Paul Auster - The Music of Chance

The Music of Chance is witty, even jauntyyou wont read much better writing anywhere about the lure of the open roadand it catches the reader in a surprisingly strong spell. Its still further evidence that Auster is one of the few contemporary American novelists whose work is both original and interesting.

The Washington Post

A tour de force about freedom and imprisonment, motion and stasis, order and randomness its story beautifully paced and shaped, its tone powerfully ominous, its prose unfailingly limpid, supple, and energetic.

The Wall Street Journal

Paul Austers fiction combines an exceptionally smooth and poised style with an old-fashioned commitment to intricate plotting. The prose gives his novels an irresistible charm, the plot sweeps the reader into unexpected and dizzying byways of the mind. The experience is a bit like swimming in beautiful and exotic waters.

New York Newsday

The Music of Chance tackles all those serious themes that American novelists arent supposed to be good at anymore: fate, loyalty, responsibility, the nature of evil, and the real meaning of freedom. A thriller with conscience, The Music of Chance is one of the best American novels of the year.

Entertainment Weekly

With The Music of Chance, Auster continues to explore and elaborate upon his particular brand of fictional obsessions, even as he widens the range and flexibility of his subject matter and narrative voice.

Chicago Tribune

Offbeat and strangely compelling In this lucid, captivating yarn, Auster quietly raises disturbing questions of servants and masters, of loyalty, freedom, and the inexplicable urge to kill.

Publishers Weekly

Auster works over the language of the novel with the eyes of a poet and hands of a storyteller. The Music of Chance sustains the brilliance of his previous writing, providing another rare experience of contemporary fiction at its most thrilling.

New Statesman & Society (London)

A carefully plotted work, elegantly sparse in its narration as it narrows to a concentrated conclusion of great intensity. There is pleasure to be had not only from Austers prose but also from the odd mixture of detachment and suspense that the novel induces.

The New York Review of Books

This story is a maze of literary mind gamesmetaphors and references that ricochet playfully from page to page. It is an exceptional novel about the interplay of freedom and chance which takes you on an engrossing tour of a mans inner life.

Los Angeles Times

Austers sleight of hand imbues his work with a haunting sense of the uncanny. An intriguing story about one mans escape from freedom.

San Francisco Chronicle

He can write with the speed and skill of a self-assured pool player, sending one bizarre event ricocheting neatly and unexpectedly into the next creating a narrative that continually manages to elude our expectations. A chilling little story thats entertaining, provocative, and resonant.

The New York Times

Auster writes in a cooly sustained neo-noir voice tinged with existential mystery. The Music of Chance is never less than fascinating, Austers prose is simple and driven. He is a writer unafraid of intensity, eager to enlarge his clever novels with universal questions.

The Boston Globe

Paul Auster is one of Americas most spectacularly inventive writers. His narratives slide easily from the ordinary to the just-plausible to the impossibly outlandish. His prose remains unflappable, meticulously recording the details of even the most extreme situations with elegance and precision. Auster is an experimental writer who is also compulsively readable. His novels are impossible to put down.

The Times Literary Supplement (London)

The Music of Chance is a rare achievement: a novel of formal sophistication which is not consciously exquisite or ostentatiously ground-breaking; a novel whose philosophical concerns convincingly arise out of its action and the fates of its characters, without airily rising above them or schematically giving rise to them; a novel in which the consciousness of an all-unsettling uncertainty does not abolish moral urgency about the seriousness of human bonds. Its dramatic meditation on the moments when things are in harmony and the other moments when they go out of whack gives, rightly, no answersbut it gives clear form to the chaos we sense ourselves verging on when coincidence suddenly shifts our inner bearings.

London Review of Books