Paul Auster, Leviathan
After discovering Oracle Night, I knew that I wanted to read more novels by Paul Auster, and picked up Leviathan.
The story is told from the perspective of Peter Aaron (initials P. A., like Paul Auster), a writer, with the opening sentence: "Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin". Peter Aaron is convinced that the man who blew himself up is his best friend, former writer Benjamin Sachs. Questioned by two FBI agents, Aaron hurries to write the story of his friend as he knew him, from what he gathered through years of acquaintance, from insights he previously acquired from people who knew him, and from what Sachs himself confided in him…
Leviathan is a very complex novel in which the narrator tries to make us familiar with the Sachs’s personality while he himself struggles to understand him, to fill the gaps in his knowledge of him. What Peter Aaron reveals, even if he doesn’t want to acknowledge it completely, is man’s essential loneliness, which seems to contradict John Donne’s statement that "no man is an island". For Paul Auster it seems on the contrary that every man is an island, and that a connection with others is at worst accidental, at best transitory. As Sachs says at one point: "we never know anything about anyone". The novel shows that truth is often inaccessible (therefore the reader must not expect to have all the answers), or rather that several versions of the same truth can coexist…
The narrator tries to understand how his friend’s life, which was more stable than his own when he first met him (Sachs had an apparently solid marriage with a woman named Fanny and a first novel published) took a turn for the worst. While Peter Aaron finds stability after divorcing his first wife, going through a difficult period and finally meeting Iris (anagram for Siri, Auster’s wife), Sachs’s life goes down the drain, after a stupid accident from which he miraculously emerges almost unscathed, or, at least, physically unscathed. From then on, a series of strange events brought on by chance leads Sachs to his tragic ending. Paul Auster shows how little grip we have over fate and its strange twists…
Finally, through Benjamin Sachs’s only novel, The New Colossus, and from subsequent events in Sach’s life during the Reagan years, the symbolic statue of liberty is reassessed and the following political statement is made: "America has lost its way". What is accepted like a fatality by Peter Aaron who has enough grips on reality to keep him busy (a wife and two kids) soon becomes intolerable for his friend Sachs whose own grip on reality will be slowly dissolved by the series of mishaps befalling him…
Leviathan is a very good novel about the thin line between happiness and misery, sanity and madness, reality and insubstantiality. It presents us with a gallery of fascinating characters, and escapes any attempt to fit it into a category. I loved Leviathan, but I would however recommend reading Oracle Night first.
Rating: 4,5/5
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