Baumgartner : a novel
(Book)

"The life of Baumgartner--phenomenologist, noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor--has been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now pushing 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals of memory and reminiscence, delineated in episodes spanning from 1968, when Baumgartner and Anna meet as young university students in New York, through their passionate relationship over the next forty years, and back to Baumgartner's boyhood in Newark and his Polish-born father's life as a dress-shop owner and failed revolutionary....Baumgartner asks: Why do we remember certain moments, and forget others?" --book jacket