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Baumgartner

A Novel

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Baumgartner

Written by: Paul Auster
Narrated by: Paul Auster
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About this listen

Paul Auster’s brilliant 18th novel opens with a scorched pot of water, which Sy Baumgartner—phenomenologist, noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor–has just forgotten on the stove.

Baumgartner’s life had been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals of memory and reminiscence, delineated in episodes spanning from 1968, when Sy and Anna meet as broke students working and writing in New York, through their passionate relationship over the next 40 years, and back to Baumgartner’s youth 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? In one of his most luminous works and his first novel since the Booker-shortlisted tour-de-force 4 3 2 1, Paul Auster captures several lifetimes.

©2023 Paul Auster. Portions of this book were first published in Harper’s Magazine and Literary Hub. Recorded by arrangement with Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2023 Audible, Inc.
Genre Fiction Fiction
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I guess the story was intended to be a character analysis. Well that’s all it was. I took nothing away from it except that life is dismal and disappointing. I would never read it again or recommend it.

Odd little story

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