Resumo de The Music Of Chance

From Publishers Weekly Compulsive traveler Jim Nashefinances an epic poker match for a self-proclaimed jackpot winner. "Inhis lucid, captivating yarn, Auster quietly raises disturbing questionsof servants and masters, of loyalty, freedom and the inexplicable urgeto kill," said PW . Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal This insightful novelis a taut study of the self-contradictory mind living by chance whilethinking it can get away with anything. Jim Nashe is a frivolous Bostonfireman who needs music as a life crutch. His wife abandons him justbefore his father dies, leaving him money that he squanders aimlesslywhile driving around America. Near desperation, he meets a bitter youngitinerant gambler, Jack ("Jackpot") Pozzi, who lures him into a losingpoker game with two shady recluses, Flower and Stone, on theirPennsylvania estate. Nashe and Pozzi must retire their debt by buildinga stone wall on the premises: what this Herculean labor does to them isthe novel's leitmotif. An interesting story, but some may object thatthe journalistic prose merely tells the story instead of showing it.I don't know if I necessarily enjoyed this book (or any Paul Austerbook, for that matter). The enjoyment comes from the questions I askmyself after I've put the book down. It is not an enjoyable readingexperience, but rather a contemplative one. In that regard, it is ahighly successful piece of art.The story appears to be relativelysimple. One man goes driving. He meets another man on the road. The twoof them meet some eccentric millionaires. The four men play poker. Thentwo men build a wall. It is almost nonsensical now that I look back onit. But the story's not really the thing (it never is in an Austerbook). 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 thenature of fate and the restrictions of freedom.Auster's writingstyle is enigmatic. There is a faux-coldness to it, appearing at firstglance distant and reserved. Closer inspection, however, reveals muchhumanity and passion in his prose. I've always had suspicions that hissurname is really an ingeniously calculated pseudonym, for anyausterity in the writing is both sincere and ironic. That's a neattrick 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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