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.

Although I haven't included any major spoilers as such, I'd recommend reading Leviathan before you read any of its reviews or synopses at all, including this brief one. Go in blind as I did, and you'll get more from it I reckon.

Phenomenal. I never thought New York Trilogy could be topped but this blows it away. Never have I cared so much for a book's protagonist as I did for Benjamin Sachs.

Auster covers all his usual ground, weaving his story around writers, coincedences, private detectives, questions of one's identity, missing people, but never did I grow weary of such repeated themes.

This is the first book in a long time that I just wanted to last forever.

UPDATE

Having been the only book I've ever re-read immediately after reading it, I just read it a third time, maybe 5 years later. It's good, but didn't have anywhere the same impact on me this time.

Re-reading this after 25+ years, and time has not been kind to it. It has a lovely set-up - the first sentence remains worth reading - but I remembered nothing of the book beyond actually having read it. That turns out to be because there's surprisingly little memorable here, and Auster seems so embarrassed to have come up with a cute set-up that he does everything possible to submerge it in a flood of dull navel-gazing.

What was intended at the time to look to look exploratory, an investigation of the writing of fiction and narrative, now just looks like some desperate liberal hand-wringing apologetics. Worst of all is that for all Auster's reputation at the cutting edge of '90s writing, it is all so crushingly, tiresomely conventional and conservative.

The king of endings