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 a strong autobiographical charge – are starred by characters who , reaching an advanced age, try to explore through the fog of forgetfulness those events of 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 most important coincidence is that all four, without exception, are prodigious storytellers.
Julian Barnes (Leicester, 1946) published the novel Elizabeth Finch (Angle Editorial/Anagram) in 2022. Last year it was the turn of Ian McEwan (Aldershot, 1948) with Lessons (Anagram) and very soon the last work of Paul Auster (New Jersey, 1947), Baumgartner (Edicions 62/Seix Barral) will be published in Spain . He will close this particular and – we admit it – arbitrary cycle Richard Ford (Jackson, 1944) with Be mine (Anagrama), the last installment of his anti-hero Frank Bascombe. If we wanted to extend the list beyond the Anglo-Saxon world, it would also include, for example, the last one by the French Patrick Modiano (Boulogne-Billancourt, 1945), Chevreuse, published by Proa/Anagrama in 2023.
It has been said of these works that they are written in a farewell key. 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”. However, Baumgartner’s reading does not suggest that this must necessarily be his literary farewell. As in other of the novels mentioned, here one senses that Auster has too many heads left to tie, too many pending excursions through the terra incognita of forgetfulness to retire the pen without fighting the penultimate battle. Hopefully so.
In this batch of excellent novels, Auster and his contemporaries sacrifice rigor and coherence to engage 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 started or a reckless encounter with a ghost from the past .
The work of Julian Barnes revolves around those whom we met in our formative stage – such as Professor Elizabeth Finch – and who 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 it could inflict on a child. Ford’s goes further. In the latest installment of a series that began with The Sportsman, the tenacious optimist that is Frank Bascombe, here a part-time real estate agent, embarks on another of his impossible journeys, now with his ALS-stricken son . Hiding behind his sarcasm, he exhausts the last days of his life, which he fears will also be his.
After reading all four books in one run, their plots intersect and converge, as if it were a single story told in chorus. The resulting feeling is the same as when one reads Modiano and discovers that, in reality, the author has been locked up all his life in a single novel: the rounds of his characters in Parisian cafes that are actually a black hole of memory; the shadow of an unacknowledged antecedent in occupied France; the last attempt to find out who that blonde woman was who disappeared without a trace…
A final reflection: what these twilight authors give us is a self-help manual for managing – between conformity and rebellion – the suspicion that at some point in the remote past we took the wrong path.
