Let's get my one complaint out of the way first: the book uses sexual tension as a tool for creating general tension...which is not necessary. Just let the characters all be troubled and skip the part where the two best friends (male) can't stop themselves from fucking each others' wives/lovers. YES, that creates tension in real life, but it wasn't necessary at all to this plot. Everything would have shaken out the way it did if all the awkward fucking never happened.

That's a small point to make, in light of how consuming this short novel is. I can't remember the last time I was disappointed in a character, the way I am with Sachs. I mean, as a person. Auster has me judging Sachs with my real-life human emotions, like I'd judge a friend who won't stop screwing up his/her life. You love them and root for them, but they're on a bad road, and all you can do is wait for the news that they're dead. Sure enough, that's how the book begins.

In all, one of the better "Absurd tragedy, as told to..." novels I've read.

Lentement mais sûrement je poursuis mon Auster-thon. Je peux déjà dire qu’il ne fera pas partie de mes préférés. Le narrateur, Peter Aaron (Paul Auster ?), raconte dans les moindres détails sa rencontre, puis son amitié avec Benjamin Sachs. Le récit est assez linéaire, le début est passionnant, la fin aussi, mais j’avoue qu’à la moitié du livre j’ai été tentée d’arrêter. Je me félicite d’avoir poursuivi malgré une lassitude subite et brève. Malgré tout, le principal intérêt réside dans la galerie de personnages, particulièrement fouillés. Peter Aaron est une transposition claire de Paul Auster. Toujours le thème de l’écrivain, de l’inspiration, de la recherche d’identité. Ce roman m’a toutefois moins passionnée, certainement aussi à cause d’une période peu propice à la lecture.

An interesting tale of how a man came to blow himself to pieces.
Especially the first half is beautiful. Writer Peter Aaron recalls how his friendship with Ben Sachs (also a writer) began. It is about the inexplicable force we call character, mind, or madness and where that drives us, and about how both their lives were touched by other people, by good and bad luck and by improbable coincidences to lead to the state they are in now. Also, it is about hindsight, about how knowledge of an ending might change the light in which we see past events. Is there really a coherent story to be told, or is it all trivial reconstruction and reinterpretation?
These improbabilities increase in the second half of the book, which made it harder to go along with the story. But overall it's one of those books that will stay with you for all the right reasons.

The book started off promising, but the more I read the less I liked it. Here are some reasons:
- We hardly know anything about the man who is supposedly writing this book about his best friend. I did not empathize with him at all so in the end, why would I care what he has to say?
- A lot of reactions and interactions were so far fetched that I didn’t relate to the characters at all.
- Every female secondary character just serves as the sexual interest for the two male protagonists.

I really didn’t love that book, but still had an okay time reading it sometimes.

Liked how characters were build, they seems to be persons you could encounter in real life. Great descriptions of places, situations and thoughts of the characters. Very human characters with their own past, present, and future, problems, etc., as someone in real life; makes it easy to relate to one or more characters.

Wasn't the genre i was expecting, gave me close to zero interest in main plot, ending was kinda anticlimatic.

Dry but nevertheless quite memorable and gripping.

I knew nothing about this book when I started, so I had no expectations to be met, which turned into an interesting journey. The story reads like a memoir from a someone towards the life and challenges of their best friend and also their own, adding many details as someone sharing their memories would. I can't pinpoint why, but although I didn't lose interest along the way, this read felt lengthy and it took me much longer to complete than I expected.

Dedicated to Don DeLillo, and interestingly parallel to DeLillo's Mao II, released only a year earlier, which also deals with terrorism and the social and political role of writers. This is one of Auster's finer works. It delves into the dark, disillusioned (and disillusioning) side of Americana and commodity that DeLillo has repeatedly mined, while also revisiting the familiar Austerian themes of mysterious coincidence, the action of writing, and interconnectedness.