Love in the moment of truth

Is there anything more plausible than the tragic “madness of grief” that Paul Auster tells us about in

Baumgartner

?

In his novel, despite living, as he himself says, “in the country of

Cancerland

”, he has the detail of continuing to bet on the strident stupor that reality produces and maintaining an unconditional faith in fiction, as well as a no less unconditional faith in love.

And so much so that, by making the “madness of grief” of the widower Baumgartner so plausible, Auster creates the ideal narrative path to reach a supreme moment, worthy of any anthology of love stories: the telephone rings in the night. and the dilapidated widower hears, from beyond, the voice of his wife who died nine years earlier.

Although necessarily ambiguous, the fraction of verisimilitude of this episode creates sufficient conditions for the reader to be trapped by the author's skill in the art of fiction.

An art that, from that magical and masterful moment, leads him to frequent the emotions that will mark the passage to the rest of the novel, created with that type of naturalness in modern writing that is usually attributed to Stendhal, monarch precisely of all the love books.

At

Baumgartner

we are told that if we are lucky enough to be closely connected to another person, so close that the other is as important as yourself, life will not only become possible, but also

lived

.

Which is like saying that, with or without a cold grave, love is more eternal than the silence of death.

And that, at the end of our days, it only counts if you have loved someone and they have loved you.

“Has love become something undervalued in the contemporary world, perhaps because other values ​​provoke more interest?”

This is one of the questions that David Trueba asks Woody Allen in his recently released and brilliant film-interview

A Day in New York

.

Woody Allen's response (which brings me back to Auster's novel): “I think that if you watch movies set in the present day, or period films, even if you read books from today, love is always there.”

Love and crime, Woody points out.

And crime refers to death, to “madness of grief”, to the classics love and death, to which the third theme always needs to be added, the passage of time, a cliché that cannot be missing in the triangle of themes that are always present. there.

For Woody Allen, love and death “have remained stable, from Greek tragedy until now, “through Shakespeare, Chekhov, and reaching Scorsese.”

He says it to David Trueba with the same prodigious serenity that he maintains throughout the entire film-interview, where he subtracts any type of pomp from his career, even falling into humility, even knowing, as it can be assumed that he knows, that The problem with humility is that you can't brag about it.

But that's what Woody seems to be interested in: not bragging about anything, as if he wanted to tell us that everything he filmed was easy, it came

together

.

And only love, as Auster tells us in

Baumgartner

, counts at the moment of truth.

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