Author: Paul Auster
Book title: Baumgartner
No. of braille volumes: 4
No. of pages in braille issue: 434
Publisher of the book in black print: Geopoetika [Geh-oh-poetica]
Place and year of publishing: Belgrade, 2024
No. of pages in black print: 151
About the book:
Paul Auster’s last novel, Baumgartner, has been described by critics primarily as a work about aging, memory and loss. Yet for its protagonist, Sy Baumgartner, a professor of philosophy and ethics at Princeton who is nearing the end of his professional career, these experiences become a reason to keep moving forward. It is the “go on” from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” In Baumgartner, aging serves as an opportunity for the protagonist to learn to accept the new realities of his body, something he does with resilience, even though he occasionally makes clumsy, humorous, and awkward mistakes along the way.