Auster Leviathan

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-26676-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Paul Auster's explosively suspenseful tale from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: 'a literary voice for the ages' (Guardian) 'Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin . . .' The explosion that detonates the narrative of Paul Auster's thrilling novel also ends the life of its hero, Benjamin Sachs, and brings two FBI agents to the home of one of Sachs's oldest friends, the writer Peter Aaron. What follows is Aaron's story, an intricate, subtle and gripping investigation of another man's life in all its richness and complexity. Combining an investigation of freedom and terrorism with all the tension, mystery and allusive richness of Auster's classic fiction.

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Sunset Park, The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy. He and Spencer Ostrander collaborated on Bloodbath Nation. In 2006, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. His other honours include the Prix Medicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the Screenplay of Smoke, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Burning Boy, and the Carlos Fuentes Prize for his body of work. His novel 4 3 2 1 was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work was translated into more than forty languages. His final novel, Baumgartner, was published in November 2023. He died on 30 April 2024.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Auster, Paul

Leseproben

The initial phase of our friendship lasted for approximately a year and a half. Then, within several months of each other, we both left the Upper West Side, and another chapter began. Fanny and Ben went first, moving to an apartment in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. It was a roomier, more comfortable place than Fanny’s old student digs near Columbia, and it put her within walking distance of her job at the museum. That was the fall of 1976. In the time that elapsed between their finding the apartment and moving into it, my wife Delia discovered that she was pregnant. Almost at once, we began making plans to move as well. Our place on Riverside Drive was too cramped to accommodate a child, and with things already growing rocky between us, we figured we might have a better chance if we left the city altogether. I was translating books full-time by then, and as far as work was concerned, it made no difference where we lived.

I can’t say that I have any desire to talk about my first marriage now. To the extent that it touches on Sachs’s story, however, I don’t see how I can entirely avoid the subject. One thing leads to another, and whether I like it or not, I’m as much a part of what happened as anyone else. If not for the breakup of my marriage to Delia Bond, I never would have met Maria Turner, and if I hadn’t met Maria Turner, I never would have known about Lillian Stern, and if I hadn’t known about Lillian Stern, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this book. Each one of us is connected to Sachs’s death in some way, and it won’t be possible for me to tell his story without telling each of our stories at the same time. Everything is connected to everything else, every story overlaps with every other story. Horrible as it is for me to say it, I understand now that I’m the one who brought all of us together. As much as Sachs himself, I’m the place where everything begins.

The sequence breaks down like this: I pursued Delia off and on for seven years (1967–74), I convinced her to marry me (1975), we moved to the country (March 1977), our son David was born (June 1977), we separated (November 1978). During the eighteen months I was out of New York, I stayed in close touch with Sachs, but we saw each other less often than before. Postcards and letters took the place of late-night talks in bars, and our contacts were necessarily more circumscribed and formal. Fanny and Ben occasionally drove up to spend weekends with us in the country, and Delia and I visited their house in Vermont for a short stretch one summer, but these get-togethers lacked the anarchic and improvisational quality of our meetings in the past. Still, it wasn’t as if the friendship suffered. Every now and then I would have to go down to New York on business: delivering manuscripts, signing contracts, picking up new work, discussing projects with editors. This happened two or three times a month, and whenever I was there I would spend the night at Fanny’s and Ben’s place in Brooklyn. The stability of their marriage had a calming effect on me, and if I was able to keep some semblance of sanity during that period, I think they were at least partly responsible for it. Going back to Delia the next morning could be difficult, however. The spectacle of domestic happiness I had just witnessed made me understand how seriously I had botched things for myself. I began to dread plunging back into my own turmoil, the deep thickets of disorder that had grown up all around me.

I’m not about to speculate on what did us in. Money was in short supply during our last couple of years together, but I wouldn’t want to cite that as a direct cause. A good marriage can withstand any amount of external pressure, a bad marriage cracks apart. In our case, the nightmare began no more than hours after we left the city, and whatever fragile thing that had been holding us together came permanently undone.

Given our lack of money, our original plan had been quite cautious: to rent a house somewhere and see if living in the country suited us or not. If it did, we would stay; if it didn’t, we would go back to New York after the lease ran out. But then Delia’s father stepped in and offered to advance us ten thousand dollars for a down payment on a place of our own. With country houses selling for as little as thirty or forty thousand at the time, this sum represented much more than it would now. It was a generous thing for Mr Bond to do, but in the end it worked against us, locking us into a situation neither one of us was prepared to handle. After searching for a couple of months, we found an inexpensive place in Dutchess County, an old and somewhat sagging house with plenty of room inside and a splendid set of lilac bushes in the yard. The day after we moved in, a ferocious thunderstorm swept through the town. Lightning struck the branch of a tree next to the house, the branch caught fire, the fire spread to an electric line that ran through the tree, and we lost our electricity. The moment that happened, the sump pump shut off, and in less than an hour the cellar was flooded. I spent the better part of the night knee-deep in cold rain, working by flashlight as I bailed out the water with buckets. When the electrician arrived the next afternoon to assess the damage, we learned that the entire electrical system had to be replaced. That cost several hundred dollars, and when the septic tank gave out the following month, it cost us more than a thousand dollars to remove the smell of shit from our backyard. We couldn’t afford any of these repairs, and the assault on our budget left us dizzy with apprehension. I stepped up the pace of my translation work, taking any assignments that came along, and by mid-spring I had all but abandoned the novel I had been writing for the past three years. Delia was hugely pregnant by then, but she continued to plug away at her own job (free-lance copyediting), and in the last week before she went into labor, she sat at her desk from morning to night correcting a manuscript of over nine hundred pages.

After David was born, the situation only grew worse. Money became my single, overriding obsession, and for the next year I lived in a state of continual panic. With Delia no longer able to contribute much in the way of work, our income fell at the precise moment our expenses began to go up. I took the responsibilities of fatherhood seriously, and the thought of not being able to provide for my wife and son filled me with shame. Once, when a publisher was slow in paying me for work I had handed in, I drove down to New York and stormed into his office, threatening him with physical violence unless he wrote out a check to me on the spot. At one point, I actually grabbed him by the collar and pushed him against the wall. This was utterly implausible behavior for me, a betrayal of everything I believed in. I hadn’t fought with anyone since I was a child, and if I let my feelings run away from me in that man’s office, it only proves how unhinged I had become. I wrote as many articles as I could, I took on every translation job I was offered, but still it wasn’t enough. Assuming that my novel was dead, that my dreams of becoming a writer were finished, I went out and started hunting for a permanent job. But times were bad just then, and opportunities in the country were sparse. Even the local community college, which had advertised for someone to teach a full load of freshman composition courses at the paltry wage of eight thousand dollars a year, received more than three hundred applications for the post. Without any prior teaching experience, I was rejected without an interview. After that, I tried to join the staffs of several of the magazines I had written for, figuring I could commute down to the city if I had to, but the editors only laughed at me and treated my letters as a joke. This is no job for a writer, they answered back, you’d just be wasting your time. But I wasn’t a writer anymore, I was a drowning man. I was a man at the end of his rope.

Delia and I were both exhausted, and as time went on our quarreling became automatic, a reflex that neither one of us could control. She nagged and I sulked; she harangued and I brooded; we went days without having the courage to talk to each other. David was the only thing that seemed to bring us pleasure anymore, and we talked about him as if no other subject existed, wary of overstepping the boundaries of that neutral zone. As soon as we did, the snipers would jump back into their trenches, shots would be exchanged, and the war of attrition would begin all over again. It seemed to drag on interminably, a subtle conflict with no definable objective, fought with silences, misunderstandings, and hurt, bewildered looks. For all that, I don’t think that either one of us was willing to surrender. We had both dug in for the long haul, and the idea of giving up had never even occurred to us.

All that changed very suddenly in the fall of 1978. One evening, while we were sitting in the living room with David, Delia asked me to fetch her glasses from a shelf in her upstairs study, and when I entered the room I saw her journal lying open on the desk. Delia had been keeping a journal since the age of thirteen or fourteen, and by now it ran to dozens of volumes, notebook after notebook filled with the ongoing saga of her inner life. She had often read passages from it to me, but until that evening I had never so much as dared to look at it without her permission. Standing there at that moment, however, I found myself gripped by a tremendous urge to read those pages. In retrospect, I understand that this meant our life together was already finished, that my willingness to break this trust proved that I had given...