Baumgartner by Paul Auster

The novel we are introducing today is Baumgartner by Paul Auster, published in 2023, and described by its publisher as: A tender masterpiece of love, memory and grief from one of the world’s greatest writers. Paul Auster died, aged 77, in April 2024, six months after this novel was published. He was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, translator, poet and filmmaker. A best-selling author, he received many international prizes for his work, which has been translated into more than forty languages.

What’s the novel about?

The publisher’s description of the novel says:

„The life of Baumgartner (phenomenologist, noted author, and soon-to-be-retired philosophy professor) has been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years ago. Now pushing 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence….…the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals of memory and reminiscence, delineated in episodes spanning from 1968, when Baumgartner and Anna meet as young university students in New York, through their passionate relationship over the next 40 years, and back to Baumgartner’s boyhood in Newark and his Polish-born father’s life as a dress-shop owner and failed revolutionary.

Rich with compassion, wit, and Auster’s keen eye for beauty in the smallest, most transient moments of ordinary life. ‘Baumgartner’ asks: Why do we remember certain moments and forget others?“

Book recommendations from Reading Circle members

– The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt, second wife of Paul Auster (2010): The author delves into the mysteries of her own neurological condition in a far-ranging memoir that is ‚graceful, intense and curiously affirming‘. (Booklist)

– Zwischen Welten by Julie Zeh and Simon Urban (2023) An epistolary novel between two old friends, a male urban journalist and a female farmer, addressing their differing and shared views of the world. In German.

– Blue Skies by T.C. Boyle (2023): A satirical yet ultimately moving send-up of contemporary American life in the glare of climate change.

– Iron Kingdom – The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947 by Christopher Clark (2006): A compelling account of a country that played a pivotal role in Europe’s fortunes and fundamentally shaped our world. (Google)

– OSS Agents in Hitler’s Heartland by Gerald Schwab (1996): Tells the story of one of the most successful OSS operations of WW2, which took place in our own area.

– Entfalten by Reading Circle member Maria Kandolph-Kühne and colleagues (2025): Essays on their attitudes to ageing.

– The Seven Moons of Maali Almeda by Shehan Karunatilaka (2022), Booker Prizewinner 2022: a searing, mordantly funny satire set amid the murderous mayhem of a Sri Lanka beset by civil war. Sri Lankan history as a whodunnit thriller.

– Four, Three, Two, One by Paul Auster (2017): Four alternate versions of the subject’s life story.

– What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt (2003): Follows the relationship between Leo and artist Bill and the close ties between each of the characters‘ families. It explores the themes of love, loss, art and psychology. May have been influenced by elements of Siri Hustvedt’s life with Paul Auster.

– Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Yepi (2021) : A memoir of life amid the collapse of communism in Albania and the family secrets exposed in its aftermath.

Our Reading Circle has a break over the summer, so next month we will be introducing some books that we have read over the year but which have not been discussed by the Reading Circle.

Music Played

– Excerpt from the St Matthew Passion by J.S. Bach, conducted by John Elliot Gardner with the English Baroque Soloists..

– A traditional Ukranian Folk Song