A NICE NIGHT'S ENTERTAINMENT ON THE FOURTH OF JULY:

Fireworks Over Brooklyn

We're at a party in a modern bohemian fourth floor apartment in Brooklyn.

The guests include publishers, writers, artists, film-makers, musicians and various minders, acolytes and drummers disguised as waiters.

It’s July 4, 1981 (or is it 2003 or 2012 or all three, I don't know, the script doesn't say), barely twenty minutes before the fireworks are due to begin.

LYDIA DAVIS (who has just arrived, it’s her second party of t More...

For me the tale did not merit the lengthy narrative, the book within the book seemed contrived and interfered with the tension. I felt it was too much blathering and was in need of editing. Perhaps it's a case of not being able to latch on to either of the main male characters as sympathetic or interesting. The female protagonists started out as more captivating particularly since I'd seen museum exhibits of Sophie Calle and immediately recognized her in Maria but they were reduced to pretty muc More...

WOW! WOW! WOW! No wonder Siri married him. I really think serious stalking in Brooklyn is a possibility my next trip to New York. I utterly ADORED this book. Complete satisfaction. It is not a very long book but it is incredibly dense and the narrative moves along at a good clip. This is the fourth Paul Auster I have read this year and none have been the same. BUT BUT I strongly suspect that this may not be for everyone. It is almost review proof because you really can't say much about the plot. More...

I can't remember the last time I read a book that was so emotionally draining as Paul Auster's Leviathan. I have been reading it at work for the last week or so, and finally in the home stretch of the last hundred pages today, I started walking around with my head down and my coworkers kept asking if I was okay. That's a feat to behold.

Auster's books are some of the most finely crafted works I have ever had the pleasure of reading. Maybe the stories don't always get wrapped up cleanly, or the ch More...

The opening line reels you in: "Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of the road in Northern Wisconsin." I read this novel when it was first published around 1992. And because I just finished reading the author's memoir, I pulled Leviathan from the shelf and suggested to my partner that he read it. He zipped through it in two days, so I decided to revisit it (for a third time). Auster likes to touch on the absurd or the existential in his work, but this novel is (or seems to be) a rat More...

Once I read a quote and it went something like...the best and only way we have to see inside someone's mind is through reading. That's not always the case, sometimes books (even very good books) are fairly shallow in that respect, relying more on clever plots and cinematic vividness of descriptions. But in Paul Auster's books, it's always possible to see inside someone's mind, inside someone's heart. It's a fascinating journey each time. Only now, having read a bunch of his books, I am beginning More...

"Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of the road in Northern Wisconsin..."

In 1992, the great American author Paul Auster chooses this kind of sentence to start his book. From this moment onwards, the main figure Peter Aaron (also a writer) is going to tell us about this man who decided to shorten his life drastically: Benjamin Sachs, another (imaginary) writer, a man whose views in life may sometimes have astonished his surroundings. He has also been Aaron's best friends for a long t More...

I always mistakenly think this was the first book I ever read by Paul Auster. It wasn't. Moon Palace was. I do remember reading an advance copy of this that I pulled off the shelves of the publisher I worked for at the time. It felt like I was stealing, though he wouldn't have cared, and couldn't have ever known I did that unless I told him. By chance, the day I placed it back on the shelf, the publisher gave it & that Sun & Moon Press book The Art of Hunger to one of the staff members t More...

Elegant Examination Of One Character's Descent Into Madness

Noted Brooklyn, New York-based novelist Paul Auster is in fine form in his novel "Leviathan", which can be regarded as an interesting, highly literate, example of crime fiction which ought to resonate with anyone interested in seeing a character's descent into madness. In this early 1990s novel, Auster has cast himself as a fictional doppelganger, the novelist Peter Aaron, who witnesses the gradual descent into madness by his best friend More...

Não, não é o livro de Thomas Hobbes.
Não, não se trata de uma besta bíblica do mar e do medo (pelo menos não a princípio).

Esse é o nome de um livro de Paul Auster. Uma obra que se dilata e contrái em diversas câmadas, tornando tênues os limites da ficção e da vida.
Se Aristóteles lesse Paul Auster ele o consideraria um trombadinha, um mero detentor da técnica manual da escrita, mas não de seu significado. Em sua obra não há nada de necessário, provável. Há apenas, no decorrer das páginas, a catars More...

Paul Auster's Leviathan], like most of his other work, hinges largely on chance and coincidental relationships. At the same time, this novel is much more fatalistic than his other work, mostly due to the frequent use of foreshadowing including the start of the book in which it is revealed that Benjamin Sachs, the character that the book focuses on, has recently blown himself up accidentally.

Leviathan is an interesting title for a couple of reasons. The more obvious reason for this title is as a More...

I was introduced to Auster via The New York Trilogy which was gifted to me by a friend.

A modern day flaneurial style and self-reflexive narrative, that self-consciously comments on its own nature as a fiction is an addictive trait in most of Auster's books and of the three I have read the appeal has not yet waned.

Leviathan gripped me throughly, and though a little too drawn out in places, never failed to lose its overall pace. The story was one of the ordinary turned extraordinary but never bec More...

Apesar de não me "aspirar" para dentro da acção como nos meus livros preferidos, se a intenção do autor era fazer um elogio à amizade e lealdade e uma critica mordaz à Hipocrisia norte-americana em relação aos símbolos dos seus valores, então isso foi conseguido. Ainda assim esperava melhor dum autor com este renome, ainda assim só depois de ler outros livros dele é que verei se o coloco ou não na prateleira dos autores preferidos, ou na prateleira dos autores a ler de vez em quando... Parte pre More...

Na mijn laatste teleurstellende leeservaring (Sunset Park) merkte ik dat ik niet echt afgeschrikt was om gewoon weer een Auster mee te nemen op vakantie. En het was weer een lekkertje! Het is al een 'ouwetje' (1992), misschien scheelt dat, houd ik gewoon meer van de ouwe Auster dan van zijn recente werk...

Het verhaal
Schrijver Peter Aaron heeft zojuist in een krantenberichtje gelezen dat een onbekende man zichzelf heeft opgeblazen. Direct realiseert hij zich dat dit zijn beste vriend Ben Sachs mo More...

Paul Auster has been an acclaimed author through the latter half of the 20th century. His work often portrays what happens through a series of chance meetings and reveals that every detail of the book has been well-considered and placed in the narrative for a reason. In Leviathan Auster presents a deeply focused narrative that centers on the relationship between Peter Aaron, the narrator of the book, and his best friend, Benjamin Sachs. The story builds the complex relationship between these fri More...

I was disappointed by this book which I was reading as one of the 'Revolutionary Writing' series. I think it was because there was nothing particularly revolutionary about the plot or the characters portrayed. The tie between the terrorist act which starts the book and the characters whose story is told seems to be almost non existent and when it is finally revealed (although hinted at from the first) it seems utterly improbable. I expected there to be something far more in the plot. As someone More...

Auster rolls out a captivating narrative about friendship, betrayal, disappointment and committment against the backdrop of the counterculture politics of the Sixties and the 1980s New York literary scene. As with many of Auster's novels, it seems tinged with autobiographical details. Clearly, the narrator is a writer very much like Auster, married, divorced, moved to Paris, moved back, became famous. One wonders if there he actually bonded with someone like the protagonist, Benjamin Sachs. From More...

9/15 - re-read completed last night. It still seriously tanks out with the Berkley episode and repetitively-revealing-resolution ending but the first 2/3rds is much, much greater than I'd given it credit for.



8/29 - re-reading w/ gf, she's never read it and I'm also reading Sophie Calle's Double Game so a re-read is in order

First read in July 2006

Auster explores the role of chance and coincidence in the lives of a group of strangers. As anyone who has read Auster’s The Red Notebook knows, coincidences abound in his own life and he knows whereof he speaks.

The book is told as a sort of flashback, the story behind the headline, as it were: “Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of the road in northern Wisconsin.” For the next 275 pages Auster endeavors to demonstrate how the man came to be there. The story follows the circuitous p More...

Leviathan – Published in ’92, Auster’s themes are once again prevalent in this work: happenstance, failure, disappointment, coincidence and most importantly, identity - in this case the identities of the novelist (the character Peter Aarons) and the subject of his latest book, the protagonist Ben Sachs. The author, Aarons, is up against one of the most impossible of deadlines: to finish the book about his friend before the completion of a police investigation in which the author could be regarde More...

I love this book, but it doesn't really help that Paul Auster is my favorite author. The book is a quick read but dabbles in depression, self exploration, love and hate. These subjects are usually what his books cover.
Though all of his pieces have a depressing feel to them, this one is more fun than the others. I mean, who doesn't love explosions, especially ones that are thought to be connected with terrorists? Or enjoying a release that you know is definitely wrong...but at the same time can More...

Todo comienza con un muerto anónimo: en una carretera de Wisconsin, un día de 1990, a un hombre le estalla una bomba en la mano y vuela en mil pedazos. Pero alguien sabe quién era, y con el FBI pisándole los talones, Peter Aaron decide contar su historia, dar su versión de los hechos y del personaje, antes de que la historia y las mitologías oficiales establezcan para siempre sus falsedades o verdades a medias como la verdad. Y así, Peter Aaron escribirá Leviatán, la biografía de Benjamin Sachs,

More...

"Six days ago a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin." The great opening line of this novel bodes well for what follows and what follows is a great plot well executed. It is part straight up mystery, part contemplation upon the creative process, part subtle political commentary, but always an intelligent reader's page turner.

"Leviathan" is more conventional and less claustrophobic than many of Auster's other novels. The principal character, Benjamin Sachs (the secretiv More...

می توانم بگویم در تمام لحظاتی که کتاب را می خواندم، مسخ شده بودم. هر خط از داستان یک بمب کوچک بود که در ذهنم پیش فرض ها را منفجر می کرد. آستر به معنای واقعی کلمه در مورد " انسان " می نویسد و رابطه ی او را با جهان تصادف ها به شکلی منظم پیش چشم خواننده تصویر می کند. طوری که عجیب ترین و نادرالوقوع ترین اتفاقات، امری بدیهی جلوه می کنند. و آن چه به نظر من خارق العاده می آید، درست بعد از تحقیر باورهای پیشین اتفاق می افتد؛ " کشف حقیقت "
اشتیاق بی پایان و فزاینده ای در من هست که می خواهم ساعت ها و روزها More...

A novel about a novelist who feels the burden of writing a sort of apologia for another writer who has died in an explosion of his own making, and was potentially responsible for a number of terrorist attacks across the U.S.A. Auster's confidential style creates a an imminently readable flow and as the narrator attempts to tell the whole story, piecing it together from hearsay as much as first-hand experience, we realize the Leviathan of the novel is the story itself, too large to truly be under More...

A tentative 4 stars for now.

Writing: Auster's style was something that grew on me. I didn't exactly enjoy the rambling nature of his wording nor did I think it was quotable enough to immediately grab my attention. This is where I wanted to give the book 3 stars instead of 4. But...

Themes: These I found fascinating. Sachs was a far more interesting character than the narrator and I was glad to find early on that the story would revolve more around him than the latter. Most of Leviathan's best sce More...

Leviathan is a book that illustrates wonderful writing, character development and description. This isn't a 'thriller/car chase/'oo what happen's next?' However, there is something about Auster's writing that makes sure you want to pick up the book as soon as possible and continue reading the wonderful prose.

The story centres around writers Ben Sachs and his friend Peter. Peter writes about his friends life and their relationship over the years and throughout the book seems be the undercurrent t More...

While much of this work is prosaic and biographical, the (mis)adventures of Benjamin Sachs did manage to keep my attention. The Phantom of Liberty is a compelling yet thinly sketched character. No doubt inspired by Ted Kaczynski and the Weathermen, he simultaneously holds out the promise of America as a shining beacon of liberty, and a failure to live up to that promise. It is disquieting to think of an activist liberal eschewing an endless empowering dialogue in favor of bomb making, and yet ev More...

I'm on a quest to catch up on late 20th century novels from respected but not NYT best seller-type authors. Paul Auster has been on my "must read" list for a while, and I grabbed Leviathan from the Lexington library a few weeks ago.

I loved the 80's New York setting; the bromance between writers Ben and Peter; and the sharp, fluid writing. But Auster has lots of BIG IDEAS on his mind and I found myself shifting between reading for plot figuring out Auster's metaphorical prose. Coincidence; secret More...