SUNSET PARK
Novel Paul Auster
Anagrama 2010
narratives Panorama
Original title: Sunset Park 2010
Translated from English by Benito Gómez Ibáñez
278 pages
Although you can not consider novelist Paul Auster as a philosophical or as a novelist of considerable controversy, we are seeing in his latest books is growing interest in the social situation in the U.S. and in particular in the segment of population younger. If your previous novel Invisible, This concern was behind the other concerns and especially behind his essays and stories metaliterature times and with different narrators, in Sunset Park, his last novel, Auster see a dump directly into the status of some American youth and so disenchanted as the current financial crisis, evictions or media pressure in favor of the recent Nobel Peace Prize Liu Xiaobo. This is an absolutely linear novel, narrated in the present tense once that runs from fall 2008 to spring 2009.
A young character, Miles Heller, 28, gathers around him many friends and family Auster describes not so much to get into their lives, problems or feelings, to create a coral history situates us in the New York post-Bush era, compared to a generation of young people evicted them also hit by the circumstances has touched their lives, struggling to survive in an adverse world, even if it means having to pay a high price.
Miles, alive but weak temperament, he feels guilty about an unfortunate accident that took the life of his half-brother Bobby. Without explanation dropped out of school, runs away from home, and performs several jobs for seven years, the last of which led him to Florida where works for a company dedicated to clean up the houses because of mortgage defaults and foreclosures banks want to resell. Florida falls in love with Pilar, a 17 year old Cuban. However, the blackmail jealous sister, and to avoid problems with police in the Puritan American environment, Miles returned to New York in the hope that Pilar is 18 years.
Miles, will be installed in a squat in the Sunset Park district in Brooklyn with his friend Bing Nathan, Drums in a band and local owner of a curious, the "Hospital of broken things" and that Miles behind has been passing information to the family sovereign the whereabouts of his friend. The brilliant, self-conscious Alice Bergstrom preparing his doctoral thesis, and the beautiful and depressing Ellen Brice, complete the occupants of a dilapidated house where they have installed illegally with the constant fear of a visit from the police.
They are characters, smart and valuable, but at the same time sad, hurt, hopeless and increasingly less willing to find solutions. Among them, Miles is the most typically Austeriano, tormented and quiet, instead of coping flees. The weight of the family, the brilliant and independent career of her actress mother, caring father, owner of a publishing house, everything seems to contribute to increase their sense of failure.
Obviously, Auster could not conform to simple linear story. Through an ingenious set of mirrors, projecting the current situation, which followed the Second World War and does so with the movie "The Best Years of Our Lives by William Wyler that at some point all the characters in the novel have seen and that is the basis for his doctoral thesis on the works Alice.
This is not the only nod to Auster makes the culture, a language of young Miles Heller (actually a composition of Auster's daughter), we can enter the Harper Lee novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" and leads him to introduce something as blunt as "There must have been injured to become a man"
In simple language, bright, Auster takes us through 287 pages for the lives of characters and a time, but no conclusions. Nothing is closed. The characters go about their problems and concerns and we are left with the feeling of seeing see a "continue".
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