Baumgartner (Spanish Edition)

by Paul Auster

Overview

Baumgartner es un eminente escritor y profesor universitario, tan excéntrico como increíblemente tierno, que hace nueve años perdió a su mujer. Su vida estuvo definida por el amor profundo y duradero que sentía hacia Anna y ahora, con 71 años, continúa luchando por vivir en su ausencia. Su historia común arranca en 1968, cuando se conocen como estudiantes sin dinero en Nueva York y a pesar de ser casi opuestos en muchos aspectos, inician una apasionada relación que se prolongará a lo largo de cuarenta años. La superación del duelo por la pérdida de Anna se intercala con historias maravillosas -desde su juventud en Newark hasta la vida de revolucionario fracasado de su padre en Europa del Este- y con una poderosa reflexión acerca del modo en que amamos en distintas etapas de la vida. El esperado regreso a la novela de Paul Auster, que acompaña al inolvidable profesor Baumgartner en el viaje por los recuerdos de toda una vida.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9786073910651
Publisher:	Planeta Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/28/2024
Edition description:	Spanish-language Edition
Pages:	264
Sales rank:	676,065
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Language:	Spanish

About the Author

Paul Auster (1947-2024) fue un escritor, traductor y cineasta. Autor de los libros Jugada de presión (1982), escrito bajo el pseudónimo de Paul Benjamin; La invención de la soledad (1982); La trilogía de Nueva York (1987), compuesta por las novelas Ciudad de cristal (1985), Fantasmas (1986) y La habitación cerrada (1986); El país de las últimas cosas (1987); El Palacio de la Luna (1989); La música del azar (1990); Pista de despegue (1990); El cuento de Navidad de Auggie Wren (1990); Leviatán (1992); El cuaderno rojo (1992); Mr. Vértigo (1994); A salto de mata (1997); Tombuctú (1999); Experimentos con la verdad (2000); El libro de las ilusiones (2002); La historia de mi máquina de escribir (2002); La noche del oráculo (2003); Brooklyn Follies (2005); Viajes por el Scriptorium (2006); Un hombre en la oscuridad (2008); Invisible (2009); Sunset Park (2010); Diario de invierno (2012) e Informe del interior (2013) y editó el libro de relatos Creía que mi padre era Dios (2001). 

 Auster recibió numerosos galardones, entre lo que destacan el Premio Médicis por la novela Leviatán, el Independent Spirit Award por el guión de Smoke, el Premio al mejor libro del año del Gremio de Libreros de Madrid por El libro de las ilusiones, el Premio Qué Leer por La noche del oráculo y el Premio Leteo. En 2006 recibió el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras. Fue miembro de la American Academy of Arts and Letters y Caballero de la Orden de las Artes y las Letras Francesa. Su obra está traducida a más de cuarenta idiomas. 

Paul Auster (1947-2024) was the bestselling author of Man in the Dark, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions, The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other honors are the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix Medicis Étranger for Leviathan. He has also been shortlisted for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions) and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (The Music of Chance). His work has been translated into more than forty languages.

Hometown:

Brooklyn, New York

Date of Birth:

February 3, 1947

Place of Birth:

Newark, New Jersey

Education:

B.A., M.A., Columbia University, 1970

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/09/2023

Auster (The Brooklyn Follies) offers a profound character study of a man whose advancing years are shaped by mourning and memory. Sy Baumgartner is a 70-year-old philosophy professor at Princeton who, at the novel’s outset, has spent the past decade grieving his beloved wife Anna’s death in a swimming accident. Though he attends to a banal domestic routine, writes scholarly books, and even proposes marriage to a divorced colleague, Sy is so surrounded by effects of his old life with Anna (including manuscripts of her poetry, a book of which he shepherded into print posthumously) and so steeped in his reminiscences of her that at one point he becomes convinced she’s called him over a long-ago disconnected phone line to assure him “that the living and the dead are connected, and to be as deeply connected as they were when she was alive can continue even in death.” Sy lives simultaneously in both the present and the past, and Auster navigates these two narrative tracks nimbly: an uncovered box of Anna’s postgraduate papers leads to a reverie about her and Sy’s courtship decades earlier; a present-day moment of absentmindedness conjures recollections of Sy’s multigenerational family. The effect builds to a beautiful approximation of memory’s fluidity and allure. This is one to savor. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Baumgartner:

“Baumgartner’s mind is full of late-life insights and angst, while his capacity for love provides a rich emotional seam. Auster packs a lot into this slim novel… An always intriguing writer.” – Kirkus

“The subject of lost loved ones and all that follows in the wake of such a loss is hardly unusual in contemporary literature, but Paul Auster's Baumgartner is a worthy addition to the body of fiction that treats the subject. It's a well-drawn portrait of a man wrestling with grief, and a sensitive character study that displays many of the qualities for which Auster's been lauded in a long literary career… Baumgartner's story is revealed in episodic fashion and with precise, observant, and sometimes touching detail… Poignant.” – Shelf Awareness

“Auster presents his eighteenth novel, a finely distilled tale of a charmingly self-deprecating and forthright intellectual and romantic… Auster's portrait of a thoughtful man embracing loss and love is a gorgeous, subtly suspenseful revelation of the covert dramas of a contemplative, kind, and expressive life.” — Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

Praise for Paul Auster:

“One of the great American prose stylists of our time.” —New York Times

“Auster really does possess the wand of the enchanter.” —New York Review of Books

“One of the great writers of our time.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Contemporary American writing at its best.” —New York Times Book Review, on Invisible

“A literary original who is perfecting a hybrid genre of his own.” —Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

2023-07-26
An elderly philosophy professor sorts through grief, mortality, and late love.

Raised by a mother surnamed Auster in Newark, New Jersey, educated at Columbia University and in Paris, married to a translator—for the title character of his latest, Auster dips often into the autobiographical well. As the book opens, S.T. Baumgartner, age 70, has been mourning his late wife, Anna, for 10 years when mishaps darken an otherwise ordinary day. He has a nasty fall, he learns that his cleaning lady’s husband has severed two fingers in a work accident, and he burns a pot he’s had since he first met his wife. Auster likes to stir up apprehension, but none of these misfortunes can match the frisson when a disconnected phone in his late wife’s study impossibly brings a call from her, telling him about the afterlife and how they remain connected. As Baumgartner, amid typical worries about how much future he has, frequently revisits the past, the narrative of his falling for Anna and their marriage takes shape—yet the strange phone call also frees him to enjoy love again, with a colleague at Princeton. Then another woman appears and seems to promise a different sort of emotional investment, this one tied to his late wife. Auster is not as textually tricky here as he has been in previous novels. He does bring back publisher Morris Heller and son Miles from Sunset Park (2010). He has Baumgartner working on “a serio-comic, quasi-fictional discourse on the self in relation to other selves,” which sounds like a study of Auster’s fiction. Baumgartner’s mind is full of late-life insights and angst, while his capacity for love provides a rich emotional seam. Auster packs a lot into this slim novel, including, alas, prose so prone to cliché that the mind winces.

An always intriguing writer mostly playing to his strengths.

Kirkus Reviews