The Music of Chance

First UK edition. 8vo. Pp. [vi], 217. Publisher's black cloth, lettered in ecru to spine. Pictorial dustjacket featuring the author as a budding pianist, designed by Irene von Treskow.

Signed by Auster to title-page. Textblock edges lightly tanned, else Fine.

Finalist for the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Auster's sixth novel. A Kafkaesque parable about a Boston fireman who decides to pursue a 'life of freedom,' only to end up his days as an indentured bricklayer in a Pennsylvania meadow, following a high-stakes poker game. Chance, understandably, is a recurring theme in Auster's fiction. Whilst hiking during summer camp aged 14, he witnessed a boy inches away from him struck dead by lightning. "That changed the way I saw the world. Until then I thought I was walking on solid ground. There is no such thing. Anything can happen to anyone at any time, just like that". [From a 2018 interview with Greek daily, Kathimerini, on the occasion of the Greek release of his magnum opus 4321].

Basis for the 1993 Philip Haas-directed film, starring James Spader, Mandy Patinkin, M. Emmet Walsh, Charles Durning, Joel Gray and featuring a cameo by the author as a driver. "A rare experience of contemporary fiction at its most thrilling." –New Statesman