di Auster - "The Music of Chance"
"The Music of Chance" is a novel written by the American author Paul Auster and published in 1990.
Jim Nashe is a firefighter who, after having inherited an unexpected fortune, starts wandering around America, waiting for the money to end. But when the case, again, brings him to Jakpot, an extravagant poker player in his early twenties, what seemed like a trip according to the canons of American mythology turns into a metaphysical horror story.
The gloomy atmosphere starts with a poker game where the freedom of the protagonists is at stake. The writing is direct and incisive and the plot is very well constructed. The protagonist will have to pass a test, almost a paradox: erecting a wall with stones from an old Irish castle to conquer freedom; a concrete experience that will give way to the inner evolution of the character and that takes the connotations of the grotesque and the metaphysical.
In arriving at the epilogue the reader poses questions about the boundless power of chance, free will, destiny, fate and loneliness. As in David Lynch's films, the search for truth does not find answers, it remains in the balance between reality and lies. In the end the questions remain unanswered and what remains is a sense of unknown and profound ambiguity.
In the book lives a shattered world, in which the "case music" and the changes of existence resound are generated by apparently marginal and casual facts.
