The look and title of this book suggests it is a book for grown ups, and it is. The writing style is mature and sophisticated and there is a multi-generational saga neatly fitted within 202 pages. Less is more, and Paul Auster is not an author to waste pages on needless fluff.
Sy Baumgartner is an author aged 72, and he is starting to feel the physical restrictions that come with three score years and ten. He's still working as a philosophy professor, and although retirement is calling, he's not sure how it will work out for him. His much loved wife has been dead for some years, and after living as a single man for a good while he finally found a woman in her fifties who was good company and a comfort to him.
Baumgartner's new love, Judith, is very different from his late wife Anna, both physically and temperamentally, but the relationship works and he is contemplating the next step of asking her to marry him, or at least agree to move in together.
Anna had been academic and has left a large body of work in their apartment which sits like her ghost in her old work room. Baumgartner knows he ought to do something with it but has put off sorting through the papers as it raises too many memories. Eventually he lets the memories come, and the story meanders through his childhood and the histories of various family members. The whole family picture helps to illustrate how personalities form and Baumgartner is particularly fascinated by his mother's traumatic childhood and how she still grew up to be a happy and capable adult.
I had not heard of Paul Auster before reading this book but the New York Times wrote in his obituary that he was the 'Patron saint of literary Brooklyn' and he leaves behind a good body of work that incudes novels, poetry and film making. The photographs of him fit perfectly with the type of person who I had imagined might write a book called Baumgartner.
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