I'd give this book 4.5 stars. Paul Auster writes beautifully and it was a pleasure to read this story. On one level it's the documentation of a friendship and one person's descent into madness. On another level, its just so hard to relate to the fantastic turns in Sachs life and how anyone would put up with his complete crap. I suppose that's part of "getting" this book though - finding a way to reconcile that.

I love Paul Auster novels and his are quite simply always my most favorite books to read. I can’t explain it other than by saying that I can sit down and read a large portion of his books at once. The words travel effortlessly from the page to my brain and I just love everything about how his novels are crafted from the characters to the pacing and word choice... everything.

“No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born of ignorance, and if they go on living after they are written it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood.”

This novel, Leviathan, was fantastically quirky and had all the Austerian elements: a Paul Auster-like character, unusual coincidences and puzzling contradictions, a story-within-a-story, and all kinds of twists, distortions, and mysteries. Peter Aaron (same initials as our author) is also an author, divorced from a woman named Delia (real life first wife Lydia) and married to Iris (real life current wife Siri, or Iris backwards) with two children David and Sonia (real life David and Sophie). Just as Paul Auster is the writer of the book titled Leviathan that we hold in our hands, Peter Aaron is the author/narrator of a piece we are reading within the book called “Leviathan” as well. Even deeper than that is a third manuscript called Leviathan.

Our main characters are the author Peter and his best friend, also an author, Benjamin Sachs (Benjamin is Auster’s middle name). Peter and Ben first meet each other at a bar for a canceled book reading they were both going to speak at and begin drinking and getting to become fast friends. At the end of their meet-cute, Aaron feels delirious and thinks he’s seeing double, and I couldn’t help but wonder after all these weird coincidences of their meeting if this Ben character is another analogue for Paul Auster; as if both Ben and Peter are types of Paul-like characters. Or perhaps Ben represents another famous postmodern writer? At one point Peter is talking about Ben’s first novel in which as the author he “continuously throws the reader off guard mixing so many genres and styles to tell his story that the book begins to resemble a pinball machine, a fabulous contraption with blinking lights and ninety-eight different sound effects.” This sounds a lot like real-life Paul Auster’s masterpiece novel City of Glass (part of the New York Trilogy, a MUST READ).

I love when Auster makes self-referential characters and devises plots that lead the audience on a cryptic journey. One part I liked the most of this book was when Maria found an address book and was going to visit every person in the book until she could figure out who it belonged to. But her plan, which involved traveling all throughout the city to catalogue these people in the book, involved discovering the mystery owner “in absentia” — basically trying to determine who the owner was based on who he/she was not. Maria also later follows and catalogues Ben during his aimless wandering around the city. Both of these scenes together (the wandering and of filling out a puzzle backwards) reminded me of City of Glass when Daniel believes someone is leaving messages based on the paths they are walking around New York City; the idea to make something out of nothing - is it creative, or paranoid? Peter even mentions at one point, “Knowing what I know now, I can see how little I really understood. I was drawing conclusions from what amounted to partial evidence, basing my response in a cluster of random, observable facts that told only a small piece of the story.”

So what is this novel about? Leviathan is layered with intrigue, betrayal, friendship, love, and misery all in one. It also discusses anarchism, left-wing government protest, identity crises, extramarital affairs, traumatic experiences (several), and murder. There is sadness and giddiness and overall great wonderment in how the pieces of this story fell together. There was much more finality (or was there?) than some of his other novels, such as City of Glass, but because it was a little more straightforward it wasn’t as exciting for me personally. I had no idea what to expect, so I was still captured by the prospect of the mystery. Although it wasn’t my absolute favorite (that would be City of Glass or Moon Palace), it remains an excellent story that I loved and hope to read again one day with a fresh perspective. And since this book was dedicated to Don DeLillo, it made me find some old books I need to re-read again and reminded me of books I need to start reading!

Definitely recommended if you are a fan or have read 1-2 of his books before. But honestly, no prior Auster knowledge is required to really enjoy the book, but knowing the self-references is part of the fun.

Reading Leviathan means a lot more to me than normal. It’s a re-read, picking up an old Auster ahead of aiming to tackle his massive 4 3 2 1 at some point. Back in the day, in my 20s as I was discovering the delights of contemporary, ‘literary’ fiction, Auster was kind of my authorial hero. I devoured his works, finding delights in each one, and anyone who knows his interests and subject matter will have little difficulty in appreciating the reasons for this – Auster takes on difficult briefs and makes them seem easy, and there’s a nihilistic ‘floating on the wind’ thread to his work that carries strong appeal, especially to the young and impressionable.

This isn’t to say there’s little or no value to the more mature reader. The point is more that Auster has a very readable narrative style. You can find yourself sucked in to the story because everything flows so well, and only many pages in do you realise you are trapped, like his characters, in some existential minefield. Other writers covering similar themes can be more challenging. I’ve always found Iain McEwan to be like homework, in places a chore, twenty pages of text and I haven’t a clue what’s happening, but that’s never happened with Auster. He writes about weighty, complex matters, and disguises everything within the trappings of easy reading. It’s a bit like watching a grand old Film Noir, the style of which is often taken on by Auster’s writing. You think you’re following a black and white crime drama, but after a time you come to appreciate the film’s saying profound and often pessimistic things about the human condition.

Another way of looking at it is to suggest that as a frustrated writer, he was the kind of author who made me feel as though I could never be as good as this. I think about the fragments of material I wrote back during my ‘Auster’ phase and only now get that I was doing little more than fan fiction, aping his style somewhat nakedly, and even copying his theme of protagonists whose fates are laid bare to the whims of pure chance. Nothing especially wrong with that. I can think of worse authors to copy than Auster, and if I am ever able to put something on to paper that’s as perfectly composed and easy to follow, then I’ll feel as though I’m on the right track.

Years later, retreading the pages of Leviathan, Auster’s great political novel that’s hidden within the reminiscences of a fictional author telling the account of his friend, and the flaws become more apparent. The style’s as crisp as ever and a stack of delicious things take place within its pages, some lovely twists and turns, and there’s a point where I am happy to float along with the dreamlike prose, but at the same time a lot could do with trimming, with judicious editing. Auster’s tendency to write fat, exposition-heavy paragraphs becomes tiresome. Even bearing in mind that Leviathan is written as though it’s the testimony of one man about another, it’s an exercise in indulgence in so many places. I used to lap this stuff up, give me more please, yet now the sheer weight of barely disguised biographical detail and Auster’s preference for writing about how characters feel rather than exposing those emotions via dialogue or physical actions seem like weaknesses.

It’s always a roll of the dice when you read the work of someone you admire so heavily many years down the line. Will it still be as good? Will the impact be anything like it was the first time around? Leviathan is nearly 30 years old, and Auster has written many things since then. Maybe 4 3 2 1 will expose a maturity in the author that, with any luck, retains the style and cuts away many of those younger excesses, but it’s a weighty tome so we’ll have to wait and see. I’d recommend Auster to anyone. His writing style is so good, indeed I would hold him up as an example of how to suck readers in, due to the easy flow and his uncanny ability to make his characters feel like they’ve come to life and it’s his job to try and keep up with their actions. But all this comes with caveats. Years since I first read it, Leviathan falls short of being the perfect novel I once held it up as being. The standard remains high, yet the ceiling is yet to be reached.

A great writer grappling with an ambitious subject, masterfully treated.
First of all, a perfect construction, upside down thriller which gives the identity of the dead man and goes back to his story told by his best friend who leads the investigation among the key characters, especially women who were important to them both, doubles too. The narrator recounts with thoroughness and depth a few years of life in turmoil in this little world of the American intelligentsia of the Reagan years and their lost dreams. It is also the explanation of the genesis of a story with the strokes of chance, the vain research, the intersecting stories, everything that will ultimately deliver a book to a publisher or the FBI. Magnificent!

One sentence synopsis… After his estranged friend and fellow writer Ben blows himself up with a bomb, Peter attempts to reconstruct his life and discover what led him to that end.

Read it if you like… post modern narrative techniques or Historiographic metafiction. There are some strong Ted Kaczynski vibes from Ben in the later half of the book. Auster is taking liberties with history - think Quentin Tarantino but actually good.

Dream casting… too many good options for this one. I need a Joseph Gordon-Levitt/Tom Hiddleston type for the straight man/try-hard Peter Aaron and someone who can do descent-into-madness like Jake Gyllenhaal or potentially Ryan Gosling as charming, provocative, unhinged Ben Sachs.