Paul Auster’s Baumgartner — in the shadow of death

Sy Baumgartner sits down, steadies his breathing and “asks himself where his mind will be taking him next”. In response, his head supplies an image of his wife’s face. She has been dead for nearly a decade.

This moment occurs near the end of Paul Auster’s 18th novel, but it could well be the beginning. Baumgartner follows the movement of its protagonist’s mind; that mind returns, again and again, to Anna, the woman he loved for 40 years. Against his will, he recalls her death: “The fierce, monster wave that broke her back and killed her, and since that afternoon, since that afternoon — no, Baumgartner says to himself, you mustn’t go there.” Much like that monster wave, his mind takes him where he does not want to go.

Auster has long explored ideas of disaster, causality and coincidence. His 1980s New York Trilogy spun those themes into tricksy webs. And his last novel, 4321 — published in 2017 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize — recounts four versions of a man’s life as the angle of chance’s hand is tweaked. Born in 1947 in New Jersey like Auster himself, the story of Archibald Ferguson is determined and redetermined. The preoccupation endures with Baumgartner, as Auster tunes in to how accident and choice make a person.

The novel begins in April 2018 and ends in January 2020. The protagonist, a Jewish-American professor, has worked at Princeton for 34 years, an “aging phenomenologist” in his seventies and author of nine books. Things happen — he falls down the stairs, romances a woman, writes — but the focus is the past. Anything can prompt recollection, particularly given that Baumgartner’s home is unchanged since Anna died, down to the study where she worked as a translator and poet.

Told in third-person present tense, Baumgartner has the vernacular of a person thinking off the cuff — a character who is thoughtful yet a little puffed-up. The sentences are springy and propulsive. A UPS worker reminds Baumgartner of Anna and he over-orders books to encourage her visits. He struggles to pinpoint the similarity. “A sense of alertness, perhaps, although it is a good deal more than that, or else . . . the power of an illuminated self-hood, human aliveness in all its vibratory splendor emanating from within to without in a complex, interlocking dance of feeling and thought — something like that, perhaps, if such a thing makes any sense.” There is thrill in this live phrasemaking. Auster animates how a thought is sandpapered into its final form.

Folded into Baumgartner’s reminiscences are the stories others have passed on to him: the compromises his mother made; his father’s irrevocable choices. Baumgartner tumbles into Anna’s world via her archive — “through her letters and manuscripts . . . he found her voice again”. Some of his rediscoveries are excerpted. Anna writes of a man attempting to mug her in the dark: “Nothing more than a flash or two from the whites of his eyes, a cryptogram of a person, a smudge in the night.”

At the time, the event confronted Baumgartner with his feelings and he proposed to her. We learn this from Anna’s poetic recollection, written decades later and reread years after by Baumgartner. It is one of many displays by Auster of how we carve life into stories, and then retell them for meaning: for ourselves and for one another.

Later, Baumgartner pens an account of a trip to the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk, where his paternal grandfather was born. That trip is identical to one Auster took himself, down to the date; the tale excerpted in the novel, “The Wolves of Stanislav”, was originally published as a 2020 piece of non-fiction. There are instances like this throughout Baumgartner: overlaps or references you can make something from, or not. On Baumgartner’s father’s side is a family line he knows little about: the “obscure Auster side that had . . . not one living relative anywhere in sight”. Paul Auster narrowly misses a spot in the novel’s universe. (No great tragedy: he moonlights as a private eye in City of Glass.)

That’s like complaining when a pub serves beer: meta-intrusions are a requisite of Auster novels

Then there’s Baumgartner’s wife’s name, “Anna Blume” — a Kurt Schwitters poem. “Blume” is also German for flower, a motif in the only poem of Anna’s we see. Baumgartner (“tree gardener”) is riffable, too: the family tree . . . preserving family stories . . . fated connection to blume . . . is there meaning in this? Not exactly. They are flashes of reflection in a hall of mirrors Auster has long loved to construct.

But Auster resists the conjuring tricks of, say, his New York Trilogy. Baumgartner is a more intimate book. Still, I wanted more — I wanted Baumgartner to unravel, the thread to snap. The author can intrude on the narrative: “We will end the chapter with Baumgartner sitting at his desk, pen in hand.” These flourishes introduce a push-and-pull between intimacy and distance. But that’s like complaining when a pub serves beer: meta-intrusions are a requisite of Auster novels.

Auster, who is 76, finished Baumgartner while unwell — he is being treated for cancer. The novel is inflected with the perspective granted by the author’s seven decades and the reality of his condition. Much like Baumgartner, Auster has been with his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, for more than 40 years. As ever with Auster’s novels, we make eye contact with him through mottled glass. (In fact, “Auster” is scrambled into Baumgartner’s full name twice.)

Hints of reality intensify the novel’s reflection on what it is to love someone and what a partnership might look like when one half is no longer there. Auster has always been enchanted by memory, chance, echo. Here, the charge of that obsession electrifies.

Baumgartner by Paul Auster Grove Press $27/Faber £18.99, 202 pages

Rebecca Watson is the author of ‘little scratch’ and the FT’s assistant arts editor

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