Leviathan

From Publishers Weekly
Auster ( The Music of Chance ) captivatingly renews a theme central to his acclaimed New York Trilogy and Moon Palace --that of the other, the shadow self whose parallel life somehow jumps the track and threatens the more sober protagonist. After his valued friend and fellow writer Ben Sachs blows himself up with a bomb, Peter Aaron reviews their 15-year bond--including their shared love for Ben's lovely wife--and tries to reconstruct Ben's life. A boyhood experience in the Statue of Liberty haunted Ben until his transformation following a plunge from a fire escape at a drunken Fourth of July party in Brooklyn. After this fall, Ben stopped writing and became the "Phantom of Liberty," detonating Statue of Liberty replicas as a sign to America to "mend its ways." Peter's writing, on the other hand, surges "as though I had caught fire." The novel explores the fictional act: the relation between conflicting stories and kinds of truth; the reading of an address book, a la Sophie Calle, as a fertile text jammed with mysterious characters; role-reversal as self-discovery, practiced by photographer Maria and prostitute Lillian, women friends intimately linked to Peter and Ben. Finally, Peter (and Auster) appropriates the title of Ben's abandoned novel, a title that evokes the biblical sea monster and, thanks to Hobbes, the state, implying that the novel is itself a monster genre that merges diverse humans, their nightmares and passions. 25,000 first printing; author tour. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Born on August 6, 1945, Benjamin Sachs describes himself as "America's first Hiroshima baby . . . the original bomb child." Forty-five years later, while the FBI investigates Sachs's mysterious death, Sachs's friend Peter Aaron attempts to explain his even more enigmatic life--the personal and political forces that propelled his progression from Vietnam War protester to successful novelist to bomb-wielding terrorist. Auster's inventive plot, reminiscent at times of works by Paul Theroux, con tains bizarre coincidences which affirm that "everything is connected to everything else" as well as disturbing ambiguities that proclaim the elusiveness of truth. Both suspenseful and meditative, this new novel by the author of The Music of Chance ( LJ 9/1/90) blends a crime story with a thoughtful examination of important psychological and moral questions. For most public libraries. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/ 1/92.- Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., CookevilleCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


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A provocative novel about friendship and betrayal, sexual desire and estrangement -- about the intrusions of the unpredictable into the everyday. Leviathan is Paul Auster at his prime, conceptualizing worlds of tremendous complication and bizarre plausibility. The chief protagonist in this story is novelist-journalist named Benjamin Sachs. At the beginning of the novel he is blown to pieces while attempting to manufacture a bomb by the side of a snowy winter road in Wisconsin. How he came to this abrupt, untimely end is the ostensible topic being investigated by the imaginary author of the present novel, one Peter Aaron, who had known Sachs well. Aaron, it seems, is particularly concerned with recounting the life of Sachs because he is afraid lest the authorities . .. will misrepresent Sachs' career.


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