35: Leviathan by Paul Auster
““His body mended, but he was never the same after that. In those few seconds before he hit the ground, it was as if Sachs lost everything. His entire life flew apart in midair.”(20) ”
Throughout Paul Auster’s mysterious meditation on themes of annihilation, friendship, and psychological torment, we are asked to reckon with the mythology of American exceptionalism, fatalism, and reason.
Published in 1992 and set in the eighties, the metafiction of Benjamin Sach’s certain death is unraveled by his best friend, Peter Aaron, and explores themes of chance and legacy. After reading an essay collection by Siri Hustvedt--Paul Auster’s wife--I was intrigued to get into his work even though I’d never heard of Leviathan before, and this novel was pleasantly surprising.
“ With the opening line: “Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of the road in Northern Wisconsin”(1), the reader is immediately rapt with curiosity—curiosity that is well rewarded by Auster’s sharp abilities in telling the story backward. What better way to approach it, when the piece itself is a masterful exploration of the inside-out?”
Unknown Artist, linked source.
Aaron, the insightful third-person narrator, investigates the slow and sordid descent of his best friend’s end with a tone of mutual respect and loss. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, Aaron investigates how Sachs fell down a rabbit-hole after a divorce that left him unmoored both from home and spirit. In a tangled web of childhood memory, a traumatic injury, and a failure to launch career-wise, Sachs embarks on a strange vigilante vandalism trip that explodes in his face, literally.
“An overly refined conscience, a predisposition toward guilt in the face of his own desires, led a good man to act in curiously underhanded ways, in ways that compromised his own goodness”(147).
Auster beautifully showcases an adult male friendship in the throes of marital issues, affairs, failed books, crimes of passion, and existential turmoil in earnest. There is a continuous throughline of forgiveness, of giving each other the benefit of the doubt, that propels the narrator, Aaron, into the territory of a somewhat reliable, if not likeable, storyteller.
Art by Eneakelo.
In Leviathan, the protagonist may simply be the truth itself. The story, from all accounts, is driven by a deep desire to unearth some quintessential fact--about love, legacy, or nation. There is a central plot-line involving the Statue of Liberty, harking on a political purpose that ultimately brings Sachs’ to ruin with Aaron left to hold the proverbial torch, “yearning to breathe free”.
While Aaron sought to understand Sachs, Sachs sought to understand a greater fact about the world, a fact that cost him everything.
If you enjoyed books like The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut, or Underworld by Don Delillo, you should add this to your list.
