Review by Booklist Review
Auster had almost a cult following with his brilliantly eccentric New York Trilogy, but successive novels, including his last, The Music of Chance, have brought him greater recognition and a less runic style. His characters have acquired more substance and emotion, and his newest tale is perhaps the most human of all, which is not to say that Auster has lost his edge. Leviathan seethes within his incomparable aura of methodical concentration and inexorability. The title sets the tone, referring as it does to a monster of the deep; a vast, bureaucratic political state; and anything large, powerful, and frightening. Some such force certainly drives this high-strung and cunning story. Two writers, Peter Aaron and Benjamin Sachs, meet during a blizzard; they sit out the storm, drinking, talking, and forging a strong friendship. Fifteen years later, after the kinkiest twists of fate imaginable, Peter sits down in a panic to write the chronicle of Sachs' bizarre life before the FBI agents investigating his friend's death return and confront him with his lies. Peter's narrative explicates Sachs' dogged personality and confounding exploits as well as the highly "unorthodox" and peculiarly systematic adventures of a woman named Maria Turner and her inexplicable friend Lillian, both of whom fall in love with the doomed Sachs. Auster's attunement to the implications of obsession, interconnectedness, and the manifestation of inner states is evident in every word he writes, lifting us to new heights of scrutiny and wonder at the puzzles of existence and the power of a story well told. (Reviewed June 15, 1992)0670846767Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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., Cookeville (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
With each new work, Auster (Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, etc.) is quickly becoming our preeminent novelist of ideas--a postmodern fabulator who grounds his odd and challenging fictions in conventional and accessible narrative structures. In Auster's latest, a narrator much like himself (a novelist named Peter Aaron) tries to solve the mystery of his best friend's life and death. When he reads a news report of an unidentified man blowing himself up on a Wisconsin roadside, Aaron knows it must be his friend Benjamin Sachs, a once-promising novelist who became a ``crazed idealist.'' Ever since his days in jail as a war resister, Sachs maintained ``an attitude of remorseless inner vigilance.'' His Thoreauvian vision of ``personal salvation'' through politics eventually results in his strange career as the Phantom of Liberty- -an anarchist bomber who blows up replicas of the State of Liberty in town-squares across America. Aaron accepts responsibility for the turn of events because he is ``the place where everything begins.'' Through him, Sachs meets the nutty conceptual artist who in turn identifies the victim of a bizarre murder committed by Sachs, himself ``an emblem of the unknowable.'' As much as this is the story of Sachs's twisted pursuit of mercy and forgiveness, it is also a journey of self-discovery for the narrator, who must deal with his own acts of desire and betrayal. Auster's abstract intentions here are more than balanced by his sense of intrigue and character. In a world thrown off-balance by uncertainty and chance, he pursues facts with the determination of a hard-nosed detective.
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