Status Updates From La Musique Du Hasard

Nashe is driven by chance. Poker is a game of chance. Life plays like music to the rhythm of chance. In Nashe's case, classical music provides the soundtrack. Decisions can be taken within the given framework. Wrong decisions can be mercilessly punished.
The ones determining the framework play another game. Flower and Stone make the rules. They are untouchable. Their helpers are not.

The first third is just setup. Unremarkable. Things get interesting when Jim and Jack arrive for the poker party. Everything's wrong. Flower and Stone don't show their true faces. An oppressive atmosphere. Something fishy is going on. The situation quickly becomes ugly for Jim and Jack.

Auster is on known territory. An isolated man, reality with a twist, another world lurking through the cracks.

After Sabbath's Theater, this feels like coming from a younger generation of writers even though it was written five years earlier. Not as deep and ponderous, reads like a breeze. In both, a man is on a desperate last journey. But the focus is shifted from inner torments to apathetically drifting through an indifferent world with random encounters. A puppet instead of a puppeteer.