Baumgartner (Edició en català)

by Paul Auster, Ernest Riera Arbussà (Translator)

Overview

Paul Auster torna set anys després amb una novel·la lluminosa i brillant.

Paul Auster torna set anys després amb una novel·la lluminosa i brillant. Una història tensa i expansiva sobre l'amor, el desig, la pèrdua, la memòria i la solitud protagonitzada per Seymor Baumgartner, un professor de filosofia a punt de jubilar-se.

La vida d'en Baumgartner ha estat marcada per l'amor profund i permanent per la seva dona, l'Anna, que va morir en un accident de natació fa nou anys. Amb setanta-un anys, en Baumgartner continua atrapat pels records i pels petits entrebancs quotidians, i lluita per acostumar-se a la seva absència. La visita d'una jove, estudiosa de l'obra de la seva dona, trasbalsa el seu dia a dia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788429781854
Publisher:	Edicions 62
Publication date:	02/28/2024
Series:	El Balancí
Sold by:	Planeta
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	515 KB
Language:	Catalan

About the Author

Paul Auster (Newark, Nova Jersey, 1947) és escriptor, traductor, guionista i director de cinema. Va estudiar a la Universitat de Columbia a Nova York i poc després es va traslladar a París, on va fer traduccions, ressenyes i mil i una feines mal pagades mentre intentava escriure. Edicions 62 ha publicat en català gran part de la seva obra, en què destaquen títols com La invenció de la solitud (1982), Trilogia de Nova York (1987), El Palau de la Lluna (1989), La música de l'atzar (1990), Leviatan (1992), El llibre de les il·lusions (2002), Bogeries de Brooklyn (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Diari d'hivern (2012), Informe de l'interior (2013) o 4321 (2017). El 2006 va rebre el premi Príncep d'Astúries de Literatura i va ingressar a l'American Academy of Arts and Letters. Entre altres premis, ha rebut l'Independent Spirit pel guió de Smoke i el Premi Médicis per Leviatan, i ha estat nominat al Premi IMPAC i al PEN/Faulkner. La seva obra s'ha traduït a més de quaranta llengües. Viu a Brooklyn.
Paul Auster (Newark, Nova Jersey, 1947) és escriptor, traductor, guionista i director de cinema. Va estudiar a la Universitat de Columbia a Nova York i poc després es va traslladar a París, on va fer traduccions, ressenyes i mil i una feines mal pagades mentre intentava escriure. Edicions 62 ha publicat en català gran part de la seva obra, en què destaquen títols com La invenció de la solitud (1982), Trilogia de Nova York (1987), El Palau de la Lluna (1989), La música de l’atzar (1990), Leviatan (1992), El llibre de les il·lusions (2002), Bogeries de Brooklyn (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Diari d’hivern (2012), Informe de l’interior (2013) o 4321 (2017). El 2006 va rebre el premi Príncep d’Astúries de Literatura i va ingressar a l’American Academy of Arts and Letters. Entre altres premis, ha rebut l’Independent Spirit pel guió de Smoke i el Premi Médicis per Leviatan, i ha estat nominat al Premi IMPAC i al PEN/Faulkner. La seva obra s’ha traduït a més de quaranta llengües. Viu a Brooklyn.

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