Kamakana's Reviews > Leviathan

181021: well. i have read 17 books by Paul Auster, over the years (decades...), ranging widely in appreciation from great joy to good to ok, so i have decided to do this kind of (meta? mega?) review of what are his apparent concerns, who are his usual characters, his usual world, his usual interpersonal relationships, how the plot will be driven or informed by coincidence, how these are particularly literary works that yes you can read twice or more...

1) in silence, aside from occasional background hum, politics are never foreground, never truly affecting the plot of his characters, except in one case the protagonist basically starves himself to ensure rejection from the army during Vietnam, but as some of his work was read only so long ago, i might be mistaken on this perception. always, his characters live some versions of his life, nothing but the usual northeastern american, usual educated, slightly leftist, often translator and poet or writer, who has no problems with observing, in a slightly unnerving, removed way, the progress of a friend in his writing or politics, usually impressed, usually envied- but also somehow not a friend he closely follows...

2) having read so many of his works, i cannot help but name this character, this event, involving and essential, familiar, mild confusions of his life in which the narrator is mostly passive and paranoid, that show up to varying styles in each book. he is a postmodern writer, his work never as difficult as modernists. his characters do find time to become essential friends, adopt and play, wonder and scheme, even as he himself denounces his simplest most innocuous acts, innocent acts, that have great consequences that cannot help but support a paranoid idea of himself or his situation. and in a postmodern way of course inserts his name in the phone call for a person he is not... then his character slips into this or that existential void, his character sometimes give up his agency, his life, pulled by obscure guilt, allowing this life that is not his to become his (this other man he is not) life, his character drifting given role or purpose and somehow this pleases him, this comforts him, even or maybe more because it is absurd, in hauling stones, in shattering stones, yes, the world of extending this useless stone wall is absurd in The Music of Chance... but it is at least purpose?...

3) this reaction to the void is what has always drawn me to read him again, starting with the thrice-read The New York Trilogy, in which the narrator adopts various disguises but truly becomes a sort of literary private investigator who is summoned by mistaken identity and, in a postmodern way, must inevitably fail to solve the case of language, of trauma, despite certain work and certain accidents that could help him. then his character waves farewell to the other who has hired him, for whom he has investigated, first of language then of characters then of the plot, the plot without ‘arc’, without solution, without resolution, this hard boiled innocent p.i. who could be considered collateral damage. the usual tropes of the p.i. genre are subverted, though i kept seeing it as a deconstruction, for pervasive deception, for dark ethics, for compromised morality, for inevitable ‘femme fatale’, this case ultimately kind of dissolving rather than ending in triumphant restoration of the pre-crime world, the recovery of a moral, logical world...

4) and then there is what could be subtitles under any of his titles: ‘life as coincidence’, that is what will matter, will build, will reinforce the true helplessness of having a plan for your life, will be so absurdly useful/necessary to keep the plot, even as it crosses from coast to coast, even in the slightly bothersome way this or that other or the narrator himself is too aware of this absurdity but somehow unable to escape, that the world must be fantastic, must be coincidence, comes to believe that rather than plans, the best thing is ‘coincidence’... yes be open to possibilities, yes i can see this but i would prefer to apply any of my limited intellect and emotions to vague promises of ‘plans’, i would like to believe my intentions make a difference, maybe my plans are useful if not ‘successful’, that ‘coincidence’ is by nature so rare, that result in ‘plot’ only seen after the fact, so you will not be able to plan or prepare for all the possibilities, and anyway as the far more helpful the common aspects of life we can prepare for, we name ‘probability’, we name ‘contingency’... this is me musing on philosophical views of even fictional worlds, this is me arguing it, this is me bothered in my ongoing fascination though i live and think of art in another way...

5) and then there are the aspects of his various worlds, the phone books, the essential narrative inside the narrative, that i often find most sad and haunting: that the artistic project, the telephone call, the needed connection, the phone book that ends up as- (unmentioned, is that searcher rewarded? does he starve to death when his exit is blocked?), the subtext that art is maybe necessary, but is more a expression of the futility of any sort of communication from artist to audiences, from character to character. this may just be my prejudice, for i want to believe any is valuable so my own art is worthwhile to create, that communication is possible, is motivating force of art... but some work is lost, no one ever sees what is in that block of paper, poetry? prose? visual art? (Timbuktu) but we lose it as readers as the man who fashioned it loses it through death... because auster does not dive into that realm of something like meaning...

6) some of auster’s work cannibalizes his own work, borrows names if not characters, and i do prefer his shorter work, even his longer almost-conventional work in The Brooklyn Follies, after his abstract novella Travels in the Scriptorium, that seems maybe a parody of itself, some of his work in wtf territory, some that may bother the ‘real’ models, the ‘real’ lives, but then artists have no other source, no limitations, no rules, thus no proprietary sense and here is endless proof that we cannot ultimately communicate because we are a dog, in Timbuktu, we are so secretive about our unknown work, or we are embarrassed by the story and fallout, in Invisible: A Novel, that we film just for ourselves and then kill the artist who wants to share it, after all these years, in The Book of Illusions, or the man who investigates is trapped with nothing but names and phone books and no way to phone in Oracle Night, the experiences of horror when the city is all ghetto and everyone seems to be homeless rag pickers in 'In the Country of Last Things... auster never goes far enough for me, into surrealism, into experimentalism, never elaborates plots that seem interesting, such as the alternative reality of some sort of american civil war (Man in the Dark...

7) so, i have read a lot of him, as it is many years (decades...) past that i began reading postmodern literature, reading only as this award or that award says, reading books of a type, then authors of a type, then select books of a type- but it is only about a decade past that i began to read much philosophy, to add philosophical ideas to what literary theory i had read in and since u.. i have greatly enjoyed rereading some of his work, such as his 'In the Country of Last Things, which is a concise, poetic nightmare. but then i try perhaps uselessly to convince all other readers not to read 4 3 2 1, which is to me a great disappointment, this is not the auster of his best work, for though the concept intrigues, the unfolding narrative is far far far too long...