The Word Depot : 2024-01-07

Saturday 13 January 2024

"C.S. Lewis versus Paul Auster"

A Review

by Cándido Pintos Andrés

Sometimes a book calls you up at the right moment. More than twenty years ago the film “Shadowlands” was recommended to me by a friend, after a long talk about God and grief. My love for Debra Winger did the rest; that is how I found C.S. Lewis and “ A Grief Observed.”

The nights of this grey and rainy autumn were a fabulous opportunity for pulling out of the drawer many films and songs almost forgotten: “Smoke” was the chosen one.

“Smoke” is an independent film from 1995 directed by Wayne Wang and based on a story written by the American author Paul Auster, whose short story “Auggie Wren's Christmas Story” plays an essential role in one of the best and most highly known scenes.

So, with the fresh reading of “A Grief Observed” and Paul Auster unconsciously in my mind, another greyish evening led me to a bookshop and, once among the shelves, my eyes focused instinctively on the last book by Paul Auster: “Baumgartner.” And I bought it

In “Baumgartner,” Paul Auster offers a tender reflection of loss, memory, and grief in such a way that I could not help but think that Paul had been in our reading workshop last week and had rewritten, with other words, many of the paragraphs of C.S. Lewis’s book.

“Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one.” (Lewis)

“He is a human stump now, a half-man who has lost the half of himself that had made him whole, and yes, the missing limbs are still there, and they still hurt, hurt so much that he sometimes feels his body is about to catch fire and consume him on the spot.’ (Auster).

"And grief still feels like fear." (Lewis)

"To live is to feel pain, he told himself, and to live in fear of pain is to refuse to live. "(Auster)

"I had yet to learn that all human relationships end in pain" (Lewis)

“(...) to be as deeply connected as they were when she was alive can continue even in death for if one dies before the other, the living one can keep the dead one going in a sort of temporary limbo between life and not-life, but when the living one also dies, that is the end of it (...) ”(Auster)

So ..was this book calling me up? I will never know it but the fact was that I felt I had closed the circle.

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