The Music of Chance - Softcover

Auster, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140154078 ISBN 13: 9780140154078

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1991

Synopsis

An “exceptional” (Los Angeles Times) tale of fate, loyalty, responsibility, and the real meaning of freedom, from the author of the forthcoming 4 3 2 1:  A Novel

A finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award

This “rich and dazzling” (Wall Street Journal) novel follows Jim Nashe who, after squandering an unexpected inheritance, picks up a young gambler named Jack Pozzi hoping to con two millionaires. But when their plans backfire, Jim and Jack are indentured by their elusive marks and are forced to build a meaningless wall with bricks gathered from ruins of an Irish castle. Time passes, their debts mount, and anger builds as the two struggle to dig themselves out of their Kafkaesque serfdom.

New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) brings us back into his strange, shape-shifting world of fiendish bargains and punitive whims, where chance is a powerful yet unpredictable force.

About this title

About the Author:

Paul Auster is the bestselling author of The New York Trilogy and many other critically acclaimed novels. He was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in 2006. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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 needs 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0140154078
• ISBN 13: 9780140154078
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224