Although the idea of a triptych associated with Paul Auster (Newark, 1947) immediately refers to The New York Trilogy, the three stories, intertwined and appearing in the eighties, where the detective and the metafictional posed a fascinating game that catapulted the author Internationally, much later there was a second trilogy, unofficial and less playful.
Between 2002 and 2005, the author chained what he himself would define as “my trilogy of battered men” – The Book of Illusions, The Night of the Oracle, Brooklyn Follies –, novels starring individuals faced with loss and disease, ultimately rescued from their black holes by chance discoveries that managed to reconcile them with life. Six years after his last novel – the monumental 4 3 2 1 , consummation of the narrative possibilities of that motif so dear to the author as chance, and with which he threatened to say goodbye to the genre, exhausted – and after two books that could be described as rarities within his production - the mixture of biography and critical analysis that was Stephen Crane's The Immortal Flame and the denunciation essay that was A Country Bathed in Blood -, Auster takes up the concept of the "battered man" in Baumgartner, but this Perhaps salvation does not come from the hand of deus ex machina or blows of fate, but from acceptance and healing nostalgia.
At 71 years old, Baumgartner, a successful writer and university professor of Philosophy on the verge of retirement, has mainly his memories left, a creature full of the past, to whom loneliness and lack of creative inspiration invite him to an exercise of vital recapitulation and to take refuge in the defining moments of his passage through this world. Widowed for nine years, Baumgartner lives in a kind of sweet mourning, because no matter how much the absence hurts, the ghost continues to give off warmth. While the unforgettable sad tobacconist in the film Smoke, scripted by the writer, photographed the same corner of Brooklyn every day to end up discovering an image of his deceased loved one that served as a luminous epiphany, Baumgartner carries that image inside, at every moment. There is a Light that Never Goes Out, as The Smiths sang.
Had it been written decades ago and its protagonist also been a decade younger, it is very likely that its story would have had a surprising engine or an unexpected generator that would open a new path of possibilities that are as uncertain as they are exciting. However, Auster, now firmly installed in his seventies, wants to communicate to us through his late creature that, in the end (of existence and of a literary career), love surpasses any achievement, in its enjoyment or in Gratitude for services rendered lies the true magic (more than in any artifice served by fiction).
The tribute to the memory of Baumgartner's wife is the heart of a book that is built with a sweep of biographical episodes - his childhood in Newark, marked by the early death of his father, the lives of his parents, his love for baseball. , the interest in philosophy, the literary vocation...– and some present disappointment – a new romantic relationship that does not bear fruit, projects that do not come to fruition...–, exposed by a third-person narrator who flees from all drama and victimhood, and appears to be overflowing with affection and tenderness for the vicissitudes and eccentricities of his sitter.
Let's admit it, not much is significant about Baumgartner (although this is largely the message, everyday life is the treasure), and among the scattering of anecdotes, there are some that are much more interesting than others, there are even passages and reflections that he already addressed in the memoirs Diario de Invierno and Informe del Interior, but as an unexpected novel about the author's own old age and delicate health; A wise novel, of pure life filtered, analyzed and weighed, a novel of celebration of the worldly gifts received, it strikes a chord and leaves a mark.
