Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Publication
Penguin (Non-Classics) (1993), Paperback, 288 pages
Description
Leviathan begins when a woman finds an address book and steals a new identity. Or it begins with a sudden, violent death. Or it begins as Peter Aaron sits down to tell the story of his best friend, Benjamin Sachs - to take us, through a life, to the road in rural Wisconsin where Sachs has accidentally blown himself up. Aaron's sole aim is to tell the truth and preserve it, before those who are investigating the case invent a story of their own. Aaron's clues are the small mysteries of any lifetime. Sachs had a marriage Aaron envied, an intelligence he admired, a circle of friends he shared. And then suddenly, after a near-fatal fall that might or might not have been intentional, Sachs disappears. For a while, Aaron's only link to him is through Maria Turner, an artist, and the one witness to Sachs's balcony plunge. Periodically, Sachs reappears, talks manically, and vanishes again - in pursuit of mercy or salvation, in thrall to an idea. Since the first book in his brilliant and acclaimed "New York Trilogy," Paul Auster's "rare combination of talent, scope, and audacity" (The New Republic) has given us worlds in which chance and destiny collide, in which solitary protagonists take us on mysterious, soul-wrenching journeys unparalleled in contemporary fiction. His seventh novel is about friendship and betrayal, sexual desire and estrangement, and the unpredictable intrusions of violence in the everyday. Rooted in American mythology and archetype, Leviathan is both timeless and resolutely about this moment. It is a daring and immensely moving story by "one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers" (The Times Literary Supplement).… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member Steven_VI
I've never read a Paul Auster novel that I didn't like, but among the five or six titles I have read there are some that rank higher than others. Leviathan is one of those, because it seems to define what Auster is all about. It has the unreliable narrator, confronting two stories of different
The hero in this case is Benjamin Sachs, a writer like so many of Austers heroes, and by the time the reader has finished the first sentence of the book Benjamin Sachs is already dead, not just killed but almost annihilated by a bomb blast. In his familiar style, Auster takes the reader back and forth in his story, giving him from time to time a hint of what is to follow or sometimes going back to important moments already mentioned before and giving them a new perspective, creating layer upon layer of interpretation of what really happened - and ultimately questioning the notion that one is ever able to know what really happened. At one point the first person narrator Peter Aaron (a writer, unsurprisingly, sharing Austers initials) proposes that perhaps two different stories can be true at the same time.
One of the most intriguing characters in the book is Maria Turner, an undefined artist whose work centers on the act of observation. Her projects include photographing meetings with friends, posing as a stripper, shadowing strangers and paying a private detective to shadow her. This is Auster at his best: he mentions a few projects in passing, leaving the reader to fill in the details for himself.
Both these strategies, the layering and the compact miniature portraits, give Leviathan and other Auster novels their richness in detail: 245 (densely printed) pages that seem to hold as much information as classics twice that length. Despite all this, the reader never feels overwhelmed by the details, the novel doesn't seem to have a complicated structure, the storyline is clear and, despite the mystery, straightforward. The ability to be both complex, post-modern, even experimental and at the same time compelling, clear and convincing make Auster one of the greatest living writers, and Leviathan an incomparable experience to read.
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characters that can't be brought into agreement; the magnificent miniature portraits of the main characters, each single one of them a complete book in their own rights; the uncanny coincidences that lead to life-changing experiences; the distant scent of a proud and worthy America; and finally, the rise and, ultimately, unavoidably, the fall of an American hero.The hero in this case is Benjamin Sachs, a writer like so many of Austers heroes, and by the time the reader has finished the first sentence of the book Benjamin Sachs is already dead, not just killed but almost annihilated by a bomb blast. In his familiar style, Auster takes the reader back and forth in his story, giving him from time to time a hint of what is to follow or sometimes going back to important moments already mentioned before and giving them a new perspective, creating layer upon layer of interpretation of what really happened - and ultimately questioning the notion that one is ever able to know what really happened. At one point the first person narrator Peter Aaron (a writer, unsurprisingly, sharing Austers initials) proposes that perhaps two different stories can be true at the same time.
One of the most intriguing characters in the book is Maria Turner, an undefined artist whose work centers on the act of observation. Her projects include photographing meetings with friends, posing as a stripper, shadowing strangers and paying a private detective to shadow her. This is Auster at his best: he mentions a few projects in passing, leaving the reader to fill in the details for himself.
Both these strategies, the layering and the compact miniature portraits, give Leviathan and other Auster novels their richness in detail: 245 (densely printed) pages that seem to hold as much information as classics twice that length. Despite all this, the reader never feels overwhelmed by the details, the novel doesn't seem to have a complicated structure, the storyline is clear and, despite the mystery, straightforward. The ability to be both complex, post-modern, even experimental and at the same time compelling, clear and convincing make Auster one of the greatest living writers, and Leviathan an incomparable experience to read.
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LibraryThing member updraught
The protagonist dies in the first sentence of this novel. What follows is an account of the events leading up to this. This does not sound very exciting at first. However, Auster manages to make it very much so. As the story unfolds the protagonists doom does not seem as inevitable as in a Kafka
Very cleverly written and enjoyable.
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novel, yet his fate looms all the more heavily as the reader already knows it.Very cleverly written and enjoyable.
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LibraryThing member JimElkins
This is, by most people's account, a minor novel of Auster's, and so it may be an especially go one to raise the question of what drives the work, as opposed to what happens when the writing succeeds in some more specific way. This book has a kind of unremitting literalism in its narrative. In a
After fifty pages or so I finally realized what that was all about: Auster is driven, in this book at least, with an overpowering desire to keep my attention, to be the one whose stories I want to hear. It's a kind of underlying urge to write, independent of his subject matter. It pushes so hard on his imagination that it even prevents him from pausing long enough to construct metaphors, analogies, figures of speech, or other tropes that could make the writing interesting in itself. A typical example of a trope is this:
"But a new element was added to the already unstable mixture of the past twenty-four hours, and it wound up producing a deadly compound, a beakerful of acid that hissed forth its dangers in a billowing profusion of smoke."
This passage, like others involving figures of speech, is a rare interruption in a generally prose that's generally free of metaphor, and it's awkward: first the "element" is a "compound," then it's a container of acid. The acid "hisses forth" (an overdone image, and a dramatic and clichéd qualifier), and then the "hiss" becomes "smoke." The sentence is confused and hard to picture; it's as if Auster were writing at speed, and couldn't be bothered to stop and tune up his images.
That sense of the rush to write also comes out in passages that seem never to have been re-read:
"Iris was just twenty-four back then, a dazzling blond presence, six feet tall with an exquisite Scandinavian face and and the deepest, merriest blue eyes t be found between heaven and hell."
It's not hard to find yourself writing boilerplate text, but even a single editing session should reveal and correct drivel like this.
In "Leviathan" it's as if the psychology, politics, characters, style, and mood of the novel are all arbitrary, and what matters is writing continuously, adding new plot elements with every sentence, propelling the story onward. I began to feel this (his intense desire to hold my attention no matter what the subject might be) as a kind of unslakable desire to compel attention, and in that way the book began to be more and more what it almost is: a book about an ambitious author and his struggle to write.
Auster is known for metafiction, and for writing about writing, and those devices might be the best expressions of what really matters to him--by which I don't mean participation in postmodernism and its possibilities, but his own ambition to keep a reader's undivided attention. I hope this observation can't be generalized across metafiction or literary postmodernism--that is, I hope many more things are at stake in self-referential fiction. It's often said that Auster practices a literary fiction version of popular crime fiction, blending metafiction with complex narratives. I imagine people generally mean that his work is an interesting, literary variation on the sorts of tight, complex narratives typical of crime fiction. But I wonder if it might not be better to say he uses devices of postmodernism in order todo what popular trade press authors do--write what Naipaul disparagingly called "puzzles." I can't imagine a reason for reading another of his books.
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nearly blank, neutral voice, the narrator tells us dozens of dates, places, and names; in part that's justified by the notion that this is a book written at speed in order to provide legal evidence about one of the narrator's friends. But aside from that, the studiously neutral tone is increasingly difficult to understand. Auster barely uses adjectives; he doesn't pause to pick the write phrase, or find the right image; his writing is utilitarian and evidential, even when the subject is sex, love, murder, or jealousy. After fifty pages or so I finally realized what that was all about: Auster is driven, in this book at least, with an overpowering desire to keep my attention, to be the one whose stories I want to hear. It's a kind of underlying urge to write, independent of his subject matter. It pushes so hard on his imagination that it even prevents him from pausing long enough to construct metaphors, analogies, figures of speech, or other tropes that could make the writing interesting in itself. A typical example of a trope is this:
"But a new element was added to the already unstable mixture of the past twenty-four hours, and it wound up producing a deadly compound, a beakerful of acid that hissed forth its dangers in a billowing profusion of smoke."
This passage, like others involving figures of speech, is a rare interruption in a generally prose that's generally free of metaphor, and it's awkward: first the "element" is a "compound," then it's a container of acid. The acid "hisses forth" (an overdone image, and a dramatic and clichéd qualifier), and then the "hiss" becomes "smoke." The sentence is confused and hard to picture; it's as if Auster were writing at speed, and couldn't be bothered to stop and tune up his images.
That sense of the rush to write also comes out in passages that seem never to have been re-read:
"Iris was just twenty-four back then, a dazzling blond presence, six feet tall with an exquisite Scandinavian face and and the deepest, merriest blue eyes t be found between heaven and hell."
It's not hard to find yourself writing boilerplate text, but even a single editing session should reveal and correct drivel like this.
In "Leviathan" it's as if the psychology, politics, characters, style, and mood of the novel are all arbitrary, and what matters is writing continuously, adding new plot elements with every sentence, propelling the story onward. I began to feel this (his intense desire to hold my attention no matter what the subject might be) as a kind of unslakable desire to compel attention, and in that way the book began to be more and more what it almost is: a book about an ambitious author and his struggle to write.
Auster is known for metafiction, and for writing about writing, and those devices might be the best expressions of what really matters to him--by which I don't mean participation in postmodernism and its possibilities, but his own ambition to keep a reader's undivided attention. I hope this observation can't be generalized across metafiction or literary postmodernism--that is, I hope many more things are at stake in self-referential fiction. It's often said that Auster practices a literary fiction version of popular crime fiction, blending metafiction with complex narratives. I imagine people generally mean that his work is an interesting, literary variation on the sorts of tight, complex narratives typical of crime fiction. But I wonder if it might not be better to say he uses devices of postmodernism in order todo what popular trade press authors do--write what Naipaul disparagingly called "puzzles." I can't imagine a reason for reading another of his books.
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LibraryThing member wouterzzzzz
Intruiging story about a writer, Peter, having only limited time to tell the world the story of his best friend's, Ben, life. The reason why he does so, an unknown man blew himself up, is weird, and for a long time, you are kept in the dark how on earth this man is supposed to be Ben. With Peter
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being Ben's friend, much of what he tells is about himself, and the people he knows well. Every character is thoroughly described by Peter (or basically, by Auster), and it makes that for a large part of the book, you're overloaded by information, without really knowing why this is important. Only in the second part of the book, things start to come together, and the life of Ben starts to make sense (well... maybe it makes less sense). I would definitely recommend the book if you like stories, and especially those in which the characters are very important. More important than the events that take place. Show Less
LibraryThing member lucasmurtinho
My first Paul Auster, and to this day my favorite. His characters have never felt more as if they came from a Greek tragedy, unable to do anything but follow the strange path laid down by coincidences before them. And it got even more important after 9/11, with its subtle questioning of American
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patriotism and the apology it makes of a certain kind of terrorism. Show Less
LibraryThing member GeorgMayer
If Auster would not have written "The Book of Illusions" I'd vote for "Leviathan" as his all-time masterpiece. It is a wonderful story, that is told in a warm tone, that touches you and lets you truly feel what is going on in the person who is telling the story. A perfect book.
LibraryThing member iayork
Entertaining Oddities: I enjoyed the writer writing about himself writing a book about himself and his writer friend (who blows himself up) against the clock of the FBI.
I thought the book excelled at the inner questioning of all of the oddballs even though the transitional links between them were
The plot is rather thin and is more a catching us up with the narrator/author's life and how the victim fit in it so we can understands the dynamics before the FBI breaks down the door and hauls him away.
I thought the book excelled at the inner questioning of all of the oddballs even though the transitional links between them were
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clumsy. We really do not know anything about our neighbors/friends outside of our outer definition of them and this book hammers that theme home. Auster ups the ante with a high degree of betrayal as well. The plot is rather thin and is more a catching us up with the narrator/author's life and how the victim fit in it so we can understands the dynamics before the FBI breaks down the door and hauls him away.
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LibraryThing member PapaDubs
Not my favorite Auster read so far but still quite enjoyable. I liked "The New York Trilogy" much better.
LibraryThing member iftyzaidi
Auster's prose is mesmerizing. Once you start reading, it simply pulls you along, as the narrative unfolds in a series of confessions, drawing the reader into greater and greater intimacy with the cast of strange and wonderful characters that populate the world of this novel. The twists and turns
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of the plot are bizarre and unexpected, stretching credulity, but all the more gripping for doing so. This is enthralling stuff. Show Less
LibraryThing member verenka
I am a bit torn on this book. I loved the beginning and how the story is set up. It really grabbed me and made me want to keep on reding to find out why the storyteller would know someone who blew himself up on the side of the road.
After the first half or so, I felt the story didn't live up to my
After the first half or so, I felt the story didn't live up to my
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expectation. It didn't drag and I still enjoyed the carefully crafted narrative, but it didn't quite captivate me as much. I still rate is as an 8 because I think it's excellent storytelling! Show Less
LibraryThing member dawnpen
Obnoxious as it may seem (and is); Leviathan is about a writer writing Leviathan about a writer who already wrote Leviathan. And just to make things interesting the "writer" smells faintly of (who else) Paul Auster who is (of course) writing the novel. Yippie.
LibraryThing member lilywren
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
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 thread that highlights how we often don't truly know about the lives, thoughts and even personalities of people we are close too.
It isn't my favourite Auster book and, as someone commented in an earlier review, the plot is a little thin. That said, it still kept me interested to the very end.
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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 thread that highlights how we often don't truly know about the lives, thoughts and even personalities of people we are close too.
It isn't my favourite Auster book and, as someone commented in an earlier review, the plot is a little thin. That said, it still kept me interested to the very end.
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LibraryThing member palaverofbirds
Not exactly what I hoped for. It starts off with a bang (har har) but soon after the intriguing first chapter drifts into kind of bland relationship drama and some narrator yakking on and on. I didn't think the stories of the book built up for the ending. They just seemed there to fill the space
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between the opening teaser and the rather dull finale. Not to say it was unenjoyable or a waste of time, but it just didn't live up to it's promises for me. Show Less
LibraryThing member hemlokgang
I was somewhat disappointed in this novel. Not my favorite by Auster. A man retrospectively analyzes the decline of his friend, whose demise is explosive, literally.
LibraryThing member BooksForDinner
Am I crazy or does it seem when you are reading a Paul Auster novel and you look down and realize you only have 10 pages or so left, that the novel doesn't seem like it should be ending. It feels right in the middle of things and then, well, book's done. Another fine outing from Mr. Auster.
LibraryThing member brendanus
Explaining a man who had blown himself up.
LibraryThing member sturlington
I’ve heard a lot about author Paul Auster, who is sometimes the toast of NPR and has also been behind one or two literate screenplays for movies I never got around to watching. But this is the first novel of his that I’ve read, and all in all, I was disappointed.
The first problem was Auster’s
The second problem was of story. The book didn’t seem to have much of one, although it kept hinting at a dire, fated outcome, which kept me turning pages to look for it. All the build-up contributed to the final letdown, as well. By the end of the book, I wasn’t convinced that anything was motivating the characters. And I was disappointed, because I think Auster has the potential to be a great writer. He has a literate style and a knack for description. I just wish he could tell a better story.
The first problem was Auster’s
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writing style. Auster doesn’t write in scenes or even snippets of action. Rather, he rambles on in description, forming gigantic paragraphs and incessant chapters (this 275-page book only had 5 chapters). The events of the story didn’t seem to move along so much as to be dragged, and the characters were not people we got to know, but rather people that someone else was telling us about, if you can grasp the distinction.The second problem was of story. The book didn’t seem to have much of one, although it kept hinting at a dire, fated outcome, which kept me turning pages to look for it. All the build-up contributed to the final letdown, as well. By the end of the book, I wasn’t convinced that anything was motivating the characters. And I was disappointed, because I think Auster has the potential to be a great writer. He has a literate style and a knack for description. I just wish he could tell a better story.
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LibraryThing member eclecticheart
This is my favorite book ever (this was probably the eighth or ninth time I've read it). The details are fantastic. The whole story depends largely on coincidence, but it never feels contrived.
Subjects
Awards
Prix Médicis (1993)
Notable Books List (1993)
Language
Original publication date
1992
Physical description
274 p.; 7.92 inches
ISBN
0140178139 / 9780140178135