Customer Reviews

Leviathan

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Paul Auster is a blatantly theoretical novelist. He dissects and deconstructs literary genres and trends with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker. But some accuse him of abandoning the delight of a story for a view from the ivory tower. I tend to disagree, for the most part, but offer up "Leviathan" as an example of an Auster book that's both a page-turner and a think-piece.

For po-mo lit-lovers, Auster is in fine form. His modus operandi of casting himself as the literary quasi-detective is in full effect here. Narrator Peter Aaron (check those initials) is married to lovely Iris (Auster is married to novelist *Siri* Hustvedt). He is a writer by trade. "My books are published... people read them, and I don't have any idea who they are... as long as they have my book in their hands, my words are the only reality that exists for them," he says, defensively.

The book he is currently writing -- and the book "you" are currently holding -- is an examination of his recently deceased friend, Benjamin Sachs ("Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of the road in Northern Wisconsin," reads the novel's enticing opening line). Sachs has enough vaguely roguish qualities to make "Leviathan" a fascinating picaresque. But he's also an idealist, and fiercely intelligent. He's a writer manque, whose first novel blew the critics away but was a failure with readers. Sachs is a character who exists mostly in absentia, periodically jumping back into Aaron's life to offer up enough details to tantalize his friend, and keep the reader off-balance. "Even though Sachs confided a great deal to me over the years of our friendship," Aaron says. "I don't claim to have more than a partial understanding of who he was. I can't dismiss the possibility that... the truth is quite different from what I imagine it to be." This is Auster playing with the concept of the unreliable narrator, only here the narrator is aware that he's unreliable. An interesting concept, that.

But "Leviathan" is not just conceptual. It's loaded with intriguing personalities, and a lot of implicit suspense. And Auster's habit of digressing from the story to discuss an interesting tangent yields at least one fascinating sequence. Sachs' novel, entitled "The New Colossus", is summarized by Aaron. Auster spares no expense, creating an appealing advertisement for a historical page-turner that doesn't exist. But within that summary he also explicates some of his own novel's grander themes.

The main one, and it's all over the place here, is America as a place of infinite possibilities for freedom but a failure in terms of realizing those possibilities. "America has lost its way," Aaron writes, when talking about the message of Sachs' book. "Thoreau was the one man who could read the compass for us, and now that he is gone, we have no hope of finding ourselves again." Further examination reveals that the Statue of Liberty, as an icon or just a concept, is "Leviathan's" dominant motif. It appears in Sachs' book and in a poignant memory from his childhood. The occasion of her hundredth birthday forms the background for the novel's great turning point. And if not for the Lady's presence, the climax of the book would be hokey and overwrought. As it is, she lends it dignity and class, amplifying its intensity and greatness.

Using spare but consequential prose, Auster has written another novel that straddles the line between pulp and intricate fiction. It never panders to the unintellectual audience, but also never dumbs itself down. And it reaches that fine balance with seemingly relative ease, a trademark of Auster's other works. Try this one first before jumping to "The New York Trilogy" or "The Music of Chance". I dare say you won't be disappointed.

Leviathan has excellent prose and narrative pacing. It is the sort of book you can read in one or two sittings. I would jump from thinking the book was completely ridiculous to sheer absorption. The male characters took themselves too seriously, but sometimes that provided a nice comic effect. I understand that Peter Aaron is roughly based on Paul Auster (P.A., and he ends up marrying Iris, who is the protagonist of "The Blindfold", based on and by his wife Siri Hustvedt), but I was wondering Sachs was based on Delillo, who the book is dedicated too. Delillo's first book is Americana, is that anything like The New Collosus? Sachs' initials also spell BS, who knows if that means anything. What is fun about Leviathan is the great plot twists, and the way the philosophical abstractions add to the suspense. Usually, for me, philosophical digressions weigh down the narrative. Reaing it a second time is fun because Auster foreshadows a lot with symbolism (Aaron's double vision at the bar for example). The female characters are generally weak, except for Maria Turner - who is probably the best character in the book. The male characters are a little charming, but they don't have the self-irony they think they do. They're clever, but not the center of the universe.

Having recently read Leviathan and The Music of Chance, I can't help but fear that anything Auster has done or will do after 1987 will always be dwarfed by The New York Trilogy. There is nothing wrong with Leviathan as entertainment - it is a fast-paced page turner with an interesting plot and enjoyable (if incomplete) characterisation. The problem is it feels like an early work by a writer of potential, not one by a great writer coming after such a masterpiece as NYT. The thematics go in too many different directions - philosophical, political and sensational - and the second half of the novel feels rushed, heading towards a conclusion that contains only a half-hearted version of the metafictive brilliance that we know Auster is capable of. Too many of the plot-lines go nowhere in the end, and the book is finally too many things at once to make a real mark.

Auster is a highly skilled and thought-provoking writer who can hold the attention like few others with the pace and punch of his sentences. He should be capable of more than is on show here, and I shall continue to read his later work with the hope that he lives up to his promise.

Leviathan is a fascinating book, and it clips along at a very quick pace - I read it over the course of a couple of study halls. It cannot, however, hold a candle to a book such as The New York Trilogy (my favorite Auster novel, and the standard to which all others are compared). Leviathan is complex, but ends up feeling rushed, particularly the second half. The characters are well crafted, but are too frequently cast aside as the plot rushes forward. Auster needed to trim the book down, or expand upon it.

Despite the hurried feeling, Levithan is nonetheless a very interesting novel, and does a wonderful job of bringing up questions about America and the American citizen's identity within America. It is fitting that the book is dedicated to Don DeLillo, a writer who frequently confronts this sort of question in his work.

All in all, an excellent read. Despite the adrenaline rush, Leviathan is steeped in a sense of philosophical melancholy. Whether or not there is hope for America, Paul Auster proves there is hope for American literature.

After reading The New York Trilogy, I immediately had to buy this book. Auster continues obsessing over certain ideas clearly weaving much of his own life into his novels. The mind of Auster had already grabbed me by the time I read this book and continues to interest me after reading it.

However, much of the criticism of Leviathan leveled by other reviewers is warranted. He does seem to make the book a tad Hollywood in its action at times. Auster is constantly left piecing together tangent stories, for example when he describes the artistic experiments of one of the narrator's lovers. He attempts to piece these stories together under the guise of style, a "music of chance" type thing that brings the thousand stories of the naked city into one novel. In retrospect, this seems a little forced and contrived to possibly meet publishing deadlines for his next novel. Perhaps he should have broke this book up into three related novellas like The New York Trilogy.

One cannot escape, however, his haunting narrative and interesting scenes. The bits and pieces of the plot are so interesting in and of themselves (if not as a whole) that this book is well worth reading. This sit-tradgety forces the reader into eccentric circumstance, closes out each quandrum for the protagonist without true resolution, and leaves the reader disturbed. However, the peculiar thing is the sense of beauty Auster always seems to convey in his somewhat dark prose. He makes the view of the world as an uncertain place filled with vague human purposes enchanting.

Leviathan probably will not go down as Auster's greatest book, nor as his best introductory reading. However, this work is worth reading because it is very Auster. For lack of a better conclusion, a mediocre book by him is ten times better than most of what's written today (except maybe Don DeLillo whom the book was devoted to).

Paul Auster has to be one of the cleverest writers around, and one of the most rewarding. "Leviathan" tells the story of Peter Aaron's 15-year friendship with Benjamin Sachs - a wunderkind novelist and conscientious objector who, ultimately through violent protest, makes his political convictions a part of his everyday life. Running from the mid-seventies to 1990, this is a tour through Reagan's America and its somnambulistic abandonment of every value that makes America great. Once again, Auster usefully blurs the boundaries of autobiography and fiction, making his unlikely tale feel real. And his choice of a "mystery story" setup and personal tone are perfect: with its largely undramatized sequences presented in the casual, reflective style of a memoir, it never gets preachy despite its political intent; and our desire to uncover the mystery of just how and why Ben died pulls us effortlessly through the labyrinth to the end. For me, the final scene was remarkably touching. Compulsively readable, perfectly pitched, and ultimately about something important - novels don't get much better than this.

I'm not interested in literary criticism or inside info about the characters in Leviathan or their relationship to real people. To me, this is just an interesting journey of a book. Introspective, but also a genuine action story, this is a book about the unravelling of the character Benjamin Sachs. There is a moment in Auster's books when a character reaches an internal crisis that derails their life. It isn't exactly a psychological portrait but to me his brilliance is the ability to reveal the fault line that exists beneath the surface of human lives. There is a common theme in his books. An event that cracks the surface of a person's life and which causes that character to slide into darkness, self destruction and despair. Something about that rings true, an understanding of the fragility of existence and personality. I haven't read many contemporary authors who can portray that lurking weakness like Auster. And the fact that he doesn't have all the answers makes his portraits more believable. There's always doubt. The mystery isn't the plot, it's the psychology of the character.

Leviathan is the first book I have read by Paul Auster, and I found it absorbing and compelling, if a bit thin. It would be hard for this subject and structure NOT to be suspenseful -- the narrator is writing against time, trying to get the book finished before the FBI figures out what he knows, and we are told enough about the situation in the beginning to make us wonder how it all happened. How does a man who had been a successful writer end up killing himself while building a bomb? And what part does the narrator play in it all? These questions carry us through, and Auster's brisk, spare writing serves the suspense well.

Unfortunately, the writing doesn't serve the characters very well. This is not a novel which will leave you with piercing portraits of unique people. Nor will it give you any great insights into modern life, or the meaning of the universe. That's okay, there are other books which do that, writers who are capable of tackling bigger stuff than Auster (check out Norman Rush, Catherine Bush, or the person to whom Auster has dedicated Leviathan, Don DeLillo). The virtues of Leviathan are its oddities; it's an entertaining novel with literary aspirations which it can't deliver on, but that doesn't mean the book's not entertaining.

The novel's greatest virtue, perhaps, is its cleverness. It is a book about coincidences, about the improbable connections which zap through our lives. It is fruitless to criticize the book for being improbable, because that very improbability is its whole reason for being. Auster is audacious in his plotting, and he moves with speed and suspense through the narrative's many convolutions.

A Leviathan is a "sea monster" or whale or "whopper" and, by extension, an euphemism for "lie" or "liar". It is not the title of this book but the title of a novel by a character in the book. Leviathan is also the title of Thomas Hobbes famous tome which examines what is meant by "freedom", power, the nature of human thought, and the exercise of power of humans in constant motion. As an artifact, Paul Auster's work has been polished until it sparkles and, like a dream, perhaps surreal, seems more real than waking life. Accordingly, I found it memorable with the writer, Auster, the power to make this work resonate. I thought his characterisation was vivid, even the least of them, such as little Maria who, at five years of age, exercised her power in destroying a relationship between her mother, Lillian, and novelist and serial bomber Benjamin Sachs. Sachs is on a journey of redemption and forgiveness and charity after killing Lillian's husband, and Maria's father, Reed Dimaggio, teacher and environmental activist.
There are a number of stories within the novel and the characters themselves have stories of their own. Beautiful Lillian had, for example, "made three different stories" of her break up with husband Reed, " one of the stories might have been real. It was even possible that all of them were real - but there again, it was just possible that all of them were false" (p. 185).
The mosaic of the various yarns do contribute to the overall pattern and do come to a satisfying conclusion.
Nevertheless, the concerns with co-incidence, chance, truth, reality, and the capacity for self deception by humans are abiding themes. There is a special thanks at the front of the book to Sophie Calle for permission to mingle fact with fiction(!!!???).
All right already, I may be a bit peculiar but I did also enjoy the erotic element of this work. Maybe it is my appreciation of film noir heroines.
An engrossing and entertaining read. Highly recommended.

Even though I've enjoyed Paul Auster's more recent screenplays, and the movies that came from them, it's a shame he abandoned novel writing as his primary mode of expression. He reached a real peak with LEVIATHAN, one that he's never matched since. The visual image in this novel is the Statue of Liberty. It's theme is how terrifying REAL freedom is, and how desperately each of us will conspire to avoid facing it in our lives. It's a brilliant piece of writing, and the best of Auster's line of truly interesting and unsettling stories.

If you're just starting out with Auster, though, you should take the time to read his novels from the beginning. You'll notice a couple of interesting things, if you do. First, Auster has said that he tried to start each of his novels where the last one left off. For instance, MOON PALACE ends with a man driving across the USA, and THE MUSIC OF CHANCE begins with a man doing just that. Then, a quirky touch by Auster, there is an umbrella that appears at some point in each of his novels, and you'll watch it go through a kind of evolution as the novels go by. And, anyway, these books contain some really fine writing.

Auster probably won't be remembered as one of the GREAT American authors (though I think Don Delillo [to whom LEVIATHAN is dedicated] very well might!). But Auster is very much in touch with the Zeitgeist of the times. HIGHLY recommended!