Paul Auster's Sunset Park is set in the sprawling flatlands of Florida, where twenty-eight-year-old Miles is photographing the last lingering traces of families who have abandoned their houses due to debt or foreclosure. Miles is haunted by guilt for having inadvertently caused the death of his step-brother, a situation that caused him to flee his father and step-mother in New York seven years ago.
What keeps him in Florida is his relationship with a teenage high-school girl, Pilar, but when her family threatens to expose their relationship, Miles decides to protect Pilar by going back to Brooklyn, where he settles in a squat to prepare himself to face the inevitable confrontation with his father - a confrontation he has been avoiding for years.
Set against the backdrop of the devastating global recession, and pulsing with the energy of Auster's previous novel Invisible, Sunset Park is as mythic as it is contemporary, as in love with baseball as it is with literature. It is above all, a story about love and forgiveness - not only among men and women, but also between fathers and sons.
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[For almost a year now, he has been taking photographs of abandoned things]***
(Faber & Faber, 2 June 2011, borrowed from my library)
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I thought Sunset Park was great. I'm a big fan of Auster's work since his New York Trilogy blew me away several years ago.
Sunset Park is much more complex than it would initially appear, intense and riveting at times. I got completely lost in it every time I sat down to read it.
I really enjoy Auster's prose. His writing is rich and vivid. I found the novel absorbing.
I liked the way the novel is structured, using different characters to gradually bring seemingly unconnected events together.
The characters are complex, flawed and thoroughly engrossing.
