Weaving together memory and life, loss and mourning, coincidence and moments
A heartbreaking story about the relationships and love that surround life.
Paul Auster's brilliant final chapter

It is a record of the absences and enduring losses that fill life.
There is natural sadness, but it is not just sadness.
Even in that loss, Baumgartner and Auster discover the power of imagination, or rather, the power of dreams.
Something that is fiction, but more powerful than the truth.
- Geum Jeong-yeon (writer)

Paul Auster, with his magical literary skills, sparkling wit, keen observation, and profound intellect, portrays the diverse facets of human history.
He debuted with acclaim as a "rising American star," and has solidified his position as a representative writer of American literature, demonstrating outstanding skills in both novels and prose for over half a century.
He has also been praised as “the greatest writer of our time” and “the greatest writer of words” for his unique originality, boldness, and brilliant sense of humor, enough to be called a literary genius.
The novels 『New York Trilogy』, 『Palace of the Moon』, 『4 3 2 1』, and the essay 『The Typewriter That Bakes Bread』.
Representative works include “Talking to Strangers.”


This novel, written by Paul Auster while battling an illness and anticipating the end of his life, and published on the first anniversary of his death, captures loss and mourning, memory and the present, the flow of time, and the meaning of life through the eyes of Professor Sai Baumgartner, who is nearing retirement.
This is a full-length novel published six years after 『4 3 2 1』(Open Books, 2023), but in contrast, it is a short work of about 200 pages. This novel concisely and delicately condenses Paul Auster's thoughts on the truth and power created by writing and fiction, and the aesthetics of coincidence, the themes he has dealt with throughout his life. It was praised by the press for "packing so much into such a short book," and was evaluated as reminiscent of his early works while also showing the mature thoughts of the author nearing the end of his life.

Professor Baumgartner, who lost his wife in a tragic accident ten years ago, lives with the loss as if suffering from phantom limb pain.
One day, as a series of strange incidents occur, he stares blankly at a blackened pot, and memories of his wife suddenly begin to flash back to him.
His wife's lifelong but never-published writings and the manuscripts Baumgartner was working on became intimately and naturally intertwined with his inner journey, and Baumgartner, who was finally able to look back on the past without fear through fiction, fantasy, and story, felt that he was finally able to break free from the past and enter a new realm of life.
A new lover who makes him decide to propose to a man who thinks he should be completely faithful to the present, and a young female scholar who wants to study his wife's unpublished manuscript appear one after another, adding new stories to his life... ... .

Standing at the end of life, I look into the loss and emptiness.
The dazzling fragments of memories brought up there

Or why fleeting moments, encountered by chance, remain persistently in our memories, while other, more significant moments fade away forever.
- Page 141

Like his surname, which means "gardener," Baumgartner begins to explore the fragments of life that are intertwined like branches in the garden of memory.
The novel spans several scenes and episodes, from the time he first met his wife as a poor aspiring writer in New York in 1968, to their 40 years together, and from their childhood in Newark to his recollections of his father, a tailor and failed revolutionary.
By closely following one character's inner narrative, Paul Auster quickly draws readers into a tangled web of coincidences.

One of the most important themes that runs through the novel is “loss” and “memories” that come to us at unexpected moments.
From the burnt pots and old coffee cups, the birds in the yard, and the pure white clouds, the “floats of memory” that have drifted from the past that has already disappeared slowly flow into Baumgartner, and Baumgartner calmly watches as the time that has passed, the changed body, and the memories slowly disperse and disappear within him.
At the end of such passage of time and loss, what Baumgartner gains is not simply the disappearance of all things, but the sparkle of the remains remaining in the empty space, and the power to accept the “change” itself that passes through a long time.
Through Baumgartner, who experienced the immense loss of his wife's death, this novel tells the story of how we can mourn the loss of a loved one and move on with our lives, and of the many things that still exist at the end of our lives, breathing life into the meaning of life given to us in a dry yet warm way, akin to Paul Auster.

The love and relationships that make up life are like trees.
Existence is a small thing that is connected to the countless things that make up the universe.

For someone who is not connected to other people, life is like no life.
When you're lucky enough to connect deeply with someone, to the point where that other person becomes as important as you are, life becomes not only possible, but good.
- Page 123

In his last novel, Baumgartner, written with a premonition of the end, Paul Auster goes beyond the constant theme of death in his work, and, in the face of that very imminence, conveys “the importance of our relationships with other people and each individual to our lives” (The Guardian). He says, “You have to think of love as a kind of tree or a plant,” and focuses on the incomprehensibility of love and relationships and the other in life, and the complex “entanglement” of it all.
It says that in order for us to sustain love, we need that very entanglement, that all relationships are “connected,” and that, even though the other is a complex, unfamiliar, confusing, and “never fully understandable” being, we must organically “change” while being entangled with it.


According to Oster, we are small things, but “small things connected to countless other small things that make up the universe.”
In the dice-like game of God, what we can confirm in that mystery is that we are colorfully and clearly 〈connected〉.
Through this tree-like connection, which is also a grand metaphor that runs through the work, Auster powerfully pushes forward and unfolds the possibility of connecting not only with the typist but also with the dead, a core theme he has long explored: the power of story.
From it he salvages what might be called a recovery from emptiness and emptiness.


Auster's "Story" is an alternative world that can be covered by the inevitable death and loss, and it touches on the most important emotional truth of human beings, and as the author Geum Jeong-yeon said, it is a matter of discovering "something that is fiction but better than the truth."
In his final work, where the power of the stories he has dedicated his life to shines more strongly than ever, Paul Auster captures the beauty of life's trivial, accidental, yet true moments, and sends us a final farewell that will remain with us for a long time.

A word from the translator

It is worth noting that the feeling that we are just “small things” that are “part of a great puzzle,” that is, that we are small things that have to live in a puzzle, is not painful, but that we do not know “how good it is.”
Perhaps it is because we are “small things” and yet part of something, “small things” yet “small things connected to countless other small things,” and this too is the secret of Auster’s ultimately affirmative voice from which we find solace.


At first glance, it looks small, but if you go under the branches, you will find a surprisingly wide shade. As you delve deep into this novel, which is like a tree, and listen to Paul Auster's final farewell message, which is devoid of sentimentality or humor, I hope that readers will gain the strength to live their own small lives.