Woody Allen debuts as a novelist on the verge of turning 90

BarcelonaOn November 30, the filmmaker Woody Allen will blow out 90 candles without any film projects in progress –the last one, Stroke of luck, was released in 2023 - but having debuted as a novelist with What's with Baum?, published in English by the small publishing house Post Hill Press this Tuesday and published in Spanish by Alianza on Friday under the title ¿What's up with Baum?, translated by Manuel de la Fuente.

The story Allen tells in the novel could be the starting point for many of his films. The main character—a trademark anti-hero—is Asher Baum, a writer who fails to succeed with his philosophically charged novels and is perpetually troubled by neurotic worries about the meaninglessness of life. Shortly after his book publisher informs him that he will not publish any more, Baum begins to suspect that his younger, more attractive brother is involved with his third wife. Baum is also jealous of his son, who is more successful as an author than he is. As if that were not enough, the writer has attempted to kiss a young journalist before a public event in which they were both scheduled to participate, a detail that will not be overlooked by many of Allen's readers, who has been the subject of numerous controversies in recent years. including the accusation of abuse by one of his daughters, Dylan Farrow.

A "stupid" man in New York

What's up with Baum? recreates New York cultural life, the decline of love in middle age, and the fatal destiny of someone who, without much talent, aspires to success. He does so with Allen's usual sense of humor, which he had previously worked on in many of his films and also in book format in five collections of stories, including Featherless (1975) and Zero gravity (2022), and in the volume of memoirs Apropos of nothing (2020; in Catalan by Alianza, translated by Helena Lamuela). This is the story of a "stupid" man, an attribute that, like driving skills, once acquired "is never lost" - he wrote in this latest book. Of a "neurotic" who has never been ready for marriage, but who will marry three times, one of them to his partner's adopted daughter. The story, in short, "of an emotional chaos that, since the age of sixteen, he manages to escape "without too much trouble" thanks to "his gift for entertaining others."

It is not surprising that, considering the similarities between life and the plot of What's up with Baum?, early readers may be looking for the extent to which Woody Allen's debut novel is autobiographical.