Baumgartner
After the epic nature of 4321 (900 + pages) Baumgartner is a light work, yet still with Auster’s characteristic depth of thought and playfulness with fictional form. We open with a writer at his desk, ‘pen in hand … midway through a sentence in the third chapter of his monograph on Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms’ (p. 1). A New Yor intellectual, in other words – but one distracted by something burning on the stove downstairs; the call of UPS (Baumgartner orders books to have a moment of Molly’s company); and a young visitor whose father has severed off some fingers and so Rosita has come instead of her mother, his cleaner (how Auster ). As the reviewers in The Guardian and The New York Times note, the novel begins at pace. Soon Baumgartner has fallen down a staircase in his basement, and has been rescued by a young man on his first day in the Public Service Electric & Gas Company. Chapter 2 introduces a metaphorical idea about phantom limbs and how this might help Baumgartner to