Baumgartner

Sy Baumgartner, Nine Years On

Sy Baumgartner is a 71-year-old professor of philosophy at Princeton, a man who has spent his professional life thinking carefully about the nature of consciousness and time, and who has discovered that none of this preparation was of any practical use when his wife Anna drowned nine years ago in a swimming accident while they were on holiday. He lives alone in the house they shared. He continues to teach. He burns things on the stove, forgets appointments, misplaces his glasses. He talks to Anna in the rooms she used to occupy.

Auster renders Sy’s daily life with the quiet attentiveness of a writer who is interested in the texture of ordinary survival. There is no crisis in Baumgartner, no plot in any conventional sense — just a man moving through days that are shaped entirely by the absence they are structured around. Anna is present everywhere: in the furniture they chose together, in the books on the shelves that she read and annotated, in the particular silence of a house that was once full of her and is now full of the memory of her fullness.

What makes Sy’s grief convincing rather than sentimental is precisely its refusal to arc. He is not moving through stages toward acceptance. He is not healing in any visible sense. He is simply continuing — a man for whom the event of Anna’s death has not receded but has become the permanent condition in which everything else occurs.

Editing Anna’s Manuscripts

Anna was a poet and translator, and she left behind a body of unfinished and unpublished work that Sy has been slowly, carefully, and with considerable difficulty trying to organise and prepare for posthumous publication. The task is not simple, and its difficulty is not merely practical. To edit Anna’s manuscripts is to spend hours each day in the closest possible contact with her thinking, her voice, her choices — with the person she was when she was working, which is to say the person she was most fully herself.

This work is both consolation and torment in proportions that Sy cannot separate. Reading her drafts, he encounters her again in her intelligence and her attention; he also encounters the versions of things she was working toward and never reached, the poems that were close to finished but are not finished, the translations that break off. The manuscripts are a map of a mind in motion that stops mid-thought, and editing them requires Sy to make decisions about her work that he is not sure he has the right to make.

Auster uses this subplot to think about what it means to be the custodian of another person’s creative life — to hold in trust a body of work that was made in private and that you are now required to make public decisions about. Sy’s hesitations are not neurotic but appropriate: the poems are Anna’s, and his intimacy with her does not automatically give him authority over them. The love and the editorial problem are entangled in ways that cannot be undone.

A Valediction

Baumgartner was published in November 2023. Paul Auster died in April 2024, at seventy-seven, of lung cancer. The novel was his last, and reading it now — reading Sy Baumgartner’s meditations on how to go on after the person at the centre of your life is gone — it is impossible not to hear in it something valedictory, a final settling of accounts with the themes that had occupied Auster across forty years of fiction.

The novel ends without resolution in any conventional sense. Sy is still in the house. Anna is still everywhere in it. The work of editing her manuscripts continues. Auster does not offer the comfort of an ending that completes Sy’s grief, because grief of this kind does not complete — it simply continues, as the medium in which everything else is experienced.

What the novel offers instead is something rarer: the honest rendering of a life that has been reorganised around loss and that continues, with considerable difficulty and occasional grace, to find things worth doing in the hours between waking and sleeping. Sy Baumgartner is not redeemed by his grief and not destroyed by it. He simply lives it, day by day, in the house where everything means what it means because Anna once touched it. For a final novel, this is exactly the right note — quiet, unsentimental, and lit by the full understanding of what is ending.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Auster’s final novel, a short and quietly devastating meditation on the permanence of grief and the persistence of love, which gains additional weight from the knowledge that it was the last book he completed before his death in April 2024.

Reading Guides

• Paul Auster Books in Order: The Complete Reading Guide (2026)