(Image by Malbique)
Music of Chance: 1990
My previous reviews of Paul Auster HERE
When I read this book, my thoughts as aide memoire will appear in the comment stream below…
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1
“Then, out of the blue, the lawyer found him and the money fell into his lap.”
Nashe’s backstory, departed wife, estranged small daughter, his driving anywhere by chance, his fire station work, his falling into money, his old piano…
I have so far read up to: “It always had a calming effect on him, as if the music helped him to see the world more clearly, to understand his place in the invisible order of things.”
“They were not creating an event so much as trying to keep up with one,…”
We get to know more about Nashe and his back story, his projected story and his overtaking plans, as he meets by chance the ‘eventful’ Fiona again, and keeps up with his daughter’s birthdays, and with regular services to the car. Lumpy motel beds galore. But where is my unserviced brain going with this so-far sharply featureless novel?
Read up to: “Where was he going, after all, and what was he trying to prove?”
Even blander, still on the brink of chance.
N’s inheritance dwindles as he drives nationwide, until he picks up a hitch hiker which brings us to the end of a musically minimalist chapter 1.
2
“The cloth dangled halfway down his legs, the short sleeves hung over his elbows, and for a moment or two it looked as if he had been turned into a scrawny twelve-year-old boy. For reasons that were not quite clear to him, Nashe felt moved by that.”
Well, there you have it! Blandness ‘moved’ or transcended by perhaps the elbow moment to end all elbow moments, as now sinks in Jim Nashe’s picking up of Jack Pozzi (Jackdaw), the latter badly bashed and disheveled and other hints where a backstory in this hitch hiker is imputed.
End of 2, & tales told to now cash-depleted Nashe of a poker backstory and futurestory by Pozzi, but who is gulling whom here? Is Auster a reliable narrator of what Pozzi says? A Ponzi scheme? Are we being pulled into a tontine, too? Whose Laurel and whose Hardy now?
3
“Nashe understood that he was no longer behaving like himself.”
And he takes Pozzi to a posh hotel, as part of the prep for poker heists, I guess. Pozzi brushes himself up but his body still bears the pain of what he has endured. All parts of the body, but this is tellingly a special thought…
“ I might not be able to play the violin anymore, but it looks like I’m going to live.”
Nashe is told by Pozzi of one day eating a melting Popsicle when his own Pop Pozzi turns up thought to be dead in Viet Nam, and, before that, estranged from the wife and Jack Pozzi’s mother. Proves it with John Anthony Pozzi printed…
Read up to: “And I’ll be damned if the whole story isn’t written there in black and white.”
Pozzi continues to tell Nashe the story of his father’s visit and the 100 dollar bill. And his friend Walt accompanying him to find out if it was real not counterfeit, as a sort of test of this father being the real one.
Read up to: “You had to invent something. It’s not possible to leave it blank. The mind won’t let you.”
Raw steaks galore hanging to be eaten, an endless roll of money, thus Pozzi tells Nashe of his father before P’s stub of a body is redressed and prepared for poker with millionaires by N, and P told by N to keep his pecker in his trousers, and Nashe reads of Rousseau’s stones…
Read up to: “At some point during the night, he [N] dreamt of a forest in which the wind passed through the trees with the sound of shuffling cards.”
“I’m the Jackpot Kid, remember? It doesn’t matter what I say. As long as I’m the one who says it, everything is going to turn out right.”
N and P travelling in car through thunderstorm to vital poker match, N’s fate dependent on P’s.
Flower and Stone their target Laurel,and Hardy.
A brink in time, as N tells P of his own marital backstory, and the fire service.
Read up to: “Serial number zero zero zero zero.”
”As Nashe studied the man more closely, he was struck by the remarkable blueness of his eyes, a blue so pale that the eyes almost seemed to vanish when the light hit them.”
I have reached the end of 3, as N and P drive to a mansion through a maze of backroads in nowhere and negotiate the gateman to who knows what fate, more precarious by the minute within N’s anxiety and P’s seeming confidence.
4
“The doorbell chimed with the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”
A trigger for the most fateful clutch of descriptions… including a model of Utopia, and a model of it within the first model, two sections of the mansion for either Flower or Stone.
“All the talk about Laurel and Hardy had planted a suggestion of Hollywood in his mind, and now that Nashe was there, it was difficult for him not to think of the house as an illusion.”
Prime numbers on lottery, jackpot, Sid Zeno… my aide memoire continues.
“‘True enough,’ Flower said. ‘We didn’t rest on our laurels.’”
Poem game impends with great suspense..
“…white wall with two closed doors in it.”
Read up to: “It was all so random, so misconstrued, so utterly beside the point.”
By chance I took this photo yesterday in someone’s front garden…
Flower and (William) Stone explain the stones of a castle transported and to be converted into a wall as a work of art (my interpolation being not a Trumpish wall!)
To be masterminded by Calvin Murks.
Notes: voodoo logic Hopalomg Cassidy birthday party-food Louise the black maid…
The poker game about to start at the end of 4.
5
This is possibly the most suspenseful chapter in all literature, and I won’t go into spoiler details of the ebb and flow of the poker match itself, but those details may become clearer to any who have not yet read the book, clearer by means of my future review entries below this one. It was just as if the madness into what N and P had entered into with this visit to F and S, was like me being dragged into the madness of this book as if it made sense to me. I feel like a quite different person having read this chapter in one sitting, and I also feel I have to build my own wall of sanity from loose castle stones in order to repay my dues. There are many twists and turns in this chapter, but the fact that N — when ‘in media res’ — surreptitiously steals a crucial part of the model upstairs was the one clincher that stole all credibility from my mind without depleting any suspense of disbelief!
6
“No twists or turns, no arches or columns, no frills of any sort. Just your basic, no-nonsense wall.”
Murks as foreman says this as we become engrossed by the methodical Zeno’s Paradox of building the wall, with the sense of its stones and the human figures secretly cached away in N’s pocket. Are they imprisoned in this utility abode in the mean time? By the means of time, that is.
Read up to: “…advancing by only the smallest of increments.”
“He [P] went about his work with stolid goodwill, he pitched in with the household chores, he even pretended to enjoy the classical music that Nashe played every night after dinner.”
A study in stoicism and Sisyphus tasks under the umbrella of an overall Zeno Paradox. The greatest such arch in all literature, I vouch. Applicable to Murks as well as N & P.
Read up to: “The wagon did not belong in the hands of a grown man. It was an object fit for the nursery, for the trivial, make-believe worlds of children, and every time he pulled it across the meadow, he felt ashamed of himself, afflicted by a sense of his own helplessness. / The work advanced slowly, by almost imperceptible degrees.”
“He had assumed that they would come poking around the meadow every day. The wall was their idea, after all,…”
Agonising over what had gone wrong in the poker match, as N and P try to acclimatise to the heavy lifting life had given them. Even to extent of visiting the house where F and S had once been and throwing pebbles when no answer came there…..
Read up to and will I return? —
“We had everything balanced, all the wheels were turning, and it was beautiful, man, really beautiful. And then you had to get up and leave.”
‘You put down another stone, and something more happens. There’s no big mystery to it. You can see the wall going up, and after a while it starts to give you a good feeling.”
The essence of the Protestant Work Ethic, mixed with a near fight along the way and a gun (Chekhov’s as well as Murks’ gun?). Powerful secret force behind life or not? And, oh yes, the immolation of the tiny models of F and S that N had stolen. End of 6.
7
“For even the smallest zero was a great hole of nothingness, a circle large enough to contain the world.”
You will remember the party that N and P have with Tiffany, so no need of an aide memoire today. It’s just I think that the word ‘poking’ or ‘poker’ are triggers or way stations in this book, not ‘elbows’, as I reach….
“…Murks looked at the ground, poking the dirt with the tip of his shoe.”
Read up to: “They grasped each other by the elbows, squeezing hard for a moment or two,…”
Perhaps a real turning point as this meta-trigger is squeezed, Pozzi escaping, while Nashe stays on alone to fulfil the Sisyphus task?
”…it was almost impossible to know that a hole had ever been there.”
Read to the devastating end of 7, and I thought it was simply an ‘elbow’ trigger just above, but what a trigger!
8
“…’The Mysterious Barricades.’ It was impossible for him to play this last piece without thinking about the wall, and he found himself returning to it more often than any of the others. It took just over two minutes to perform, and at no point in its slow, stately progress, with all its pauses, suspensions, and repetitions, did it require him to touch more than one note at a time. The music started and stopped, then started again, then stopped again, and yet through it all the piece continued to advance, pushing on toward a resolution that never came. Were those the mysterious barricades?”
NB: two tiny new models for F&S’s model town, N & P? — electronic piano for N on his own now, Couperin mystery deriving from above quote, “the continued presence of the gun”, then it was gone from Murks’ side, still untriggered, ‘bowels’ of hell open when the little boy arrives whom N hates to the extreme point of a frenzied thought of killing him, and Pozzi is said to be out of what I now call the Hozzpital?
Tiffany again, music and flirting, N’s ‘erection’, a poker, I wonder?
Read up to: “Zeno’s strictly on the up-and-up.”
“God God God God God.” – to finish 8, a vertical lemniscate. I’ve now forgotten why the name Dolores was important. Perhaps the model’s figures were dollies?
9
“Some time in the third week of November, Nashe realized that it would be possible to bring himself back to zero on his birthday,…”
The Zeno Paradox wall and the Sisyphus who built it.
Back in the Saab, with Murks and Floyd. Back in Society, playing pool with Floyd, plenty of balls with sticks and elbows galore, I guess.
“It might have been one of the quartets that Mozart dedicated to Haydn, Nashe thought, but it might have been the other way around.” — plenty of elbows and fiddles?
The nature of this book’s crucial ending has to be left out of this aide memoire. You will know why when you reach it. If you ever do.
END