Sunset Park: A Novel by Paul Auster (EPUB)

3

 

Ebook Info

  • Published: 2010
  • Number of pages: 320 pages
  • Format: EPUB
  • File Size: 0.46 MB
  • Authors: Paul Auster

Description

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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Paul Auster is a master literary craftsman. Like a Pied Piper, he can magically pull the reader along with skillful and precise writing and story telling. However, his novel Sunset Park which I finished reading is terrible. These are my reasons: It is unfocused, has no clear thematic core, is overindulgent in its observations about the major characters. Auster also is more than occasionally trying to educate the reader about subjects oblique to his story which the seems to care about, love and has personal meaning for him, forgetting the reader may think otherwise. The novel is flawed by pointless digressions about old time baseball players who have died because the son Miles Heller and his father, Morris find their lives and fortunes similar to their own.The main characters are seem to lead pointless lives of indecision and different degrees of failure. The main character is Miles Heller’s M.O. He is not very ambitious and a wanderer despite having three years of Ivy league education under his belt. He is erudite and reads many books and offers insight and analysis of books, ideas and people when he chooses to speak. being somewhat introverted. He overhears an argument between his stepmother and father about his problems and lack of ambition. Frustrated with his life and family. he takes to the road at age 21 and lives in four different states eeking out a living with menial low paying jobs. He appears and identifies himself as a loser destined to fail at everything. He moves to Florida and acquire a jobs as a “trash out inspector” that empties foreclosed. houses of valuables left behind by former owners. He meets and fall in love with a 17 year high school student who becomes the great love of his life. Her name is Pilar Sanchez who he believes is intelligent and sharp witted, but offers no substantial proof of her intelligence except that, she reads books;. they actually meet in a local park where they both are reading the same book, “The Great Gatsby”Unfortunately her sister is a greedy and jealous bitch who wants Miles to lavish her with gifts from the items he collects from the foreclosed houses he empties. Miles refuses and she threatens to inform the police that his sister is 17 and sleeping with a 28 year old man ( at this point Miles has been away from his New York family for close to 8 years with minimal contact through a mutual friend who reports to his father of his whereabouts. Miles is more or less forced to leave the state or risk serious jail time. He returns secretively to New York where he joins his mutual friend who has taken over a broken down house in “Sunset Park” He has filled the house with 3 other friends who are poor and destitude and on the verge of homelessness. Therefore, they occupy this shack of a dwelling as squatters, not fearing they could be evicted at any tome by the police. His friend is big burly slob with a violent temper because of his anti-society and radical views . Like Miles, he a loser with no direction and makes a pittance repairing broken typewriters and framing posters. The other members of the squatter house is a somewhat disheveled women who strives to be a painter but has mental and inner personal issues, and sees herself as a loser who cannot gain any traction in the New York City Art scene. The last member is a tall, large blond women in her thirties who is completing a dissertation at Columbia University. Her topic is male and female relationships after World War II focused on returning veterans having trouble getting adjusted to home with their families. Working on the last chapter of her study, she provides( or is it Auster) an analysis of the classic film. ” The Best Years of Our Lives” of the post war period that is well made, though somewhat sentimental but offers a hopeful ending for the characters involved. The story is common, but film is carried by skill and the sincerity of the actors playing the main parts. This is another of Auster’s pointless digressions which comes across as just” filler”, and seems obliquely related to lives of the people involved in the novel. Unfortunately, Auster is again schooling his reader and demonstrating how informed he is about film history. The film is generally a great film but has its limitations and flaws, yet the female dissertation student chooses it as a way to pull together several of the thematic issues of her study.The novel is flawed by the author’s digressions, and showcasing his encyclopedia knowledge of trivia that weaken the narrative structure and obscure what the author is attempting to convey to the reader Even his reportage of the inner monologue of each character seems contrived and detached from what these characters may actually think in their individual desperate situations. This novel does not “REFLECT” the inner life and anguish of its characters, but instead superimposes the author’s suppositions and judgments about them that does ring true to this reader. The novel has one believable character which draws out the reader empathy. he is Morris Heller, the father of Miles. He own a publishing company that he has successfully built over the course of his life, but may go under unless he can find new investors. Besides his profligate son his second wife is neurotic, overly scholarly wife and unforgiving of his one time fall from grace and runs off to England to teach Exeter College. All these pressures and including his uncertainty about his son Miles is wearing the man down. he is a good man with integrity but is hampered by family and business problemsThe denouement of this jumbled narrative is both vaguely suspected, but also unsuspected. Where everything in Miles life seems to be working out, including a ceasefire within his family, and with friends. Miles prepares to return to Florida and when his girl friend Pilar turns 18 and legal, he will ask her to marry him Unfortunately, Miles is again railroaded by fate, or just his succession of stupid mistakes and lackadaisical misjudgments about people. The upheaval is serious enough to return all the major players of the novel back to square one.If Auster has a theme to convey, it may be an indirect rebuke of the 60’s countercultural mantra “to do your own thing in your own time, and that…”it all is good”. Fate is a positive force in this cosmic view of the universe; whereas fate is a cruel interlocutor in people’s lives and grudgingly offers second chances Miles and his squatter house friends may be either victims of fate, or just stupid in their life choices and decisions.. Whether Auster’s haphazard parable intends this theme is also unclear.. .

⭐Sunset Park: Landscape For Survivorsbook reviewI’m not one for contemporary fiction. I read less than a novel a year and I’m usually disappointed, so my taste tends toward Garcia Marquez, Pamuk, Paley or older writers like Bellow, Carver, Hemingway, and so on. I prefer philosophy, poetry, drama, straight science. I don’t suspend disbelief when dipping into contemporary fiction because so much of it is awful and simply a waste of time. I don’t care to recall when this decline in imagination began (it probably has to do with the congealing of English language fiction into a global entertainment corporate commodity during the Reagan era).That’s all changed now, and admittedly one can find pretty good fiction from all around the planet for virtually nothing these days. In any event I admit to this sanguine perspective so you can better judge the following recommendation: I’ve just finished a really good novel called Sunset Park by Paul Auster.How do I know Sunset Park is a good novel? Because I wept at least three times during the read, which I assure you, required something more than suspension of disbelief on my part. While engaged in this contemporary narrative of damaged people brought to the point of reinvention by the corruption of capitalism, I found myself at the funeral of a brilliant young suicide. A twenty-three year old woman inexplicably hangs herself in a ladies room in Venice and I confront her father, days later, at her funeral in New York and I crumble into tears, unable to ignore his unbearable suffering.Perhaps it was the wine, or the late hour, but as an atheist fully aware of the existential land mines which await us all, I muttered a silent prayer to the neon Vegas Dice strand in my DNA — the nucleotide we sometimes call “luck,” “chance,” “fate” or “karma” — thankful yet again that my two brilliant daughters and young architect son are fit and well and committed, each navigating with a strong internal compass toward completely personal and productive futures.I was overcome by the father, a writer who delivers his daughter’s eulogy in Sunset Park, but I won’t ruin your read by going into this entangled yet crystalline plot further, except to say that the narrative doesn’t unfold, it circumambulates in and out of each characters existential confrontations, revealing more with each unfolding narrative. The story connects and disconnects characters as they move hesitantly, denyingly, toward the deeper mythos of tragedy, farce, despair and weary triumph, in a culture so totally disengaged from their inconsequential lives that the reader has no choice but to fill the emotional gaps with understanding, empathy, solidarity, and finally celebration that somehow their lives (and our own) move forward, no matter the time wasted with ambitious banalities, awful art, and failed society. Auster, at the top of his game, also provides an arsenal of literary “tricks” enough to engage and amuse the informed reader.Art and Literature bind Auster’s characters into a subset of Americana adrift and in search of moorings. As each character — mother, father, son, underage lover, coconspirator, childhood paramour — moves through dilemmas and confrontations — questions of self worth, gender, sexuality, ambition, procreation, death, global politics, and so on — to arrive at moments of clarity, compassion, self awareness and self liberation, armed for the good fight in the face of whatever the future might deliver next.Auster loosely integrates these individual narratives into a fluid mythic context: Hollywood, in the form of William Wyler’s sentimental 1946 “The Best Years of Our Lives” which follows three World War II veterans return home to discover that they and their families (not to mention their nation 60 years later) have been irreparably changed. (Jung’s myth of the returning hero gone awry.) Auster’s contemporary characters engage the film and live out post-war angst, and post-cold war decline, into a state of lingering ennui at the end of empire today.There’s a deeper mythology at work in Sunset Park, the exhausted spiritual state of existential reality as Samuel Beckett explored it, before the rest of us were even “born into it”. Auster’s lead character’s estranged mother, for example, is a successful aging film actress returned to the city to appear in the role of her career as Winnie in a new production of Beckett’s stark and challenging “Happy Days.” Sunset Park’s mythic context sifts through the last half century from the failed returning hero, into Beckett’s post-apocalyptic landscape of endless contemplation and anxiety, armed with nothing but logic, cunning, and language. Another contextual level is the everyday mythology of baseball heroes, discussed endlessly between generations, as well as food and popular celebrity which provide connective tissue to hold contemporary culture at least conversationally in place.Sunset Park is an interesting and moving read. Sure to strengthen the resolve of the survivors of the storm, circa 2010. No matter where you have landed, post crash of ’08, Sunset Park is where you will eventually find yourself.Robert Philbin

⭐This novel has certainly received some poor reviews since its publication but I think it to be one of Auster’s best books, perhaps for no other reason than a lot of the subject matter resonated with me personally.The overarching story (if we can call it that) follows the lives of four young people who, through various misfortunes, have found themselves having to squat a dilapidated house in Brooklyn. Each character is given a separate chapter in which we learn more about their backgrounds and how their lives are entwined.It is told from the point of view of an omniscient narrator and there are large parts of exposition in which we are spoon-fed what each character is thinking and feeling and this makes it difficult for the reader to then bring their own thoughts and emotions to the text, which is usually one of joys of reading Auster.The books deals with themes of poverty and wealth, love and hate, family and friends, inner peace and inner torment, property, space and what it means to be young and old.I can understand why this book has had a mixed reception but overall `Sunset Park’ for me is a mature, engrossing and insightful piece of work by a writer well into his craft.Recommended.

⭐Paul Auster’s 2010 novel Sunset Park is another worthy effort from my favourite author of his generation. As with a number of recent Auster novels, Sunset Park does not quite capture the downright inventiveness of earlier masterpieces such New York Trilogy, The Music Of Chance, Leviathan or The Book Of Illusions, but there is enough narrative trickery and typically sublime prose here to keep most Auster fans content (if not ecstatic) and to leave the vast majority of other contemporary authors in the shade.In Sunset Park, Auster revisits a ‘generation gap’ premise which he has tackled impressively before, whether it be Walt and tutor Master Yehudi in Mr Vertigo or Nathan Glass and his nephew Tom in the more recent The Brooklyn Follies. The main protagonist of Sunset Park is Miles Heller, 28-year old son of book publisher, twice-married Morris. The novel begins with Miles, having deserted his parents seven years earlier as a result of mutual disaffection, working in Florida as a ‘trasher out’, namely someone who reclaims possessions from houses subject to mortgage default as a result of the financial meltdown in 2008. Auster uses a number of the main characters in the book to narrate the story thereafter, including Miles’ father and the ‘tenants’ squatting in the New York residence to which Miles flees in an attempt to evade the Florida law enforcement agencies, who are likely to take a dim view of Miles’ ongoing relationship with 17-year old schoolgirl Pilar.Auster’s concerns in Sunset Park reflect a gamut of issues, both political and personal, ranging from the aftermath of the banking crisis (albeit dealt with rather superficially) and the familial impact of the Iraq war, through to the decline of the book publishing business and personal tragedies of lost love and family revenge. Auster has clearly moved on (for better or worse) from his earlier more fantastic, mysterious and suspense-filled work to a more measured, humanistic style, which is perhaps more emotionally charged.For me, therefore, Sunset Park does not attain the level of his absolutely best work, but is a must read nevertheless.

⭐this is a great writer and a good read.

⭐Good novel, but not one of Auster’s best.

⭐This is one of his better works, in my humble opinion. If you like Auster, you will like this too.

Keywords

Free Download Sunset Park: A Novel in EPUB format
Sunset Park: A Novel EPUB Free Download
Download Sunset Park: A Novel 2010 EPUB Free
Sunset Park: A Novel 2010 EPUB Free Download
Download Sunset Park: A Novel EPUB
Free Download Ebook Sunset Park: A Novel

Previous articleThe New Fowler’s Modern English Usage 3rd Edition by R. W. Burchfield (PDF)
Next articleThe Sea and the Bells (Kagean Book) by Pablo Neruda (PDF)