In his review of Sunset Park, “The Known World,” Brian Shwartz, initially states that he is unsure as to whether it is right for him to review the novel as he lives in Sunset Park and is therefore somewhat biased both by his own experiences living in the neighborhood and his resentment towards a "great author" who "had decamped from his comfy digs in affluent Park Slope and traveled to my downscale neighborhood to colonize the place with his characters and imagined scenarios." However, Shwartz proceeds to inform the reader that any preconceived notions he had about the novel and Auster were quickly transformed into admiration due to Auster's "masterful and compelling" portrayal of Miles in the first section of the book.
Shwartz then goes on to highlight his disappointment with the discrepancy he feels between this "lovely, troubling first section" and the following less then compelling sections told from the other character's perspectives. However, the biggest disappointment for Shwartz is the return to Miles' perspective. In the first section Miles seems very connected and sensitive to the people and stories around him. He takes pictures of the debris left behind in order to keep the memory of the dispossessed owners alive and acknowledge their pain and Auster describes this connection Miles feels to the past owners in loving detail. However, Shwartz is very irritated by Auster's description of Sunset Park. The "dry listing of facts sounds like a clumsy paragraph from a real-estate broker’s website," a complete contradiction to the full of life descriptions of Florida. Shwartz also feels that Miles seems completely detached from Sunset Park and the lives of the people there, "in Auster’s Brooklyn, immigrants are faceless, the neighborhood is bleak, and Miles is suddenly blind to the lives and hopes of the people around him."
Overall Shwartz appreciates Auster's ability to create a world in which the reader is made to see and believe the "beauty and fragility" of a world of literature. However, Shwartz is frustrated that the potential he sees in the beginning, Auster's, "interest in juxtaposing the world of New York literati with a larger, more complicated America," devolves from focusing on a world of uncertainty to a world that has been focused on by Auster in many of his other books, the predictable, real world of the New York neighborhoods.
I agree with Shwartz that the first 68 pages are the most compelling part of the story. I too was disappointed by the accounts of the other characters. While Miles initially seems connected to everything and everyone around him and his behavior is affected by this connection, he would even rather leave Pilar than disrespect the rules and the memories of the past owners by stealing things for Angela, in the rest of the novel, he and the rest of the characters are utterly caught up in their own lives and seem unaffected by the lives of those around them. Miles is not at all inspired to take pictures in Sunset Park, a place that one would think would inspire him as it is a similar example of the dispossession and destitution that he saw in Florida, yet he is utterly unaffected by it and instead spends his time moping around and missing Pilar. The other characters too for the most part seem more concerned with themselves than anything else.
However, I think that this account of the characters being unaffected by anything other than their own circumstances is actually a very good representation of the results of an economic crisis. It is easy to be concerned with others when you are well provided for and have the ability to be generous, yet it is much harder when you are fighting not just to save your business and job but your very home. Therefore, I think Auster's writing in the remainder of the book is a much more accurate depiction of reality.
Nina I totally agree with Shwartz about the first 68 pages of the text. However, I feel some intrinsic pull of the deteriorating lives of the other characters too. Though I don't appreciate the other misfits as much as Mile, I still find them somewhat interesting.
ReplyDelete-Ayesha
I think that there is supposed to be a juxtaposition between the favorable descriptions of Florida and the bleak portrayals of Brooklyn, because they fit Miles' mood when he is there. It is bleak for Miles in Sunset Park because he is away from Pilar, which is an accurate portrayal of a situation when one is forced to be far away from the one they love. I think the sunny descriptions of Florida and the first 69 pages are also realistic though, because Miles is with Pilar and away from what troubles him in Brooklyn.
ReplyDeleteI think that Auster portrays Sunset Park in this bleak, detached manner on purpose in order to create some sort of representation in the reader's mind. In my opinion, Sunset Park symbolizes a place, both physically and metaphorically, in which all characters in the novel are in a standstill in their lives. They have all made past mistakes and/or have regrets and for this reason they have all come together to this house in Sunset Park. All the characters have left themselves with no choice but to live there until they figure out what the next chapter of their lives will entail.
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