Paul Auster's dribble into old age, a teenager's cry of despair, the United Kingdom after Brexit and other books of the week

Paul Auster (1947) published in 2012, at the age when many people retire,

Winter Diary

, an autobiographical document in which he opened himself up and offered the reader with irony and without any shame the intimate version of a tortured author. and hypersensitive that was reviewing an entire life.

Now, at 77 years old, seven years after his wonderful kaleidoscopic novel

4321

, the person responsible for

The New York Trilogy

returns to the literary foreground with

Baumgartner

,

a kind of literary fiction of those emotional memoirs.

It is a narrative in which Auster intersperses, as if they were metaliterary games or Chinese boxes, various

found

texts , and which make up the story of a person who tries by all means to avoid the sadness generated by the loneliness of old age, the unstoppable inflation of nostalgia and fear of memory loss.

Also highlighted this week is Julia Viejo's novel titled

Bad Star

,

whose protagonist, a 13-year-old girl, struggles between the childish treatment that her environment provides her and the adult impulses that already haunt her brain.

With a mother admitted to a center for the mentally ill and a father immersed in a corruption trial, Vera, which is the teenager's name, goes through that time of her life with the sole company of her friends Miguel and Ana, and the strange presence de León, a man dressed as a nun who blurs the limits of the imagination.

Other books reviewed by Babelia

experts

are

A Snow Cold

,

in which the Australian writer Jessica Au describes the fragile relationship, with intergenerational intercommunication problems, but also linguistic ones, that a Hong Kong mother and daughter establish during a trip to Japan. more adapted to her life in Australia than to her roots;

Pure Color

,

a curious novel in which Sheila Heti establishes a novel theology in which God is just a wild card;

The author's lexicon

, by Roland Barthes, which collects the material from the seminar held at the École des Hautes Études between 1973 and 1974;

and

Una isla adrift

,

an interesting analysis by Ana Carbajosa in which the EL PAÍS journalist analyzes the situation in the United Kingdom after Brexit.

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