Sunset Park (novel)
Encyclopedia
Sunset Park is a novel by Paul Auster
published in November 2010.
and return home to New York
. There he unites with three new friends who are squatting in an abandoned home in the Sunset Park
neighborhood. Through several situations of coincidence and self-discovery, it is a story about how to reconnect with a world once left behind, and how to rejoin the human race after self-inflicted exile.
, novelist Maelna Watrous wrote, "]Auster is] right that the rules of fiction should be bent. Writers not always determined to please the reader are the ones who break new ground. Auster’s renegade impulse has set him apart, earning him devoted fans. He has also been taken to task for following his own formula too often. In 'Sunset Park,' he deviates from it by telling a fairly linear story, although there are still lengthy passages in which he interrupts the narrative by pasting in baseball trivia, a treatise on behalf of the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo and quotations from the classic movie 'The Best Years of Our Lives.' Yet if Auster can’t escape his own fixations — if his characters still mourn the passing moment even as they live in it, still yearn to hold on to the present even as it slips away — maybe that’s because this nostalgia is one universal human desire, made manifest in every photograph and every novel and every effort to leave a mark."
Paul Auster
Paul Benjamin Auster is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy , Moon Palace , The Music of Chance , The Book of Illusions and The Brooklyn Follies...
published in November 2010.
Plot summary
Set during the American financial recession in 2008, a college dropout, who has been running from his past for seven years, is forced to leave his new girlfriend and life in FloridaFlorida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
and return home to New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
. There he unites with three new friends who are squatting in an abandoned home in the Sunset Park
Sunset Park
-Places in the United States:*Sunset Park, Las Vegas, Nevada, a park*Sunset Park, Brooklyn, New York, a neighborhood and namesake park*Sunset Park, Santa Monica, California, a neighborhood...
neighborhood. Through several situations of coincidence and self-discovery, it is a story about how to reconnect with a world once left behind, and how to rejoin the human race after self-inflicted exile.
Reception
The novel was well-regarded upon publication. In The New York Times Book ReviewThe New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...
, novelist Maelna Watrous wrote, "]Auster is] right that the rules of fiction should be bent. Writers not always determined to please the reader are the ones who break new ground. Auster’s renegade impulse has set him apart, earning him devoted fans. He has also been taken to task for following his own formula too often. In 'Sunset Park,' he deviates from it by telling a fairly linear story, although there are still lengthy passages in which he interrupts the narrative by pasting in baseball trivia, a treatise on behalf of the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo and quotations from the classic movie 'The Best Years of Our Lives.' Yet if Auster can’t escape his own fixations — if his characters still mourn the passing moment even as they live in it, still yearn to hold on to the present even as it slips away — maybe that’s because this nostalgia is one universal human desire, made manifest in every photograph and every novel and every effort to leave a mark."