Leviathan by Paul Auster: Metamorphosis Through Accidents
One of the best novels that I recently read was Baumgartner by Paul Auster, which turned out to be his swansong. After reading it, I wondered how I missed reading such a gifted writer for all these years. I don't remember him being discussed in any circle of books, online and offline, that I am part of. Within months of reading Baumgartner, I found an obituary of him staring at me with an accusatory look. Recently, I also found him mentioned affectionately in Knife, Salman Rushdie's non-fictional memoir about his tryst with the assassination attempt. Thus, I got hold of a copy of Leviathan, a 1992 novel of his that's well regarded by critics.
In Leviathan, we find Peter Aaron, a novelist, probably a fictionalised version of the author himself, narrating the events that led to the death of Benjamin Sachs, his writer friend, who was killed accidentally in a bomb explosion while he was assembling it. The narrator wants to give a sincere account of the life of Sachs so that his message reaches the public before the media shares a bastardised version. We travel with the writer on a journey that starts fifteen years ago with an accidental encounter, subsequently meeting a motley bunch of associated characters, many more literal and figurative accidents that transform all of them, and finally returning to the ultimate tragedy that begins the novel.
The novel is narrated in a brilliant style and hooks the reader along with its plot. It's written as a story within the story, one that is written in haste and hurry as the narrator has to complete it before the law enforcement agencies find out the identity of Sachs. We find that attitude mirrored in the writing style, not just in the pace of the narration, but in the way sentences are framed, in the progression of the plot, and even when, in many places, the writer gets ahead of the plot and provides many hints and premonitions about what lies ahead. The author successfully transfers his narrator's rush into the reader's attitude about the plot.
Leviathan contains several motifs and themes that a careful reader could find repeated in Baumgartner. But at the same time, in certain ways, it also radically deviates. The most striking resemblance between them, in my opinion, is the concept of accidents. Both novels start with one and repeat the motif in different patterns throughout their lengths. While some of them are physical accidents, some are circumstantial, and a few are even spiritual. But invariably, they metamorphose characters from their core. The plot of both novels progresses through coincidences.
But while Baumgartner portrays an old man trying to reclaim his life from the grief of his wife's death, Leviathan works in the opposite direction. It's the tale of a man progressively unravelling himself. While Baumgartner offers a message of hope, Leviathan denies us any of that. It's like watching a car speed towards an ugly wreck, though magnificently portrayed. All the characters in the novel have in them a streak of recklessness and selfishness that abets the tragedy. It is this trait that's displayed at varied levels in the characterization that makes it difficult to forget them even after closing the book.
While the novel has its strong points, there are a few issues that I feel keep it a few notches below Baumgartner. The plot is pervaded with coincidences, many of them too abrupt, striking the reader out of the blue. It sometimes feels that the writer finds it too hard to join different strands of the story lines that he went for the easy way. A lot of coincidences can be found in Baumgartner too, but the meditative pace of it makes them feel more organic.
One can argue that the plot is sometimes narrated by Aaron using second-hand narratives, and often we find different characters have radically different interpretations of the same events, rendering all of them ultimately unreliable. We aren't sure even Aaron is reliable in his story-telling. At least some of the coincidences may not be actually so and may be interpreted or even falsified by Aaron or any other character as a coincidence. Even with such an explanation, the sheer number and magnitude of them reduce the reading pleasure to some extent.
Another issue that I have is with the character of Sachs. It's implied that he has a certain political ideology that's very close to a religious belief, and it is his issues with the titular Leviathan, a Hobbesian concept of the oppressive state, that's responsible for the actions that led to his fatal accident. But this element is not represented adequately in the plot. We don't find him having any altercations with any power structures, and all his issues are evidently personal in nature, including his affair with the Statue of Liberty, which is integral to the plot. This made his character arc unconvincing for me. In spite of these deficiencies, Leviathan remains a compelling novel that's a brilliant exploration of how unexpected events transform lives inescapably.