The Music of Chance - Paul Auster
$10.37 inc. tax
Preowned hardcover fiction.
By Paul Auster
ISBN 0-670-83535-8
Viking 1990
Shipping included.
On the inside cover:
“ The territory of Paul Auster's sixth novel opens wide, taking in the whole of the American continent, and then compresses into a single Pennsylvania meadow where two men are building a wall. How they come to this task--and the peculiar conditions imposed on them--is a matter of chance. But in Paul Auster's world, chance is a shifting and powerful force, at times resembling accident, at times fate, at times implacable volition.
Jim Nashe is in his thirties, a Boston fireman, a responsible father, a guardian of other people's lives. When he comes into a small inheritance, he decides to pursue "a life of freedom." For a year, Nashe drives back and forth across the United States, "careening blindly from one nowhere to the next, waiting for the money to run out. Then he meets Pozzi, an itinerant gambler with an abiding anger he does not attempt to master. With Nashe's last funds, he and Pozzi enter a poker game against Flower and Stone, risking "everything on the single blind turn of a card."
In this profoundly intimate, arresting parable, Paul Auster creates a world of fiendish bargains and punative whims— a world redeemed, nonetheless, by Nashe's resolute quest for justice and his capacity for love. Taut, haunting, yet strangely exuberant, The Music of Chance explores the meaning of freedom and control, relentlessly interrogating the mysteries embedded in every human choice. It is a story about the small, valuable things we can do at a time when everything is being done to us.”
