Seven years after 4321
was released
, the intricate and kaleidoscopic story of four possible lives of the same man, Paul Auster, the author of
The New York Trilogy,
returns with the help of Sy Baumgartner, the cultured septuagenarian widower who, simultaneously devastated by the disturbing memory of his wife and the love he professed for her (“he no longer remembers the details except that he looked at Anna and said to himself 'remember this moment, boy, remember it for the rest of your life') , and because of the ineluctable
memento mori
of someone facing senescence, he stars in this elegiac and twilight novel that surrounds the reader with the mists of evocation and memory and the nods to his literary universe and to the writing process itself.
We are told how Sy, “a phenomenologist of a certain age, a solitary traveler who, sunken up to his waist, trudges through the mysterious ontological swamps of human perception,” writes his book
Mysteries of the Wheel
, how he takes great care in the composition of a monograph that, not by chance but ironically, is devoted to Kierkegaard's pseudonyms or how he writes, “removing typos, improving the rhythm of the prose,” a chronicle about how his trip to Ukraine to a meeting of the Pen Club was. International or one “of the many short fables that he has been writing over the years, trifles of no consequence” that contribute to composing his portrait and that perhaps “help the reader understand the state of mind of our hero” (and that of its author, that same reader thinks) at a moment in life when one already has to weigh one's faculties, to ruminate about “the loss of short-term memory.
Before they called him
senescence
”, and celebrate that “he is still capable of thinking, and since he can think, he can continue writing”, writing being the spur of memory and the infallible balm of Fierabrás.
The book invites us to remember that fundamental question that Edward W. Said asked himself in 'On Late Style': How does the decline of life influence the work of an artist?
And Auster enjoys using the old resource of Chinese boxes when he also inserts into the novel the autobiographical writings of the protagonist's former wife, the writer and translator Anna, which Baumgartner discovers in a box in accordance with the topic of the
manuscript found
, and reads before him. the reader: “There at the dawn of childhood…”.
Auster unfolds his style by inventing that of his character, who recounts his life in the first person in the texts that appear in this multiple perspective novel that shows vestiges of those Cervantes-like metaliterary and mirror games by which the author has always been seduced. , and which has in its mastery of free indirect style and in its self-conscious narrator, with a touch of tragic irony and an extreme complicit proximity to the protagonist - "we will dispense with a detailed account of those months", "we will conclude the chapter with Baumgartner sitting at his desk, pen in hand”—one of his greatest achievements.
This is a serene and compiled text that brings to mind the author's characters, such as the writer Sidney Orr of
The Night of the Oracle
and his blue notebooks, the old Mr. Blank, under the influence of
Malone, dies
of Beckett, recovering with the ghosts of the literature of her amnesiac loneliness, Anna Blume from
The Country of Last Things
, and to a greater or lesser extent it is related to some novels of loss and loneliness of late life,
Senectud
by Italo Svevo,
A Sorrow in Observation
by CS Lewis,
Philip Roth's
Elegy ,
Oh, This Looks Like Paradise!
by John Cheever,
Old Masters
by Thomas Bernhard or
Lessons
by McEwan.
And perhaps it is not out of place to link the artist Auster, who embraced literary creation in his hopeful despondency, with the artist Eugene Pota who, also struggling to achieve literary complacency in the winter of his life, conceived Joseph Heller in
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Old
.
Not only the nostalgia that permeates its pages, but also its slow rhythm and its bookish nature invite us to remember that primordial question that Edward W. Said asked himself in
On Late Style:
How does the decline of life influence the work of an artist? ?
Baumgartner , written with sadness during his fight against cancer and which enriches the introspective experience of his
Winter Diary
with the texture of fiction
, weaves a comforting web of melancholy and courage thanks to an old philosophy professor who avoids the sadness of the loneliness of old age and fight for life sustained by a “laxity loaded with memories”, as a verse by Mallarmé that Auster translated says, of an idyllic past that was cut short and in the conviction that life is forced to transform the love and to outlaw pain, thus composing a consolation of memory that brings with it a new book of illusions.
So Auster conceives of Sy as a proxy who does not know that he is one and acts as a confidant, revealing to us how the author feels in this delicate situation of his life, in which tiny daily epiphanies generate huge emotional relief and reigns supreme. uncertainty.
Not in vain, at least since he mentioned it in 1987 in an interview later collected in
Experiments with Truth
, the author is convinced that “in the process of writing or thinking about oneself, one becomes another.”
Look for it in your bookstore
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