Baumgartner, by Paul Auster: hello sadness. In his new novel, the American writer has lost the virtuosity of the New York Trilogy.
What remains is the good old metafiction, literary references and foot-dragging prose. The septuagenarian hero is a philosophy professor at Princeton. He burns himself with a pan he left on the stove. Bad luck, Baumgartner falls down the stairs and bruises his knee, which causes “a howl imitating the din of forty lynx pushing…”