They have in common that they write in English, that they are approaching eighty years of age, that they have published or are about to publish a new novel in Spain and that their latest plots – with marked autobiographical overtones – are carried out by characters who, when they reach an age advanced, they try to explore through the mists of memory those events from the remote past that determined the rest of their lives.
Another parallel: they all publish in Spanish – or have published – in the same publishing house, Anagrama.
Although, in reality, the biggest coincidence is that all four, without exception, are prodigious storytellers.
Julian Barnes (Leicester, 1946) published his novel Elizabeth Finch (Anagrama) in 2022. Last year it was the turn of Ian McEwan (Aldershot, 1948) with Lessons (Anagrama) and very soon the latest work by Paul Auster (New Jersey, 1947) will be published in Spain, Baumgartner (Seix Barral) will close this particular and -lo we admit – arbitrary cycle Richard Ford (Jackson, 1944) with Be Mine (Anagrama), the latest installment of his antihero Frank Bascombe.
If we had wanted to extend the list beyond the Anglo-Saxon universe, it would also have a place in it, for example, the latest by the Frenchman Patrick Modiano (Boulogne-Billancourt, 1945), Chevreuse, also published by Anagrama in 2023.
It has been said of these works that they are written in the key of farewell. Especially that of Auster, who is being treated for cancer and who, in recent statements to The Guardian, said that he believes that his health “is precarious enough to think that this could be the last thing he writes.”
Despite this feeling of the writer himself, Baumgartner’s reading does not suggest that this is going to be his literary farewell. As in other of the novels cited, here we sense that Auster has too many loose ends left, too many pending excursions through the terra incognita of forgetfulness to retire his pen without fighting the penultimate battle. Hopefully it will be like that.
In this batch of excellent novels, Auster and his contemporaries sacrifice rigor and coherence to enroll in an exciting journey through the spiral of their own memories. So dizzying is the journey of its protagonists that they end up immersed in extreme vulnerability, always at the mercy of a devastating letter, a conversation they should never have had, or a reckless date with a ghost from the past.
Julian Barnes’s dalliances revolve around those whom we met during our formative years – such as Professor Elizabeth Finch – and whom chance wanted to be decisive in our way of being or not being. A process similar to that of McEwan’s novel, with the background of abuse by an adult who ignored or wanted to ignore the lasting damage that could be inflicted on a child.
Ford’s goes further. In the latest installment of a saga that began with The Sportswriter, the tenacious optimist that is Frank Bascombe, here a part-time real estate agent, undertakes another of his impossible journeys, now alongside his son who is sick with ALS. Protected behind his sarcasm, he hastens the last days of his life, which he fears will be his own.
Read the four books in one sitting, their plots intersect and converge, as if it were a single story explained in a choral manner. The resulting sensation is the same one you have when you read Modiano and discover that, in reality, the author has spent his entire life enclosed in a single novel: the wanderings of his characters through Parisian cafes that are actually a black hole of the memory; the shadow of an unspeakable antecedent in occupied France; the last attempt to find out who was that blonde woman who disappeared without a trace…
One last reflection: what these twilight authors give us is a self-help manual to manage – between conformity and rebellion – something as sensitive as the suspicion that at some point in the remote past we took the wrong path.
