โ Scribed by Paul Auster
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Luminous, passionate, expansive, an emotional tour de force
Sunset Park follows the hopes and fears of a cast of unforgettable characters brought together by the mysterious Miles Heller during the dark months of the 2008 economic collapse.
An enigmatic young man employed as a trash-out worker in southern Florida obsessively photographing thousands of abandoned objects left behind by the evicted families.
A group of young people squatting in an apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
The Hospital for Broken Things, which specializes in repairing the artifacts of a vanished world.
William Wyler's 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives.
A celebrated actress preparing to return to Broadway.
An independent publisher desperately trying to save his business and his marriage.
These are just some of the elements Auster magically weaves together in this immensely moving novel about contemporary America and its ghosts. Sunset Park is a surprising departure that confirms Paul Auster as one of our greatest living writers.
**
Auster's dry, gravelly voice has a gravitas all its own. He reads his novel about Miles Heller, hiding out from the authorities in the titular Brooklyn neighborhood, interspersed with discursions on film and baseball, fate and chance. While Auster should intuitively knows the rhythms of his own work, his reading can be oddly choppy; he occasionally comes down too hard on the wrong word. Still his voice is enough to convey a sense of the writer. One almost feels that Auster is himself an Auster character, blowing smoke rings in an empty room while pondering America's mysteries and minutiae. A Holt hardcover. (Nov.)
Starred Review Passionately literary, Auster nonetheless publishes as frequently as a genre author, writing poetic and brainy feigned procedurals featuring inadvertent outlaws. In his sixteenth novel, four flat-broke twentysomething searchers end up squatting in a funky abandoned house in Sunset Park, a rough Brooklyn neighborhood. Bing, the sloppy bear ringleader, plays drums and runs the Hospital for Broken Things, where he mends relics from a thriftier past. Melancholy artist Ellen is beset by erotic visions. Grad student Alice is researching pop-culture depictions of postwar sexual relationships. Miles is a fugitive. Poisoned by guilt over his stepbrother's death, he hasn't communicated with his loving father, a heroic independent publisher; his kind English professor stepmother; or his flamboyant actor mother for seven years. Lately he's been in Florida, trashing out foreclosed homes, stunned by what evicted people leave behind in anger and despair. Miles returns to New York after things turn dicey over his love affair with a wise-beyond-her-years Cuban American teenager. As always with the entrancing and ambushing Auster, every element is saturated with implication as each wounded, questing character's story illuminates our tragic flaws and profound need for connection, coherence, and beauty. In a time of daunting crises and change, Auster reminds us of lasting things, of love, art, and the miraculous strangeness of being alive. --Donna Seaman
A Novel
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Sunset Park opens with twenty-eight-year-old Miles Heller trashing out foreclosed houses in Florida, the latest stop in his flight across the country. When Miles falls in love with Pilar Sanchez, he finds himself fleeing once again, going back to New York, where his family still lives, and into an a
SUMMARY: Luminous, passionate, expansive, an emotional tour de force Sunset Park follows the hopes and fears of a cast of unforgettable characters brought together by the mysterious Miles Heller during the dark months of the 2008 economic collapse.An enigmatic young man employed as a trash-out wor
SUMMARY: Luminous, passionate, expansive, an emotional tour de force Sunset Park follows the hopes and fears of a cast of unforgettable characters brought together by the mysterious Miles Heller during the dark months of the 2008 economic collapse.An enigmatic young man employed as a trash-out wor
SUMMARY: Luminous, passionate, expansive, an emotional tour de force Sunset Park follows the hopes and fears of a cast of unforgettable characters brought together by the mysterious Miles Heller during the dark months of the 2008 economic collapse.An enigmatic young man employed as a trash-out wor
SUMMARY: Luminous, passionate, expansive, an emotional tour de force Sunset Park follows the hopes and fears of a cast of unforgettable characters brought together by the mysterious Miles Heller during the dark months of the 2008 economic collapse.An enigmatic young man employed as a trash-out wor
In the sprawling flatlands of Florida, 28-year-old Miles is photographing the last lingering traces of families who have abandoned their houses due to debt or foreclosure.Miles is haunted by guilt for having inadvertently caused the death of his step-brother, a situation that caused him to flee his