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Sunset Park (en español)

Name: Sunset Park (en español)
Author: Paul Auster
ISBN: 9788433932853

by Paul Auster

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Overview

Miles Heller tiene veintiocho años, y a los veinte abandonó la universidad, se despidió de sus padres, dejó Nueva York, y nadie ha vuelto a saber nada de él. Ahora vive en Florida, y trabaja para una empresa que se encarga de vaciar las viviendas de los desahuciados. Además de acarrear bultos y repintar paredes, Miles saca fotos de todas las cosas abandonadas para probar que los fantasmas de esa gente aún están presentes. Miles vive con lo mínimo, y habría seguido así de no haber sido por Pilar Sanchez. El único inconveniente es la edad de Pilar: dieciséis años. Y como Miles puede ir a la cárcel por la relación con una menor, y la codiciosa hermana de Pilar comienza a chantajearlos, regresa a Nueva York y espera allí la mayoría de edad de Pilar. Su vuelta es el retorno al pasado y a sus secretos; a su padre, un brillante editor; a su madre, una actriz implacablemente seductora. Y también la vuelta a la comunidad de Sunset Park y a sus compañeros okupas; a la vida, con todos sus horrores y esplendores. «Sunset Park también es, como Invisible, un libro sobre la inocencia de la juventud... Se habla de Auster como del maestro de la metanarrativa, pero él prefiere citar como fuente de inspiración a Emily Brontë antes que a Baudrillard» (Arifa Akbar, The Independent); «Volverá a seducir a sus fans de siempre, pero también atraerá a una multitud de nuevos lectores» (Kirkus Review); «En tiempos de crisis y de cambios abrumadores, Auster nos recuerda las cosas duraderas: el amor, el arte y la ?extraña sensación de estar vivo?» (Donna Seaman, Booklist).

About the Author, Paul Auster

Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Invisible, Man in the Dark, Travels in the Scriptorium, The Brooklyn Follies, and Oracle Night. I Thought My Father Was God, the NPR National Story Project anthology, which he edited, was a national bestseller. His work has been translated into thirty-five languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Biography

Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences.

This sentence from the opening of Paul Auster's first novel, City of Glass, could also serve as a template for the author's career, both in circumstance and theme. City of Glass is perhaps the best known of Auster's postmodern detective New York Trilogy, which is rounded out by Ghosts and The Locked Room. Though the novels nominally involve cases to be solved, at base they are about the mystery of identity and how easily it can be lost or altered. In City of Glass, a mystery writer mistakenly receives a phone call for detective Paul Auster and assumes his identity, becoming embroiled in a case. The trilogy was a welcome breath of fresh air for both detective stories and postmodernist writing, and it put Auster on the publishing map.

Setting out to write his subsequent novel, Auster kept in mind the subtitle "Anna Blume Walks Through the 20th Century." The result was a woman's post-apocalyptic urban journey, In the Country of Last Things. Subsequent works such as Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Leviathan, and Mr. Vertigo offered heroes caught up in strange worlds, playing out their stories over existential subtexts. The Music of Chance carries references from Beckett's Waiting for Godot in its story about a drifter who ends up teaming with a card player named Jack Pozzi to hustle two wealthy eccentrics in a fateful poker game. In Mr. Vertigo, a boy who has the ability to levitate goes on the road in the 1920s as "the Wonder Boy," moving through a panorama of pre-Depression America.

Auster's ability to blur the line between fantasy and reality has resulted in unique stories that never operate solely as good yarns. The New York Times wrote of Leviathan -- a dead man's coincidence-ridden story, as narrated by his friend -- "Thus in the literary looking glass of Leviathan, in which things are not always what they seem, our pleasure in reading the story is enhanced by the challenge of making other connections." Auster's fondness for allegory has earned him both praise for his cleverness and criticism from reviewers who, even as they praise his talent, occasionally find him heavy-handed.

The director Philip Haas adapted The Music of Chance for the 1993 film starring James Spader and Mandy Patinkin. But it was Wayne Wang who drew Auster to the movie business in earnest, convincing him to write the screenplay for 1995's Smoke, which was adapted from the short story "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story." The film did well enough to get producer Miramax on board for a sequel bringing back star Harvey Keitel, Blue in the Face. This time, Auster not only wrote the script but co-directed with Wang; he later went full-fledged auteur with the 1998 film (also starring Keitel) Lulu on the Bridge.

In 1999, Auster made the unconventional choice of writing from a canine's point of view in Timbuktu -- although as Auster noted in the Guardian, Mr. Bones "is and isn't a dog." In telling the story of himself and his owner, a homeless "outlaw poet" named Willy G. Christmas, Mr. Bones offers a meditation on mortality, human relationships, and dreams. "If anything," Auster said in a chat with Barnes & Noble.com readers, "I thought of Willy and Mr. Bones as a rather screwball, nutty, latter-day version of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the befuddled knight-errant and his loyal squire." The New York Times called Timbuktu his "most touching, most emotionally accessible book."

Auster earned some of his best reviews with his tenth novel The Book of Illusions, about a widower who develops an obsession with an obscure silent-film star and is surprised with an invitation to meet the presumed-dead actor. Book magazine called it "certainly his best...the book [has] the drive and dazzle reminiscent of the classic hardboiled yarns of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett."

Auster is an author who, in both his fiction and his nonfiction, rekindles hope for the romantic, the coincidental, and the magical in everyday life. He does this not with fantastic story lines but by heightening the significance of twists and coincidences that happen to us all the time -- if we approach things in a certain light, our lives become like movies. Auster spins the projector.

Good To Know

Auster's wife Siri Hustvedt, whom he met in 1981, is also a novelist and essayist; writing about her novel The Blindfold, the Village Voice Literary Supplement called Hustvedt "a writer of strong, sometimes astonishing gifts." Auster's first wife was writer Lydia Davis.

Desperately poor in the late '70s and working unhappily as a French translator to make ends meet, Auster wrote a detective novel called Squeeze Play to make some money. He also invented a card game called Action Baseball that he tried to sell to game manufacturers. However, Squeeze Play is "not a legitimate book," he told the Guardian; it was published under a pseudonym. Later, an inheritance from his father allowed Auster the financial freedom to focus more on his writing.

Auster has enjoyed a remarkably international following, even in the days before his Hollywood projects raised his profile; his novels have been translated into several languages, and web sites from Germany to Japan pay him homage.

Reviews

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Auster (Invisible) is in excellent form for this foray into the tarnished, conflicted soul of Brooklyn. New York native Miles Heller now cleans out foreclosed south Florida homes, but after falling in love with an underage girl and stirring the wrath of her older sister, he flees to Brooklyn and shacks up with a group of artists squatting in the borough's Sunset Park neighborhood. As Miles arrives at the squat, the narrative broadens to take in the lives of Miles's roommates--among them Bing, "the champion of discontent," and Alice, a starving writer--and the unlikely paths that lead them to their squat. Then there's the matter of Miles's estranged father, Morris, who, in trying to save both his marriage and the independent publishing outfit he runs, may find the opportunity to patch things up with Miles. The fractured narrative takes in an impressive swath of life and history--Vietnam, baseball trivia, the WWII coming-home film The Best Years of Our Lives--and even if a couple of the perspectives feel weak, Auster's newest is a gratifying departure from the postmodern trickery he's known for, one full of crisp turns of phrase and keen insights. (Nov.)

Kirkus Reviews

With a plot that encompasses war in the Middle East, economic recession and the perils of the publishing industry, a contemporary vitality distinguishes the latest from the veteran author. In many respects this novel bears the thematic imprint of Auster (Invisible, 2009, etc.)-chance, coincidence and "the imponderables of fate, the strangeness of life, the what-ifs and might-have-beens." Yet the literary gamesmanship of his metafictional narratives is less evident here, as the critical challenges of these times leave both the characters and the author with more at stake. The plot pivots around Miles Heller, son of an independent publisher and a well-known actress who divorced early in his childhood. After his stepbrother suffers a fatal accident, Miles can't shake the guilt he feels over his possible complicity and the suspicions of his stepmother, so he abandons his studies, cutting all ties with his family. A chance romance with a much younger girl returns him to New York, where he finds shelter in an abandoned building that has become something of an artist's colony. The plot unfolds from various perspectives, amid insecurities both economic and psychological, as details from the mid-1940s film The Best Years of Our Life provide cinematic counterpoint. Though one character muses that "the dark time will soon be over, and all will be forgiven," the novel's tragic foreshadowing doesn't promise a happily-ever-after ending. Sure to please Auster fans and likely to attract new readers as well.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Paul Auster's first book, the 1982 memoir The Invention of Solitude, opens with a grim portrait of his late father's empty house. Losing his father revived his old frustrations over how distant they had become, and he sensed a spectral chill in the home he'd come to clear out. "There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man," he wrote. "When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. They are there and yet not there: tangible ghosts, condemned to survive in a world they no longer belong to."

The opening pages of Sunset Park, Auster's unexpectedly searing new novel about abandoned homes and broken families, eerily echo that scene. Miles Heller is a young man who's spent years aimlessly wandering the country and flaying himself over his possible role in the death of his half-brother. We first meet him in Florida "trashing out" abandoned foreclosed homes for quick resale, and like Auster in his first book, Miles documents his visits as a way of coming to terms with the sadness he witnesses. He wants to show that the "ghosts of people he will never see and never know are still present in the discarded things strewn about their empty houses."

The connection between The Invention of Solitude and Sunset Park -- Auster's personal past and fictional present -- isn't limited to renderings of an empty armchair or a broken dish or two. Miles, like Auster, was a promising baseball player who eventually gave up the sport, and the novel is filled with ghoulish baseball arcana about players whose careers where cut tragically short. (Among the members of this creepy hall of fame is Herb Score, a pitcher for the Cleveland Indians in the 1950s whose career never recovered after a line drive smashed his face.) Miles, like Auster, has worked odd jobs, and they both fixate on a lack of love received from their fathers. One character works part-time at the PEN American Center, a nonprofit where Auster once served on the board of trustees.

It's not unusual for Auster to litter his novels with personal detail, of course. But Sunset Park isn't another self-referential puzzle: its power derives from how intensely its characters look into themselves and their pasts -- worriedly, regretfully -- in a manner that evokes the heartfelt, introspective tone of Auster's memoirs. In Solitude, Hand to Mouth, and The Red Notebook he addressed matters of maturity and family with a directness that rarely emerges in his fiction, where he's done his moral workouts in the context of steely Pomo eccentricities: the noirish riffing of The New York Trilogy, the dog's-eye-view of Timbuktu, the absurdist Travels in the Scriptorium, the stories-within-stories of Oracle Night and last year's Invisible. Sunset Park isn't "autobiographical" so much as it's borne of the same confessional spirit Auster has brought to his nonfiction.

Still, he does need some of his old tools to get Sunset Park's motor to kick. While in Florida, Miles falls for a 17-year-old girl named Pilar, whom he meets in unlikely circumstances: they're both reading the same edition of The Great Gatsby at the same park. His love is pure, but Pilar's jailbait status troubles the relationship. When Miles can't loot enough things on the job to satisfy Pilar's family, he needs to disappear for six months, until Pilar turns 18. "One call to the cops, and you're toast, my friend," Pilar's sister tells him, a bit of faux-noir the novel will soon abandon.

Miles's refuge is the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park, where his idealistic friend Bing Nathan has established a squat he shares with two other friends. Miles lapses into prison-speak to describe his life apart from Pilar, considering himself one of the "Sunset Park Four." Because he's now in the vicinity of parents he's spent years avoiding, he feels imprisoned further still. For the reader, though, it's clear there are worse fellow inmates to have. Bing runs a junkshop with the metaphorically pointed name of the Hospital of Broken Things. Ellen is a bright artist fixated on sexual themes. Alice, the member of this ad hoc family who winds up with the most significance for Miles, is a graduate student studying post-World War II crime novels and films, particularly The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler's 1946 melodrama about U.S. soldiers adjusting to life back home after the war -- a film that plays into her thesis that they lived in a time when "American life had to be reinvented."

Auster uses the film to underscore how complicated the definition of "happy family" is; nearly everybody in the novel registers a different opinion about it. His mother, a famous actress, "choked up at the end and cried"; Miles's father, the owner of a small but prestigious publishing house, thinks it's "propaganda" machined to argue that "everything will work out, because this is America, and in America everything always works out"; Ellen sees tragedy down the road for its characters; Miles, forever pragmatic, politely gives it a B-plus. The divergent opinions subtly underscore how much emotional distance needs to be bridged, though the entrapment theme is sometimes noisily obvious: Miles's mother is rehearsing Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, a play in which she portrays a woman buried in a mound of earth. But Auster writes with affectless sincerity when Miles's father imagines himself becoming a "Can Man," a homeless person who emerges whenever he wants to escape his existence much as his son did.

A younger Auster might've lit this scenario in neon, played up its strangeness. But Sunset Park's prodigal-son tale is somberly poignant, a study of how deeply the urge to connect runs. (The book's final section has the embracing title "All," with a chapter dedicated to each major character.) The characteristic literary references, sexual transgressions, and peculiar coincidences remain. But it's the father-son story at the core that prevails and intensifies, culminating in an ending as powerful and open to interpretation as Wyler's film. We can go home again, Auster wants us to know. But how brutally difficult it can be to face that threshold and walk in.

--Mark Athitakis