MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Paul Auster We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 SUNSET PARK by Paul Auster /2010/sunset-park-by-paul-auster/ /2010/sunset-park-by-paul-auster/#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:23:02 +0000 /?p=13611 Book Quote:

“He wonders if it is worth hoping for a future when there is no future, and from now on, he tells himself, he will stop hoping for anything and live only for now, this moment, this passing moment, the now that is here and then not here, the now that is gone forever.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill Shtulman  (NOV 15, 2010)

Paul Auster is one of my favorite writers; he paints his characters with taut, finely detailed, yet propulsive brush strokes. And in Sunset Park, he does not disappoint.

This novel is less postmodern than his recent book Invisible. It focuses on debris: physical debris from trashed-out foreclosed homes in Florida that Miles Heller, a Brown University dropout, rescues through his camera lens. And mental debris that Miles wrestles with after a spontaneous action on his part results in an accidental death, causing him to flee from his New York family and live in self-imposed exile down south. A chance encounter with a high school student, Cuban-American Pilar Sanchez, while reading The Great Gatsby brings fleeting connection into his life for a few happy months. But Pilar is underage and he is soon forced to flee back north to avoid her jaded older sister’s charges that could lead to jail time.

As a result of his northbound trek, Miles moves in with the other characters that populate this book: four flat-broke twentysomethings who are struggling with issues of personal identity and past failures. Together, they illegally squat in an abandoned house in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, openly evading the government and awaiting the day when eviction will become a reality. Each has placed his or her life on hold while forestalling a crucial decision. In Miles case, he is awaiting the right time to connect again with his father Morris, an independent publisher who is fighting the dissolution of both his business and marriage and has never quite given up that his son will eventually find his way back home.

The fractured narrative, told sequentially in the third-person, weaves together a number of elements: the economic recession and ensuring foreclosure crisis, baseball trivia including Jack Lohrke (“Lucky”) who cheated death repeatedly until the very end, William Wyler’s 1946 coming-home classic The Best Years of Our Lives, the demise of the literary publishing houses, To Kill A Mockingbird, and the Hospital of Broken Things, which repairs artifacts of a world that once was. This seemingly haphazard assortment is not quite so haphazard on second glance: all are centered on one’s ability to out-cheat fate and assume control of one’s own destiny…or not. The themes that Auster has explored in the past – chance encounters, tragic flaws and past events, art and soltitude, rebellion and penance – are all here again.

James Wood, the esteemed New Yorker critic, famously called Auster’s prose “comfortingly artificial.” With the exception of a few passages that I found to be inorganically graphic, I don’t agree. As these disparate elements come together at the end; the power took my breath away in ways that no artificial construct ever could.

In essence, Auster is asking: “Is luck random or is it within our control? How much responsibility can we take for occurrences? What does self-forgiveness entail? Is it worth hoping for a future when there may be no future? Should we live for the passing moment or take a bigger picture into consideration? These questions – perfectly posed for today’s tough economic times and daunting crises — will have you ruminating long after you read the last pages.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 98 readers
PUBLISHER: Henry Holt and Co. (November 9, 2010)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

Screenplays:

Movies from Books:

  • The Music of Chance (2003)
  • In the Country of Last Things (2007)
]]> /2010/sunset-park-by-paul-auster/feed/ 0 INVISIBLE by Paul Auster /2009/invisible-by-paul-auster/ /2009/invisible-by-paul-auster/#comments Sun, 27 Dec 2009 03:07:08 +0000 /?p=6844 Book Quote:

“I could have invented an excuse and told him I was late for another appointment, but I didn’t. That was the other half of the complex equation that represented my dealings with Born. Wary as I might have been, I was also fascinated by this peculiar, unreadable person, and the fact that he seemed genuinely glad to have stumbled into me stoked the fires of my vanity—that invisible cauldron of self-regard and ambition that simmers and burns in each one of us.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (DEC 26, 2009)

Invisible is my first Auster novel. It’s odd that I never got around to reading him before, but his name came up a few months ago–in praiseworthy terms–from someone whose literary opinions I respect, and so when Auster’s latest book appeared, it didn’t take much to convince me to grab a copy. While the novel is ostensibly the story of what happens to a promising young student named Adam Walker, Auster’s cleverly-constructed tale examines much larger issues, such as the impenetrable nature of truth, the long-lasting affects of grief, the savage tentacles of colonialism and fascism, and the passivity and futility of “good” in the presence of determined evil.

Invisible begins in 1967. The war in Vietnam is escalating, and yet it remains a disturbing background noise to twenty-year-old Adam, a second-year student at Columbia University. Adam is quite aware that his university enrollment spares him the unspeakable necessity of choosing the draft or jail, but Adam is at Columbia because, as a natural intellectual, he belongs there. He’s intelligent, sensitive and personable, and there’s every reason to suppose that Adam has a brilliant future in front of him.

The book opens with Adam attending a party where he meets two French people–visiting Professor Rudolf Born and his mismatched girlfriend, “the inscrutable” exotic Margot. Coincidentally, Adam has been reading poetry written by an obscure twelfth century figure, Bertran de Born–a man whose “genuine passion” was the blood and destruction of warmongering. Professor Born calls the twelfth century poet, “a man after my own heart,” a possibly facetious remark. Yet while Born makes comments about teaching classes on “the disasters of French colonialism,” the disasters seem to focus on “the loss of Algeria and the loss of Indochine,” rather than the fact that France’s colonial quests were wrong from their inception. Born’s opinion on the nature of war is a window into his true beliefs:

“Never underestimate the importance of war. War is the purest, most vivid expression of the human soul.”

While perhaps an older, more experienced person would run from a fresh acquaintance with someone as jaded and acerbic as Born, Adam is captured by a sort of fascination that is coupled with ego–he’s flattered that someone as worldly as Professor Born would single him out for attention. Adam chalks up Born’s unpleasant side to sophistication, and a fateful relationship springs up between Born, Margot and Adam:

“The truth was that I had never run across people like this before, and because the two of them were so alien to me, so unfamiliar in their affect, the longer I talked to them, the more unreal they seemed to become—as if they were imaginary characters in a story that was taking place in my head.”

To the reader, it’s quite apparent that Born and Margot want something from Adam, and a growing sense of unease begins to creep over the novel. The fact that Adam remains largely apart from this atmosphere just adds to the discomfort level as we wait for the ball to drop. But when Born proposes to give Adam thousands of dollars to found and edit a literary magazine, the offer seems too good to be true….

Invisible continues over the course of forty years, with its characters seen through various viewpoints as the thread of the story is picked up by others and transposed to France and finally to a remote island in the Caribbean. Fate plays a large hand in the story of what happens to Adam–a man whose brilliant career and naïve existence runs headlong into the twisted politics of the times. Invisible is an excellent tale exploring the tragedy of unfulfilled lives, lost moments and crushed illusions. Auster delivers a riveting narrative that successfully fuses the plot and intriguing characters with complex questions reflecting the impenetrable nature of truth.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 58 readers
PUBLISHER: Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition edition (October 27, 2009)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Paul Auster
EXTRAS:

 
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

 

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

Screenplays:

Movies from Books:

  • The Music of Chance (2003)
  • In the Country of Last Things (2007)
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