview with
The Guardian.
There we are informed that Seymour is read the same as "
see
more
.
"
And that is precisely what the good (and somewhat grumpy) Sy Baumgartner tries to do when ten years have passed since the death of his wife (
Anna Blume, another fetish name
that appears under different masks in
Travels from the Scriptorium
,
The Country of the last things
and
The Palace of the Moon
).
What follows is not the crude story of a widower, but the
shamelessly dark comedy
in which a man finds himself involved who loses the only person he was capable of loving and who desperately seeks a way to continue living without her. .
To do this, she decides to organize and publish some of the poems that Anna did not dare to send to any publisher, despite her good reputation as a writer and translator.
And it is there, among the drawers and filing cabinets of her
scriptorium
, where Sy comes across unpublished texts and old photographs in front of which one can only bow one's head to, she says, "pay tribute to the lost kingdom of youth
.
"
Then one night, she rings the phone and hears Anna's voice from something like the afterlife.
And it is as a result of that dream (
"because it can only be a dream"
) that something begins to change in him.
Before deciding on
Baumgartner
, Auster considered two other titles:
Worms
, in allusion to the
banquet of "worms"
that a robin had in the garden of his house in Brooklyn and which inspired the beginning of one of the stories in the novel, and
Phantom limb
, in reference to the
"phantom limb"
syndrome that the protagonist experiences throughout his body after his wife is
engulfed by a monstrous wave
on a Cape Cod beach. "Yes, she would still be alive if she hadn't gone back into the water." , he rebuts his therapist in the first and only session he attends.
"But if I had ever done something like stopping him from taking a bath whenever he wanted,
then we wouldn't have lasted thirty-something years together
."
Before the diagnosis, he had given himself over to the pleasure of "disorderly and chaotic" writing without knowing where it would lead him.
It matters little that Sy is more or less Auster's age or that, as he did in
The Invention of Solitude , the 76-year-old writer insists on following the trail of the ancestors of his family, the Auster family, for
a long time
.
trip, deliberately ambiguous
, that takes him to the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk, where he is surprised to see that there are hardly any Jews left.
Any autobiographical concordance fades from the first page, where Sy tries to remember a quote about pseudonyms attributed to that
"great joker" who was Kierkegaard
.
And it is this
apparent weightlessness
with which he handles complex issues that has made Paul Auster one of the most powerful writers of his generation without his status as a Nobel candidate having separated his feet from the ground a single centimeter (
"Crazed Ubu from the White House
," he calls Trump in
Baumgartner
).
Allergic to computers (he still types), he claims to have found in the voice of Siri, Siri Hustvedt, the answer to almost everything that worries him.
"I feel like my health is so precarious that this could be the last thing I write
," he said in an interview with
The Guardian
.
"And if this is the end, then coming out with this kind of human kindness that surrounds me as a writer in my inner circle of friends, well, it's already worth it."
Baumgartner
Paul Auster.
Translation of Benito.
Gómez Ibáñez.
Six Barral.
264 pages.
€20.90 Ebook: €10.99.
You can buy it here.
In
Life Imprisonment , one of
Baumgartner
's substories
, Sy describes a man
forced to make sentences in a cell
with the door always open: "After more than fifty years of days that go by quickly, it seems that my life is a mist that has rushed past my eyes.
I've gotten old, but since the days have passed so quickly, I generally feel young, and as long as I can still hold a pencil in my hand and see the sentence I'm writing,
I guess I'll stick with the same routine
I've been doing. since the morning I entered here.
Baumgartner
's plot
spans more than a century of memories and distant evocations of the family past of the main character who gives the book its title, but
it comes to an end in the first days of 2020
, before news about the pandemic begins to resonate in the news, as if beyond the border imposed by that inescapable date the words would run out or lose vigor.
It is the same resource that the New York writer used for the ending of
Brooklyn Follies
, whose narrator says goodbye walking through the streets of New York
at eight o'clock on the morning of September 11, 2001
.
CHARACTERS THAT RHYME
The parallelism (or the "rhyme", as the author would say) is relevant not only because the society that appears portrayed in his following novels is largely the
result of that poorly resolved trauma
, but also (or "above all", they trust Auster's parishioners) because Nathan Glass, the man who happily strolls through Manhattan forty-six minutes before the first plane crashes into the north tower of the World Trade Center, has just overcome lung cancer.
"He was looking for a quiet place to die
," he confesses on the first page.
"But the gods decided to forgive me," he finally celebrates.
Glass (a badly divorced former insurance broker) and Baumgartner (a distinguished professor at Princeton University who fails -
spoiler
alert - in his second and somewhat clumsy attempt at marriage) have little or nothing in common, except
the incorruptible sense of humor with who face the many setbacks
that life throws at them and a rare philosophical drive that leads them to write about human folly, weakness and madness, always waiting for something better that is to come on the next page, like
a bolt of lightning. of hope
that makes its way in the middle of the storm.