Blowing up the Statue of Liberty (Leviathan - Paul Auster)

Member Name: Deany

Product:	Leviathan - Paul Auster
Date:	17/07/01 (1804 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting plot

Disadvantages: Central character is not believable

As you can probably tell from the other opinions I have written, I am a bit of a Paul Auster fan. However, that doesn’t stop me from being honest and saying that this is not one of his better books. If you like Auster, there is plenty here for you to enjoy but, in general, it is just missing that certain something that has made other things I have read by him impossible to put down.

The central theme of “Leviathan”, where a writer sets about trying to document the life of a friend, will be familiar to anyone who has read Auster’s “New York Trilogy”. In the “New York Trilogy” this happens in the short story “The Locked Room” where the friend who is being described is missing, presumed dead, but later turns out to be alive. In Leviathan, however, the friend is most definitely dead – blown up by a bomb he is attempting to make by a roadside in Northern Wisconsin.

The narrator begins the tale by explaining that he has just been visited by a pair of FBI agents trying to determine the identity of the dead man who had been making the bomb. The narrator comes to the conclusion that the man can only be his friend Benjamin Sachs but does not reveal this to the FBI agent. Once they have gone, he sets about trying to reconstruct the events of his friend’s life, from the moment they met until he was killed by the bomb. It is the intention of the narrator to use the book he is writing as a counterweight to the lies he knows will be written about his friend once his identity is discovered by the police.

There are a number of recurring themes from Auster’s other books that surface in this novel. Perhaps the most notable is the fact that the narrator’s name closely echoes Auster’s – he is called Peter Aaron. Both Aaron and Sachs, the friend about whom he is writing, are published writers. Aaron is content with his profession, but Sachs grows disillusioned and ev
entually resorts to direct action to achieve his goals. Auster is also critical of the direction America is headed in, another recurrent element of his writings. The Statue of Liberty is referred to a number of times throughout the book as a symbol that many Americans hold close to their hearts without making any effort to follow the principles behind. In the later stages of the novel the only way to wake America up to its failures is to attack replicas of the Statue of Liberty in public places.

The majority of characters in the novel have been crafted with the usual Auster attention to detail. In particular, the figure of Maria, a friend to both the narrator and Sachs, is worthy of note. She is an artist who engages on odd projects that find her eating different coloured foods on different days of the week and she follows strangers through the streets in the hope of coming to understand their lives through observation. At one point she finds an address book with no owner’s name in it and becomes determined to discover who the owner is by engineering chance meetings with all those listed in the book and conducting disguised interviews. She is a vibrant character who the reader can easily identify with, as is Sachs’ wife Fanny.

It is only in the character of Sachs himself that Auster seems to loose his usual flair and, since he is the central character of the novel, this detracts from the book as a whole. Sachs is initially a very interesting character, but he undergoes a significant change after a fall (that is both metaphorical and literal) and begins down the path that will eventually end in his death when the bomb he is making explodes. My complaint is that the change is Sachs is too sudden and too large. The narrator himself cannot understand the change in his friend and feels he is overreacting to events. I suppose that Auster is attempting to make his book appear as a genuine biography and so he feels justified in saying –
‘this is how it happened. I don’t understand why, but it did and so that’s that.’ The reader, however, knows that this is fiction and expects some form of explanation to events.

Despite the novel’s shortfalls there are some interesting issues raised. The novel takes place in the first person and as such the reader can never be quite sure whether the narrator has reconstructed events properly from the interviews he has carried out with friends. At times the narrator is forced to admit he may be wrong and can only offer two or even three variations, one of which may have been the true sequence of events. This adds to the feeling mentioned above that this is a true biography. The contrast between the narrator’s inaction as he sticks to writing and his friend’s action when he abandons writing is also very interesting.

In the end, however, this novel failed to live up the expectations I had after reading other books by Auster. The string of coincidences that lead to Sachs’ death can sometimes feel too forced and a satisfying explanation of Sachs’ motives and change in character is never properly given. All in all, a good book, but Auster has written others that are much better.

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