Leviathan

New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) opens Leviathan with the tearing of a bomb explosion and the death of one Benjamin Sachs. Ben’s one-time best friend, Peter Aaron, begins to retrospectively investigate the transformation that led Ben from his enviable, stable life to one of a recluse. Both were once intelligent, yet struggling novelists until Ben’s near-death experience falling from a fire escape triggers a tumble in which he becomes withdrawn and disturbed, living alone and building bombs in a far-off cabin. That is, until he mysteriously disappears, leaving behind only a manuscript titled Leviathan, pages rustling in the wind.

 

A provocative novel about friendship and betrayal, sexual desire and estrangement -- about the intrusions of the unpredictable into the everyday. Leviathan is Paul Auster at his prime, conceptualizing worlds of tremendous complication and bizarre plausibility. The chief protagonist in this story is novelist-journalist named Benjamin Sachs. At the beginning of the novel he is blown to pieces while attempting to manufacture a bomb by the side of a snowy winter road in Wisconsin. How he came to this abrupt, untimely end is the ostensible topic being investigated by the imaginary author of the present novel, one Peter Aaron, who had known Sachs well. Aaron, it seems, is particularly concerned with recounting the life of Sachs because he is afraid lest the authorities... will misrepresent Sachs' career.