Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 224 pages
- Published by: Penguin Non-Classics December 1, 1991
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0140154078
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0140154078
-
Book Dimensions:
7.8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
- Weighs: 7.5 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Compulsive traveler Jim Nashe finances an epic poker match for a self-proclaimed jackpot winner. "In his lucid, captivating yarn, Auster quietly raises disturbing questions of servants and masters, of loyalty, freedom and the inexplicable urge to kill," said PW .
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This insightful novel is a taut study of the self-contradictory mind living by chance while thinking it can get away with anything. Jim Nashe is a frivolous Boston fireman who requirements music as a life crutch. His wife abandons him just before his father dies, leaving him money that he squanders aimlessly while driving around America. Near desperation, he meets a bitter young itinerant gambler, Jack ("Jackpot") Pozzi, who lures him into a losing poker game with two shady recluses, Flower and Stone, on their Pennsylvania estate. Nashe and Pozzi must retire their debt by building a stone wall on the premises: what this Herculean labor does to them is the novel's leitmotif. An interesting story, but some may object that the journalistic prose merely tells the story instead of showing it.
- Kenneth Mintz, formerly with Bayonne P.L., N.J.Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader Reviews
I don't know if I necessarily enjoyed this book (or any Paul Auster book, for that matter). The enjoyment comes from the questions I ask myself after I've put the book down. It is not an enjoyable reading experience, but rather a contemplative one. In that regard, it is a highly successful piece of art. The story appears to be relatively simple. One man goes driving. He meets another man on the road. The two of them meet some eccentric millionaires. The four men play poker. Then two men build a wall. It is almost nonsensical now that I look back on it. But the story's not really the thing (it never is in an Auster book). So don't go looking for closure, and don't expect easy answers. It's all just an excuse for some finely written meditations on the nature of fate and the restrictions of freedom. Auster's writing style is enigmatic. There is a faux-coldness to it, appearing at first glance distant and reserved. Closer inspection, however, reveals much humanity and passion in his prose. I've always had suspicions that his surname is really an ingeniously calculated pseudonym, for any austerity in the writing is both sincere and ironic. That's a neat trick to pull off, and, to my mind, his greatest strength as a writer. In this example from his oeuvre, he gets the balance just right.
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