At the beginning of Paul Auster's latest novel, titled Baumgartner (Seix Barral), there is a shocking scene. It is the image of fingers amputated by an electric saw. An oversight, thinks Baumgartner. Although the accident does not happen to him, but to the husband of his domestic help, Baumgartner imagines the sequence of scenes and mentally reconstructs the tragedy. He does it through gritted teeth, as if it were happening to him.
Starting with this episode, Paul Auster tricks us into a story of loneliness and phantom limbs, identifying the sensation that assails after a limb has been amputated with the feeling of losing a loved one. Just as the limb detached from the body continues to hurt, tingle or sting, the lost being continues to feel closer than ever despite its absence. The cause of this phenomenon remains an enigma, but the most commonly used hypothesis is the one that considers this phenomenon as an effect of cortical reorganization after amputation. With this, Paul Auster achieves a twilight novel where the perception of the amputated limb becomes the memory of the loved one, in this case Baumgartner's wife, a woman who has died at sea, in an absurd way.
In this way, the phantom limb syndrome floats over the entire novel, being the theme around which a hypnotic plot circulates that fragments with forays into intimate diaries and handwritten poems; The literary game in the Cervantes way – a trademark of the Brooklyn writer – makes its way into a novel where scientific truths intersect with emotional truth; a novel where the unconscious, the nocturnal side of the human soul, emerges from the depths of the psyche of each and every one of the characters who relate to Baumgartner, the protagonist of the novel, a seventy-two-year-old man who is going to living the last chapter of his life among packages of books that are piled up in a house that is too big for him.
One of the therapies to treat the neuropathy of the aforementioned phantom limb syndrome is the so-called mirror therapy and that, roughly and to understand each other, it consists of placing the non-amputated limb on one side of the mirror and the stump behind it so that it does not appear reflected. From here, “mirror-symmetrical” movements are performed. Following this pattern, Paul Auster places his protagonist in a gallery of mirrors where his relationships with other women who are symmetrical to his deceased wife are reflected.
Due to all these details, Auster's latest novel has a superficial reading, that of the widower who faces loneliness, and another scientific reading where the phantom limb syndrome underlies each paragraph. The writer from Brooklyn has managed to weave another story of his own where the most important thing – the quantum substance – is not seen, but he will determine the course to be followed by Baumgartner in search of his own cortical reorganization.
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