Libro difícil de clasificar. Pero entendamos que una clasificación para esta historia es innecesaria y , tal vez, absurda. La vida de Benjamin Sachs es fascinante, la vida de Peter Aaron es fascinante y los detalles maravillosos de cada uno de los personajes es fascinante. Una novela llena de humor, de misterio, de absurdos y de relaciones entre la literatura y su papel en la vida social. Grande Auster, ¡enorme!

At times I liked it, and other times I was perplexed by it, thus the 3 stars. The main thing that stricken me is how relevant the story and the mirror of American society is to our days. It is not a mystery book, as one might think from the back blurb. Rather a friendship story and reflection on circumstances that put people together and how they affects the results of one’s life.

Sólo me faltaba un capítulo para terminar pero no he podido continuar. Lo he intentado muchas veces con este autor pero si exceptuamos la Trilogía de Nueva York y a ratos Invisible y el Libro de las ilusiones todo lo demás me ha resultado falso, superficial, incluso cursi. Siempre recordaré Leviatán como el libro que me hizo decidir no volver a leer nada más de Paul Auster.

4.5 stars. Vintage Auster, bursting with life in all its strangeness.

"Anything can happen. And one way or another, it always does"

สนุก ชวนติดตาม ปมปัญหาค่อยๆ ขยายตัวออกอย่างนิ่มนวล
ตัวละครแต่ละตัวเมื่อถูกเอ่ยถึง ก็แสดงให้เห็นถึงจิตใจของตัวละคร คิด วิเคราะห์ บางตัวลึกซึ้งเกินกว่าเราจะเข้าใจว่าอะไรคือเหตุผลและแรงจูงใจในการกระทำของตัวละคร

> A Novel Whose Real Subject is Its Author's Anxiety About Losing Our Attention

This is, by most people's accounts, a minor novel of Auster's, and so it may be a poor choice to raise the question of what drives the work, as opposed to what happens when the writing succeeds. This book has a kind of unremitting literalism in its narrative. In a nearly blank, neutral voice, the narrator tells us dozens of dates, places, and names; it'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 rationale, the studiously neutral tone is increasingly difficult to understand. Auster barely uses adjectives; he doesn't pause to pick the right phrase or find the right image. His writing here is utilitarian and evidential, even when the subject is sex, love, murder, and jealousy.

After fifty pages or so I realized the author (not the narrator) is driven by an overpowering desire to keep my attention, to be the one whose stories I want to hear. That grasping for my supposedly faltering attention provides the book's drive, and it seems also to explain the auhor's urge to write, no matter what the subject is. His anxiety to please and entertain 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. Here is one of the uncommon inerpolations of a figure of speech:

"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 is not the most carefully constructed metaphor. 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 image is confused and hard to picture, I think because he wrote at speed, and couldn't be bothered to stop and tune up his tropes.

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 the deepest, merriest blue eyes to be found between heaven and hell."

In Leviathan it's as if the psychology, politics, characters, style, and mood of the novel are all arbitrary, and what really matters about writing is just the act of writing continuously, and pushing the plot forward with every sentence, as if fiction was a stalling donkey that needed continuous kicks and prods. But why am I imagined to have such a short attention span? And why should the solution be to keep turning the crank of the narrative, producing more and more of it? Why not settle in for a while and write some good sentences? And why write at all if your main driving emotion is fear of losing the reader's attention? The result is a book that hides a story about the author's own ambition under an entirely different plot.

It's often said that Auster practices a literary fiction version of popular crime fiction, blending metafiction with complex narratives. I imagine people mean that his work is an interesting, literary variation on the sorts of tight, complex narratives typical of crime or genre fiction. But I wonder if it might not be better to say he uses devices of postmodernism in order to do what popular trade press authors do: build what Naipaul disparagingly called "puzzles." I can't imagine a reason for reading another of his books.

Los protagonistas de esta novela son escritores, y en un momento uno de ellos dice que ha pasado la vida redactando historias y poniendo a personas imaginarias en situaciones inesperadas e inverosímiles. Eso es Leviatán.

En ese juego meta-literario que le gusta tanto a Auster se cruzan personas que realizan pequeñas acciones azarosas que provocan eventos que rozan lo inconcebible. La lectura es ágil; las páginas se devoran queriendo saber que va a pasar.

Las decisiones que toman los personajes son provocadas por sus sentimientos, por el amor, por el deseo. Estos tienen que tomar resoluciones que los van a conducir o hacia la felicidad o hacia un camino que lleva a la soledad. El leviatán, bestia bíblica creada por dios, se transforma en un destructor.

La premisa de la novela es que puede suceder cualquier cosa. Y de hecho, es así.

ne znam niti jednog autora koji tako vješto predočava svoje likove, konstruira njihove odnose i živote, piše tečno kao da mu je pisanje disanje i drži te prikovanim za tekst. granica između zbilje i fikcije potpuno je nepostojeća, dođe ti da guglaš svaki lik koji je osmislio, u zabludi da su sve to stvarne osobe. lucidno se poigrava realitetom (npr. u "levijatanu" ime pripovjedačeve žene je iris, dok se austerova žena zove siri) dovodeći te u stanje pozitivne konfuzije.

ja paulu austeru nemam ama baš ništa za prigovoriti.

Paul Auster falha, uma vez mais, em entrar para a lista dos meus autores preferidos. Uma vez mais, não consegui entusiasmar-me com esta história e tudo o que nela acontece acabou por me ser um bocado indiferente. Nem as personagens me conseguiram cativar.

Auster até pode ser um autor bastante interessante mas, depois de quatro livros lidos dele, acho que já posso dizer que não é para mim.

Review to follow.

Another deliciously entertaining ouroboros of a novel. The hallmarks of Auster's fiction are all in great supply: noir sleuthing, mysterious bombings, life-imitating-art-imitating-life, strange coincidences, meditations on the slipperiness of truth. Let's face it, every Auster novel should be called the Music of Chance, except the Music of Chance, which should be called Thursdays with Mitzy.

«If it still shocks me to report what happened, that is because the real is always ahead of what we can imagine. No matter how wild we think our inventions might be, they can never match the unpredictability of what the real world continually spews forth. This lesson seems inescapable to me now. Anything can happen. And one way or another, it always does.»
[p. 180]