The Music of Chance

Rating:
Summary: Libre albedrio?
Review: A memorable story - that keeps revolving in my mind. What is the Music of Chance? The author, Paul Auster, attempts to weigh freewill and circumstance through the art of storytelling - fluctuating between chaos and order in the same manner as a symphony. How awesome is that?
The main characters at once create and are created as part of the story - alternately shifting from victimizers to victims, from ordered to chaotic. The story itself is loaded with symbolism - from a scale model of one character's life, to a stone wall constructed in a meadow, to classical music played by the main character - all of which add necessary depth and personality to an otherwise convoluted plot, not unlike life.
At length the story makes one question one's own reality. This is definitely not a book to impart a "warm fuzzy," but rather to push the reader to consider his or her own free will and circumstance.

Rating:
Summary: Libre albedrio?
Review: A memorable story - that keeps revolving in my mind. What is the Music of Chance? The author, Paul Auster, attempts to weigh freewill and circumstance through the art of storytelling - fluctuating between chaos and order in the same manner as a symphony. How awesome is that?
The main characters at once create and are created as part of the story - alternately shifting from victimizers to victims, from ordered to chaotic. The story itself is loaded with symbolism - from a scale model of one character's life, to a stone wall constructed in a meadow, to classical music played by the main character - all of which add necessary depth and personality to an otherwise convoluted plot, not unlike life.
At length the story makes one question one's own reality. This is definitely not a book to impart a "warm fuzzy," but rather to push the reader to consider his or her own free will and circumstance.

Rating:
Summary: cop-out ending
Review: As always, Auster excells in the innovative premise of the novel--a man who defines freedom as living entirely on the whims of chance. The plot and the language are entirely engrossing, and I read the novel in breathless one day's sitting simply because I couldn't put it down. After all this, Auster deals with the enormity of what he started with a weak whimper of an ending, the most trite, 70s B-movie-like weak bravura conclusion pretending to be a philosophical challenge. The ending is the LEAST interesting instance of the "chance" that the protagonist takes.

Rating:
Summary: When fate rests on the flip of a card........
Review: Auster has a way with a certain type of character-one who is both on the fringe of both society and sanity both. They are not often very likeable or sympathetic characters, but they always are engrossing characters.

Jim Nash's veneer of sanity breaks when an unexpected windfall from the father he hates kicks out what little emotional support kept him on the straight and narrow and converts him into a wandering, nomadic drifter with his own transportation. In the midst of his journeys he meets Jack Pozzi, also a wanderer-sans transportation. Pozzi suckers Nash into an questionable gambling adventure that backfires, leaving them with a debt that leaves then essentially in a state of indentured servitude. The bulk of the story centers on how they cope with that condition.

The fundamentals of the story, as is so often the case with Auster, are , on reflection, faintly ridiculous. However, it is mood, character and fate that concern Auster, and his-and our-immersion into those topics render the absurdities of the actual story irrelevant.

I've read several Auster books and can't really say I've like any of them particularly, but they do fascinate me. I keep going back for more. The bottom line is what Auster does is ask questions about life and fate-in such a way that you are forced to think about them in your own terms. Auster does not supply answers-heck, not one of his books I've read can really be said to have an ending or resolution of any meaningful sort-but the way the questions are posed will haunt you-and keep you coming back for more.

Rating:
Summary: Compelling Toss of the Cards
Review: Compelling Toss of the Cards: A Book Review of The Music of Chance, Paul Auster, Penguin, copyright 1990

Paul Auster's The Music of Chance is enigmatic. The author entices the reader on a wild ride with his protagonist, Nashe, through the gambler's addiction and the consequences of choice.

The plot engages, accelerates, and occasionally slams but carries the somewhat less than believable characters. Our man, Nashe, is a firefighter/lover of literature. Plot goes: Man gets dumped by wife, man dumps his kid on relatives, man drives back and forth cross country for a year until money runs out, man stumbles across a young gambler (Pozzi) and takes a chance. Things go from bad to worse as he continues to be compelled by ....something, pain, love lost, being lost...your guess is as good as mine. In spite of a few fallbacks, readers will be uncomfortably captivated right up to the absolute end. I shook my head and thought...what just happened?

The characters and dialogue dropped this magnificent ball, on many occasions. Mr. Auster includes a wall these fellows are trapped into building; the author windily belabors the metaphorical point "he continued to say nothing about what truly concerned him-nothing about the struggle to put his life together again, nothing about how he saw the wall as a chance to redeem himself in his own eyes, nothing about how he welcomed the hardships of the meadow as a way to atone for his recklessness and self pity- for one he got started, he knew that all the wrong words would come tumbling out of his mouth..." (14 words left in this sentence). You get my point.

Nashe continues to pontificate and bore us with his hackneyed philosophy "Things happen in their own sweet time," he told himself. Before you could learn the truth, you had to learn patience." In this book, dialogue weights towards the mediocre "Let me drive the car back home tonight." You mean Granddad's car?" "That's right, Granddad's car. The car I used to own."

In the end, beware MADD members and Oprah Winfrey New Year's Eve special programming viewers. In spite of its flaws, The Music of Chance delivers and will leave you wondering what hit you.

Rating:
Summary: worst read I've had in ages
Review: Flat, boring, pointless, plain stupid. Guy gets too pretentious with all that bunch of alleged existencial symbolism, whatever it is supposed to mean. His writing style is quite poor, he uses tons of cliches, and presumes to be telling more than he does. Too kitshy to be true.

I would give it a -5 star if I could. Just stay away from this garbage.

Rating:
Summary: Smashing the instruments changes the music
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Best Auster ever
Review: My only complaint with this author is his "postmodern" crutch. He begins things nowhere and ends them with no ending... I dislike it but it is closer to life than literature usually is - i.e. we, here in the real world, are never shown what most literature shows us. Auster masters that aspect of reality but sometimes overdoes it so I'm lost, completely, not understanding what's going on with our character or the realm Auster creates. EXCEPT with this book. This is a great novel. Again, the ending is a thrill ride to a blank page, but it's still pretty cool.

Rating:
Summary: Very Enjoyable
Review: Paul Auster is a writer right out of the Twilight Zone mode of writing. His novels always mix realism and fantasy, and I don't mean of the sword bearing barbarian type. His work with its questions of the meaning of reality and identity seem even more prophetic in an age where personas can be switched and stolen and the faceless inhabit the Internet.

Originally published in 1990, The Music of Chance is about Jim Nashe, a fireman in his early thirties whose wife has just walked out on him. Following close on the heels of that event is the death of Jim's father, who he really doesn't mourn because they didn't have a lot of contact anyway. The good thing about his death is that his father has willed him $200,000. Finally feeling a sense of freedom from work, and leaving his young daughter behind at a relative's, he buys a new car and wanders the roads of America for a year.

With his money down to $14,000, he begins to feel he has lost his purpose and all the anxieties of his uncertain future come crashing down on him. It's then that he encounters a young hitcher named Jack Pozzi who claims to be the greatest card player of all time and who has a poker game set up with two rich "suckers" in which he could rake in a great deal of money. The problem is, that's the thing that Pozzi doesn't have. So Nashe agrees to back him in the game with the last of his money, on the hope that he can fund his further wanderings. When the game doesn't go as planned, Nashe and Pozzi are forced to build a wall of 15th century stone in order to pay off their debt even as they seek for the meaning of their lives and the motives of their overseers.

This was a good novel. It has all the hallmarks of an Auster work: odd coencidences, luminous writing, beauty and strangeness, odd, with tads of surrealism. I don't know how he comes up with his ideas, but hopefully, he'll keep them coming. His genius is that he can take the form of a conventional novel and turn it into something new. You really feel as though you're inhabiting a different world when you read his books.

Rating:
Summary: Just Awful
Review: Someone gave me this book alonf with Michael Cunningham's THE HOURS, telling me that both were part of a group of talented young writers. Let me tell you, Paul Auster couldn't be Michael Cunningham's copy editor. There are more cliches in the first 5 pages of this book than you could find in a dime store mystery novel. The characters are flat, the story ludicrous. It tries hard to be some kind of masonic allegory but is so obvious it becomes aggravating. I read the NY Times review that praises the book for it's series of "ricocheting" coincidences, and I kept waiting for that to happen. IN fact, nothing ricochets. Everything thuds. IF you are a lover of language, don't bother with Auster.