Dear Great Book Guru, I just came home from a wonderful evening of Scottish music, drink, and poetry - the annual Burns Night at St. Luke’s here in Sea Cliff. What great fun and great conversations!  One of the musicians mentioned an engrossing new novel he had just read about a man looking back over the decades at moments he remembered and questioning why those moments had significance rather than others.  Familiar with the book? A Fan of Robert Burns

Dear Fan of Robert Burns, I’m guessing the book is BAUMGARTNER  by Paul Auster.  Like Burns, Auster takes the pieces of his life and incorporates it into his fiction. Baumgartner is a seventy-year-old philosophy professor who is deeply mourning his wife’s death ten years earlier.  It was a sudden, avoidable swimming accident and Sy Baumgartner revisits that day over and over imagining what he could have done to prevent the tragedy.  Interspersed with this memory are short vignettes of their time together, early childhood incidents living in Newark, his grandfather’s tales of life in Kiev, his attempts to remarry, and encounters with strangers that change destiny.  Throughout this short novel (220 pages), we see how Baumgartner is attempting to control outcomes and make sense of the tragedies he experiences – his and others.  A very thought provoking look at the power of memory and a beautiful love story also - highly recommended!