#75 Leviathan, by Paul Auster (Faber and Faber Limited)

It cost me about £13 more than it should have done, but I suppose Paul Auster’s latest, Leviathan, was worth it!

My monetary issues came courtesy of a library fine. Unfortunately, I took out Leviathan around three months ago, but immediately ‘lost’ it. I renewed it online four times – the wonders of the modern library system, about which I promise I will write at some point this year – but then my computer broke, I was busy at work, I forgot about it and [feel free to add any of your own excuses here].

Thankfully, it turned up, not least because it meant I could pay my fines (my other books were overdue by this stage as well) - but not before I actually managed to read the book!

I was hooked from the start, Thankfully, Wikipedia provides the opening lines:

“Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin. There were no witnesses, but it appears that he was sitting on the grass next to his parked car when the bomb he was building accidentally went off. According to the forensic reports that have just been published, the man was killed instantly. His body burst into dozens of small pieces, and fragments of his corpse were found as far as 50 feet away from the site of the explosion.”

The subsequent tale, then, is of how events came to pass, pieced together by a struggling author who also relates how he is in a position to tell the story of his best friend. But while things start as a typical ‘thriller’, it’s not long before Auster is subverting the genre to introduce his typical existentialist ideas.

The usual themes are present; isolationism, the interconnectedness of things and the changing nature of identity, but this is combined with a story which compels you to keep turning the pages.

If I was being hyper critical, there were one or two coincidences, which Dickens-like become important plot devices which I could have done without, but there’s no denying that Auster consistently provides entertaining, yet intelligent and thoughtful, fare.

So, rating time:

#75 Leviathan, by Paul Auster (Faber and Faber Limited) - 8/10

Next up: The Observations, by Jane Harris (Faber and Faber Limited)

Click here for the full list of books so far, and their rating