Book Description

Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, retired, estranged from his only daughter, the former life insurance salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Glass encounters his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, who is working in a local bookstore -- a far cry from the brilliant academic career Tom had begun when Nathan saw him last. Tom's boss is the colorful and charismatic Harry Brightman -- aka Harry Dunkel -- once the owner of a Chicago art gallery, whom fate has also brought to the "ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, New York." Through Tom and Harry, Nathan's world gradually broadens to include a new circle of acquaintances -- not to mention a stray relative or two -- and leads him to a reckoning with his past.

Customer Reviews (1)

AUTHOR'S READING:THE PERFECT VOICE
New Jersey born Brooklyn based Paul Auster has given us memorable poetry, golden short stories, and bestselling novels, including Oracle Night, The Book of Illusions and Timbuktu.
He sets his latest novel in his chosen home, Brooklyn, and introduces Nathan Glass, a very ordinary man who helps us to see the extraordinariness of life.

Nathan is 59 years old, at one time he was a life insurance salesman,and hehas returned to Brooklyn to die.He's divorced, and has no contact with his only child.All Nathan wants is to be left alone; he doesn't want to be bothered and he won't bother anyone.

However, it's not long before he meets his nephew, Tom Wood, whom he hasn't seen in years.Tom now works in a bookstore owned by Harry Brightman.It is through Tom and Harry that Nathan is drawn into the world and meets new people in the Park Slope neighborhood.

At times, it doesn't sound as if Nathan or his friends think much of life; in fact, they say the world stinks.We hear Harry saying that they try to avoid the world.To this Tom replies, "We're right in the thick of it, whether we like it or not. It's all around us, and every time I lift my head and take a good look at it, I'm filled with disgust. Sadness and disgust. You'd think World War Two would have settled things, at least for a couple of hundred years. But we're still hacking each other to pieces, aren't we? We still hate each other as much as we ever did."

However, listen as the story evolves as does Nathan.

From the stuff of everyday life Auster has fashioned a hopeful, uplifting story.Hearing it read in his voice is a joy as he segues between the voices of Nathan, Tom and Harry during their dinner table conversations.Auster's voice is deep, his accent Eastern - a perfect fit.

- Gail Cooke
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Book Description
Quinn writes mysteries. The Washington Post has described him as a 'post-existentialist private eye.' An unknown voice on the telephone is now begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print. Adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, with graphics by David Mazzucchelli, Paul Auster's groundbreaking, Edgar Award-nominated masterwork has been astonishingly transformed into a new visual language. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Outstanding
Not knowing the book, I bought this comic by chance and was not at all prepared. I've never read a comic like this in my whole life. It goes so deep...it's a miracle.

Brilliant and challenging adaptation
The real magic here is that, in reworking Paul Auster's original novel, Karasik and Mazzucchelli have produced a true literary adaptation in comics form. This is no "Classics Illustrated"; this is a comic that strengthens its source material rather than diminishing it. The original book's concern with the gap between language and meaning is given further depth and resonance in the comic, which finds a visual language equivalent, and does it in a way that no other medium could have. This is no mere illustrated text, but comics as a formidable language and medium in itself. Interestingly, when the original book and the comic are read together, the comic itself almost becomes a physical character, another in the story's proliferation of literary doubles.

Damn' good!!
"City of Glass" is not a simple adaptation from the original book, but a real translation, from literature to sequential art. Mazzuchelli's drawings provides a very good trip to Auster's universe, his unusual characters, enlarging at same time the limits of comics language. One of the best comic books ever!

Must have companion piece to The New York Trilogy
If you enjoyed (or more likely were haunted by) City of Glass then you owe it to yourself to read this graphic novel.Yes, it is essentially the exact same story as Auster's metaphysical detective novella.However, this is a fascinating and beautifully rendered interpretation of the source work. My only complaint: where are the graphic novels forGhosts and The Locked Room?

Exceptional, Horrific and Beautiful Fiction
City of Glass is the story of Daniel Quinn, a poet turned mystery writer, who is called one night by a person urgently seeking a detective.After several nights of "Sorry, wrong number," Quinn decides to impersonate Paul Auster, the detective the person wants to hire.Accepting the assignment leads to his ultimate ruin.

This story is primarily about Quinn's descent from depression into outright obsession and madness.Horrific abuse based on misinterpreted religion plays a big part in the book, as does the threat of murder.The perceived danger eventually disappears and the case fades away, but Quinn cannot return to his former life, and ends up completely delusional.

City of Glass is a book of unusual subtlety.Much of the tension is implicit, but is sensed through sections of extensive dialogue. The sparse artwork of the book, finally, highlights the dialogue by moving it along and filling it out, rather than distracting the reader from what is being said.

This is an exceptional work of fiction, even for readers unaccustomed to graphic novels.
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Customer Reviews (26)

The Power of Hope
Paul Auster presents us with yet another must-read.This novella takes place in an unnamed city that has suffered complete ruin.There is no consistent government to speak of and anarchy rules supreme.But, the fascinating premise is that this is not a world problem, this is a city problem.It is a land cutoff from the world, and the world seems to have forgotten about it.Sound familiar?(Keep in mind this book was first published in 1987.)However, newspapers are still trying to get the scoop on what's going on, and so reporters are occasionally sent in, though most never return.

One such reporter who never returned left behind a younger sister who has traveled to the country of last things in order to find him.From a privileged family, it takes her a surprisingly short amount of time to adapt to the horrific conditions under which she must survive.She is primarily the narrator of her story, and we follow her as she experiences tragedy, death, suffering, but also, as impossible as it may seem, love and hope.

I've heard this book is about everything that can go wrong in a society and how it can leave the reader with a sense of despondency; however, I found the book to be a testament to the power of hope and love.

To touch upon Auster's style: I've read many of Auster's books, and while he explores similar themes, I've never read two books that were written in the same manner.Auster gives us something fresh and artistically progressive with each book he writes.In the Country of Last Things is virtually a how-to for any budding writer as it uses sparse detail and very limited dialogue to completely drive home the potency of the theme.

I've yet to read a book I did not like from Paul Auster, and In the Country of Last Things is certainly no exception.

~Scott William Foley, author of Souls Triumphant

Setting Trumps Character and Plot
The setting provides some wonderfully lurid details in Paul Auster's futuristic narrative and will keep readers turning the pages of his dystopian novel, but the so-so character development of IN THE COUNTRY OF LAST THINGS ultimately prevents this echo of Orwell from receiving the 4 stars it flirts with.There's no question that Auster is creative and compelling in describing a city gone mad with hunger, crime, and want, but once you go beyond the protagonist Anna Blume, you run into characters who are poorly developed and of little interest to the reader.

One of the book's strengths is in describing the futuristic world.It is powered by factories that burn human waste and human cadavers for energy needs, for starters.The streets are wild and dangerous, as scavengers battle over food and objects.Rife with corruption, citizens wheel and deal under a police state that often looks the other way as they break the "law."Beyond hope, many citizens choose death in interesting ways.The Leapers jump off of building roofs.The Runners run themselves into a frenzy until they collapse dead on the streets. And the Assassinators stalk people who want to die at an unknown time by an unknown method, so pay the assassinators to perform the function.

This setting and these conditions provide momentum for the book's plot as anything can happen.The "country" of the title, then, is the book's greatest strength.Unfortunately, the episodic nature of the plot sometimes gives the book a disjointed feel as characters come and go so quickly that there is little allegiance to or feeling for them on the part of the reader.Also, Auster is not above throwing in a little gratuitous sex, even when it adds nothing to the plot or the characters involved.

Despite these drawbacks, the book was intriguing in its way and should satisfy fans of dystopian fiction.I read it in a day, and although I was happy to witness Auster's artistry in creating so bleak and bizarre a world, I was just as happy to leave it and move on.For fans of the genre, this book should prove satisfying.For fans of literature, it should prove interesting, if sometimes lacking, in its ambition and reach.

Live and let write in the "Country"
It is the end of the world as we know it, and Paul Auster feels fine - sort of. His novel "In the Country of Last Things" seems to be unusual in his body work. But as the narrative advances one can notice that this novel perfectly fits his literary obsessions and constant themes. Characters live in a dystrophic world that resembles a lot the our very own world. This can be a strange and dangerous future.

This place is reminiscent of the Great Depression, when the rule is the lack - of food, clothes, services and, above all, dignity. Anna Blume is the main character, a girl who travels to this country to find her lost journalist brother. Since it's a chaotic place nor she, neither can make out what has happened.

Auster is not after a reason to explain why the world has gone rotten. The most important thing is surviving. Anna has to find means of going through hard times and yet emerge as a human being. With this device, the writer is dealing with complex and important themes.

"In the Country of Last Things", Auster exploit of the dearest issues to him: the difficult people have to communicate to each other. Sometimes words are not enough, when everything shouldn't have a limit. "You stop, but that does not mean you have come to the end. The words get smaller and smaller".

Auster, an author who has such an ease for words, here finds that one of the job of a writer is to overcome the limits that language may impose. This is the aim thing he has perceived in his career, sometime succeeding.

the maddening city
The future can only get worse. The city that awaits us is an scavengers' retreat. Man's umbilical cord links him not to mother, nurture or nature, but to an old, screeching shopping cart used to collect rubbish. The city is a site for decomposing parafernalia; objects expire by the side of corpses, corpses are removed of its objects: a nice suit, a golden teeth. The National Library is a crumpling building, perhaps the ultimate space for Anna Blume to find refuge from the crippling, self-enclosed cityscape. The she finds Samuel Farr, but will she ever find William, her brother? Many a Terrible Winter can be spent taking refuge among books.

The next movement in this nightmare society goes through the abolition of the academy status of religious scholars. A world devoid of religion, of culture, of academies, is not far from becoming a slaughter house, having lost the feeling for the sacredness of man.

The city of the future is the result of the extension of the ills of our present time into an unaccountable absurd. It is our duty to be attentive to present signs of disintegration and to try to remedy them. The problem of the city will be impossible to solve. On the other side of this barbaric city are sixteenth-century Spain (Isabel and Ferdinand), eighteenth-century Russia... and wherever the spirit has ever wavered between teh written word and the sacred purpose.

A skillfull, monotonous work


"In the country of last things", is - as many other novels by Paul Auster - a show-off in artistic brilliance and postmodern narratives. My sole criticism is that the the work lacks in sensibility in the portrayal of his characters (they seldom become anything other than segments of flesh - and in this novel, even despite his immense sharing of the protagonist's ponderings over his existence). Yet, I cannot deny that I was full of admiration from reading some very poetic depictions from this futurustic world Paul Auster has created in "In the country of last things". Unfortunely he never succeds in yielding anything a life beyond the stunning surface, and therefore and sadly his works have a tendency to turn into the monotonous. Often do I get the impression that Paul Auster is a smart and first-class craftman but a mediocre artist.
... Read more

Amazon.com
It's no wonder that Paul Auster (The Music of Chance, Leviathan, Mr. Vertigo) creates such singular characters. While his youth comprised a series of failures too unbelievable for fiction, it also equipped him with a range of experiences to draw from that most fiction writers only dream of. He worked with Bowery bums at a summer camp, had a childhood friend join the Weather Underground, and was a student at Columbia in 1968 at the height of the student uprisings there (and at which point, he boasts, he knew seven of the FBI's ten most wanted men). He worked on an oil tanker, for a French Mafia-style film producer in Paris, and for a rare-book organization in New York. He translated the North Vietnamese constitution from French into English (don't ask). His work brought him in contact to varying extents with Jean Genet, Mary McCarthy, Jerzy Kosinski, Sartre, Foucault, and John Lennon. The encounters and experiences must have been fascinating, failure aside, but Auster's prose here, sadly, lacks the tightness and luster of his fiction. The remainder--and major portion--of the volume consists of three plays, a baseball card game, and a detective novel, all written during this time.Book Description
Paul Auster's Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure is a fascinating and often funny memoir about his early years as a writer struggling to be published, and to make enough money to survive. Leaving high school with 'itchy feet' and refusing to play it safe, Auster avoided convention and the double life of steady office employment while writing. From the streets of New York City, Dublin, and Paris to a surreal adventure in a dusty village in Mexico, Auster's account of living on next to nothing introduces an unforgettable cast of characters while examining what it means to be a writer. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (27)

A Disappointment
I love Auster and when I first started reading this memoir about his early days of struggle as a writer, I was throughly engrossed. There was something open and honest about his early years, and although it runs parallel to many of the struggles writers go through, his was particularly interesting because of the wonderful people he meets along the way and the interesting situations and work environments he finds himself. But something happens halfway in and the work just comes to a halt. It loses its momentum and becomes trite and even boring. Auster fans will enjoy the early play and detective novel included, but even those seem thrown in, as if Auster knew that what he was publishing was not worth the money.

or 'How To Clean Out Your Desk and Make Money'
My eye was caught by the pretty photo of the author on the cover.Now that I've read this stinker, I bet he lovingly searched for the best(old) photo of himself.I've never heard of him before but he joins the ranks of those who work hardest trying to avoid work. He's the Maynard G. Krebs (Work!) of Columbia, Class of 69'.Couldn't Paul Auster have had some nobility about taking good care of his wife and son?Oh, yeah, that would mean someone else coming first in his life.After I closed the cover I wondered what messed up this guy to never attach to anything.I looked him up on the internet and it's the old story-getting old, settling down, and finally growing up.And cleaning out his desk and diary and making a buck off it.

When Am I Gonna Make A Living?
Paul Auster's autobiographical account spanning about 12 years or so after he finished college, is an excellent exposition of a young writer's search for meaning, and then the translation of that meaning into money, to provide for further existence, to allow the writer to keep producing work, representative of his desires, but also able to be sold for money to continue the quest.

The appeal to almost all people is hidden in the fact, that at anytime, any person, can be living a "hand to mouth" existence.This feeling of abject poverty and financial ruin is not uncommon today, in an economy that has lost over 2 million jobs, and forced hundreds of thousands to start their own businesses because work was not available.Those in America who have had to do this, can relate directly to Auster's feelings, especially the salient concept of when will I ever get to the point when I am making a living again, even a somewhat less luxurious one than before, just any living.

As usual, Auster uses his incredible incisiveness and truly exceptional clarity in his construction of this book.It is of special interest to Auster readers, as it gives the reader some very interesting information about the author's early days when he was still struggling to become known.But Auster's story is one that every actor, every writer, every lawyer, every doctor, or most of them anyway, have to go through at the beginning, including every new entrepreneur.Becoming established is very hard work.And more people fail, than succeed.This high failure rate is generated by the need to be able to sustain high levels of suffering in bad times, to get to the good times.Most of us are just not up to the task.

Not All Editions Include Game & Detective Novel Extras
Hand to Mouth, by itself, is a somewhat raw but not at all insensitive memoir of life before publishing.I found it engrossing at times.

Auster recounts his youthful rejection of middle class consumerism, his odd and fascinating encounters with all kinds of characters and life situations, his stay in Paris, his first marriage, his ...well... failures to make it big as a writer.His admirable sense of integrity (no jobs except ones literary) unfortunately kept the author wallowing in translation work to put food on the table, and the sense of pain, desperation and even a sort of starvation are palpable.Agonizingly, but rather fittingly, he tells only of his years BEFORE success.This is no rags to fame & riches story.

Hand to Mouth is basically a reality check.Of some value to anyone who wants to get published, but the only thing that keeps this from being totally depressing is our knowledge of Auster's eventual literary success.

Lovely sections about the wacky people he met on ships and on streets reveal inspiration for characters he brings alive in his humanistic fiction.

If you do buy an edition (check out the number of pages before you order) which contains "Action Baseball" and "Squeeze Play", you are in for a treat.The former is a complete card game and the latter is a detective novel.Squeeze Play was written under a pseudonym and features a Jewish private eye with a law degree from Columbia who has a taste for fine wine and music.Mickey Spillane gets urban Semitic spit & polish in this totally enjoyable bonus read.

Auster Fans Only
By and large, this book will be of interest to Auster fans only.The first section is a brief autobiography, which may be boiled down to this: "How I Tried to Avoid Having a Regular Job."It's all about the crazy schemes Auster had to make money while not working 9-5.The stories are good, though nothing amazing.As he chronicles his early life, he references his "Appendices" -- a couple of one-act plays, a card-based baseball game he'd invented, and his first novel.I'd say of the entire book, the novel may be the best part.It's strictly a by-the-numbers noir novel (the unwilling detective, the femme fatale, a larger-than-life victim), but it's executed very nicely.It's funny how Auster thinks nothing of his work -- according to the memoir, he churned this out in three months (June-August), which to me is pretty impressive, but I suppose Auster thinks it's just pulp...I don't think it is, though because he stays so within the confines of the genre, it almost comes off as parody.Still, it's an enjoyable read.

3 stars ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Review of Contemporary Fiction, published by Review of Contemporary Fiction on March 22, 1994. The length of the article is 3883 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the supplier: Danilo Kis' believed that historical literature should help connect bare historical facts to contemporary reality without letting imagination distort history. He used documents as a way of authenticating historical literature. In 'Hourglass,' 'A Tomb for Boris Davidovich' and 'The Encyclopedia of the Dead,' he used the documentary method very effectively. Works such as these help recreate the individuality of the dead, who are mere statistics in history. In achieving this, Kis makes his readers realize the tragedy of the past.

Citation Details
Title: Textualizing the past: the function of memory and history in Kis's fiction. (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
Author: Branko Gorjup
Publication: The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 1994
Publisher: Review of Contemporary Fiction
Volume: v14Issue: n1Page: p161(8)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
This is the story of Paul Auster's typewriter. The typewriter is a manual Olympia, more than 25 years old, and has been the agent of transmission for the novels, stories, collaborations, and other writings Auster has produced since the 1970s, a body of work that stands as one of the most varied, creative, and critcally acclaimed in recent American letters. It is also the story of a relationship. A relationship between Auster, his typewriter, and the artist Sam Messer, who, as Auster writes, "has turned an inanimate object into a being with a personality and a presence in the world." This is also a collaboration: Auster's story of his typewriter, and of Messer's welcome, though somewhat unsettling, intervention into that story, illustrated with Messer's muscular, obsessive drawings and paintings of both author and machine. This is, finally, a beautiful object; one that will be irresistible to lovers of Auster's writing, Messer's painting, and fine books in general. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

An affair with a typewriter
This lovely little artistically-crafted volume should be on everyone's shelf who loves to useor who owns a manual typewriter. There are a lot of us out there who use computers for certain activities of daily living, including work, email, you know what I mean. But when one wants to compose, really compose -- fiction, poetry, memoir -- one heads for the typewriter. They're handy for all those lists you compose in the kitchen as well. Auster's memoir of his typewriter is both beautiful and touching. He really gets it. Anyone who owns one will understand. Anyone who doesn't will probably wish he did.

Paul, Sam and the Typewriter.
Paul's story: It all began in 1974 when he came back in the United States. He tells how he got the typewriter, why - later on - he didn't buy an electric typewriter nor a computer like everybody else nowadays. Finally we learn how Sam Messer met the typewriter and how a relationship grew between these two.

Sam's story: The illustrations of Sam Messer are the most attractive part of this book. They are not really illustrations but tell a second story of their own.The story of an old and hard working typewriter, battered by the fingers of Paul Auster. A typewriter that suffers pain, hardship and gets angry once in a while.

To be honest: this book is a book of art and almost all the credits go to Sam Messer. A must !

The best book I have ever bought!
Anyone who enjoys a good Paul Auster story or the briliant paintings of Sam Messer will love this book.I am an artist myself and I recomend this to anyone who is at all interested in Messers work.The typewriters are beautiful.I want to buy this book for everyone I know.

A Good Coffeetable Book
If you are a typewriter fetishist or a Paul Auster devotee, then you will find a justification for buying this book. That said, I must say that the book is a bit too thin, both in volume and content, to justify a purchase for most people. This book is mostly about Sam Messer, an artist friend of Auster, who became infatuated with Auster's Olympia portable typewriter (those who are curious about the specific model name/number, it looks to be a SM 9). Over the period of twenty years or so, he painted the typewriter. The paintings are intimate and beautifully done; the best ones feature Auster in the composition. These are perhaps the loveliest depictions of a typewriter you'll find out there, and if you are a typewriter aficionado, you will love this book. Paul Auster provides a perfunctory anecdotal history of his typewriter, and at reaching the end of the book, I empathized with him (and many other writers like him) who attach illogical but mysterious significance to a writing instrument. The book is handsome, and a breezy read; you can read the whole thing in fifteen minutes - perfect for your houseguests.

Amusing Coffeetable Book, Not Much More
If you're a typewriter fetishist or Paul Auster devotee, this book is definitely worth it. I am a bit of both, so the book is quite an endearing eyecandy for me. This slim volume is really the work of Sam Messer, an artist who became enamored with Auster's Olympia portable (I think SM 8 or 9) and decided to paint it everytime he visited. The paintings are quite good, as a matter of fact. Auster provides a quick, anecdotal history of his typewriter, and if you are a writer, you will empathize how he or anyone can grow so enamored with a writing tool.

Is this a book worth adding to your collection with paid money? Yes, if you are into Auster and you believe in the superstitious mythical powers that all rational and intelligent writers place in their writing machines. In my personal opinion, this piece belonged in a nice art magazine.

If you want to get a book that Auster's work intersects with art, check out "Double Game", a collaborative effort by Sophie Calle and Paul Auster. There is no finer blending of fact/fiction, art/literature in contemporary literature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Missing the color of Auster's best characters
This small novella is the second unit of the 'New York Trilogy' It is the mediocre work wedged in between two extraordinary ones. The device of giving the major characters of the work color- names (i.e. Blue is the detective paid by White to watch Black) seems to me abstract and ineffective. One of the great strengths of Auster's writing is his capacity to create incredibly interesting characters, whose lives and stories we want to know more about. Here Blue sits too long watching and waiting for Black to give himself away.
I know that there are many hidden meanings and connections in this work, as there are in all Auster's work. I know I missed most of them. But nonetheless I would claim that great art has to appeal first of all on the surface level, and that here Auster misses the mark.

This novella intrigues but does not satisfy
Just finished "City of Glass" and then found the New York Trilogy on a bookshelf at home and finished this 70 page story in one day.

My interpretation of the plot is that a "twisted" writer (White) hides his identity and hires a young private eye (Blue) to sit in an apartment across the street from his own apartment.Blue is duped into thinking he is tailing someone named Black and obligingly sends off weekly reports to White on Black's activities.It takes Blue and the reader a long time to figure out what is really going on.Like Auster's previous novel, the detective becomes obsessive, then introspective, and finally deranged as the story goes on.The main characters could be considered insane by the time we reach the rather abrupt ending. Ugh!

I kept wanting to tap Blue on the shoulder through the first half of this story and tell him his work compulsion was going to get him in big trouble.Then I realized as time dragged on unbelieveably in the story that Auster was determined to lead his characters towards their absurd and insane climatic behavior.

So go ahead and read these two stories if you are curious about how it feels to slip into derangement.

The Color of Thought
Auster is not an easy read, but he himself admits this comparing himself to Thoreau and Walden, he intimates that you have to read him slowly to get all of the nuances.

The story itself appears simple (and mimics some of 'City of Glass'), White hires Blue to watch Black and report each week what Black has done. (White has rented two apartments that front on each other from across a steet..Orange Steet.) What Blue and Black don't know is that they have been hired to watch each other.Blue spends almost a year watching Black do nothing more than write a novel.My guess is that Black is writing the novel to keep himself busy, in the same way that Blue makes up stories in his head but never puts them to pen.In the end, Blue steals Blacks manuscript (after beating him up), reads it and leaves his apartment.

If the colors (say of light) are metaphors (duh!), white is the absense of substance, Black is the total of all colors of light and Blue is the shadow of Black.Since Blue and Black are the complement to each other, one is the stronger and the other is the follower.In the end the follower terminates the leader and leaves unfulfilled.

There are three strong hint as to what Auster is trying to get at in this story (IMHO).First is that like Walden by Thoreau there is a lot more there than meets the eyes you just have to look for it.Second is the story by Hawthorne of the man who spends years away from his family but is watching them from afar but late is welcomed back.Third, the movie 'Out of the Past' with Robert Mitchum which is about a private detective.If you take some time to look at all three, this book with be much easier to understand.

Contemplation is everything and nothing says the sparrow to the crow.

Chandler by way of Kafka
An intriguing novel of the surreal. Under the guise of detective fiction,Auster creates a study in humanity and its composite elements, weaving anintriguing web of deception and misdirection in which names areunimportant.

There are sentences in this book which entire other bookscould be based on. Thankfully, this is one time where an author choosesbrevity and wit over quantity. (Perhaps the only criticsm could be he takesthis to a whole other extreme and makes it too brief).

Recommended forfans of Beckett and Kafka. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Stroyteller? Absolutely!
Paul Auster? Well known author, a novelist. No, it's better if we inspect this writer without any restrictions. Because he is unmeasureable. Essays and fiction.Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster, this is oneof the best essaycollections i've ever read. Although it is not a fiction,you can still notice that he is discussing about the same problems as hedoes in he's novels. All these essays are each one involved with aself-seeking. Like Auster is trying to prove that his standpoints in novelsare true. I would compare Auster with Susan Sontag. Sontag's style issimilar to Auster's one. So this book is a good one in two aspects:composition and the essays itself. So, why I put only 4 stars. Well, italways seems to me in every book that there could be something more. Butthis is a great book, no doubt about that. ... Read more

Amazon.com
In Oracle Night, Paul Auster returns to one of his favorite themes: writing about writers and the act of writing. Recovering from a severe illness that has left him weak and prone to nosebleeds, struggling novelist Sidney Orr takes the suggestion of his mentor, the acclaimed novelist John Trause, and begins a story about a man who, upon considering a near-death experience as an omen (or excuse), walks out on his wife and begins a new life. Nick Bowen, Orr's protagonist, moves to Kansas City and finds work with a man engaged in creating a sort of catalogue of all known persons from a warehouse filled with phonebooks. Dressed in Goodwill clothing, Nick finds it "fitting to don the wardrobe of a man who has likewise ceased to exist--as if that double negation made the erasure of his past more thorough, more permanent." Grace, however, acts strangely soon after Sidney begins the "novel-within-a-novel" in a mysterious blue notebook.

Auster uses footnotes to provide interesting backstory and develops Sidney's insecurities regarding love and fidelity, but when Sidney hits a patchy spot and writes Bowen into a corner, he (and Auster) shrugs and drops the story. The mystery that seemingly unrelated coincidences may have a causal connection is left unresolved, and Trause's delinquent son shows up to facilitate a hollow, climactic ending. Auster is a gifted writer, to be sure, but once trapped by the inner story, Oracle Night loses steam. --Michael FerchBook Description
Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and puzzling events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality. Why does his wife suddenly break down in tears in the backseat of a taxi just hours after Sidney begins writing in the notebook? Why does M. R. Chang, the owner of the stationery shop, precipitously close his business the next day? What are the connections between a 1938 Warsaw telephone directory and a lost novel in which the hero can predict the future? At what point does animosity explode into violence? To what degree is forgiveness the ultimate expression of love? Paul Auster's mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book-only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. At once a meditation on the nature of time and a journey through the labyrinth of one man's imagination, Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster's reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (86)

What Oracle?
Not sure what Auster's intentions were for this one other than to provide the reader with a series of novel treatments that he never got around to writing.Tied together by the narrator's relationship with Grace and a famous author who used to be Grace's lover, it failed to provide closure at every level.

Strong Mixture of Traditional and Experimental
Stylistically somewhere between The New York Trilogy and The Brooklyn Follies, Oracle Night encompasses what I loved about both.

Auster gives us a bit of a plot, but there is also much experimentation in this rich novel as well.And, like with The New York Trilogy, if you are a fan of linear storytelling with a concrete introduction, body, and conclusion, Oracle Night may not be for you, though there are elements of all three.

That being said, Oracle Night was a captivating read with deeply charismatic characters who were not difficult to emotionally connect with at all.However, there are many (literal) footnotes and several asides, all of which I enjoyed immensely.Unfortunately, I'm not certain a casual reader would feel the same.

So, all in all, if you're an Auster enthusiast, this is more greatness from a wonderful writer.If you're unfamiliar with Auster but are open-minded and interested in trying out a mixture of traditional and experimental storytelling, I think you'd like Oracle Night.However, if you're into more conventional storytelling, I recommend Auster's Mr. Vertigo or The Brooklyn Follies.

~Scott William Foley, author of Souls Triumphant

Left Hanging
This book has a great premise: Sid, a novelist recently out of the hospital after a life-threatening illness, is having trouble writing.In fact, he's having trouble doing much of anything.He feels bad depending on his wife Grace, whom he absolutely adores, to financially support them.

One day while out for a walk, Sid comes across a small stationery store, where he falls in love with a blue composition book.Once home with the book, he sits down and writes for hours on end.He doesn't hear Grace return, and she insists that when she peeked into his study, he wasn't there at all.Sid writes the beginning of an amazing story, then finds he's written himself into a corner from which he can't escape.

Oddly enough, once Sid begins writing in his new notebook, strange coincidences begin surrounding him.Grace dreams about a situation almost exactly the same as the one in the story Sid had been writing.She also disappears without a word one day, just as his main character did.Could Sid be catching a glimpse of the future and writing it into his story?

This book seemed to be leading somewhere, with the strangeness of Mr. Chang, the mysterious past of Grace and the odd blue notebook.However, at the end of the book things were left hanging.Grace's past was cleared up, but the touch of supernatural in the person of Chang and in the story in Sid's notebook were unfinished.I felt like Auster was leading me in one direction but then he just quit.

I loved it, I loved it not, I loved it, I loved it not, etc...


Even after turning the last page, I found myself unable to determine whether *Oracle Night* was a magically original piece of serious fiction or the sort of pop literary-lite that passes for such in today's commercially oriented publishing industry. This novel by equal turns intrigued me and annoyed me. It sucked me in from the very first page and then seemed intent on spitting me back out every twenty pages or so with its unbearably saccharine sentimentality. But each and every time Iwas about to call it quits, give the novel justtwo more pages, it sucked me back in again. The husband who loves his wife almost to the point of imbecility, the black guy with the heart of gold, the gratuitous Holocaust subplot...there were times I was convinced that Auster was straining to stuff all the elements of a surefire Oprah-pick into this novel, going right on down the checklist of all the politically correct sympathetic archetypes as he pictured himself sitting there on a couch in front of a studio audience filled with adoring middle-aged women.

Im still not entirely certain thats not what he was doing.

Still and all, when all is said and done, *Oracle Night* is an engaging novel featuring what has become a trademark of Auster's style: a story within a story within story, all of them obliquely linked together, an interplay of reality and fiction, each reflecting the other. *Oracle Night* is written with the directness of a fable--and this indeed seems to be part of Auster's intention and on that ground one might justifiably attempt to excuse its people-pleasing sunnyside up point of view--but, as in all fables, even though the language is clear and straightforward, the plot takes many strange and unexpected turns. What seems simple at first--a writer, recuperating after a long illness begins to write a novel--ends up being a complex and labyrinthine journey through a heart-rending landscape of love, betrayal, regret, and redemption.

There's plenty about *Oracle Night* to deride and despise, to find intellectually and emotionally dishonest, to disdain as pandering of the first order, but still enough left over to keep you reading, and reading with ardor if for nothing else than to find out what happens next. Which, after all, is one of the marks of a good book. It's a book that I don't regret taking the time to read. Which is another.

A master of fiction
This Auster novel is the story of the writer Sidney Orr and his wife Gracie, and her elderly friend- since- childhood the writer John Trause. But saying that I feel how impossible it would be for me to make any summary of the work which would approximate its complexity, intricacy ad richness. It is a work in which reality and imagination are confounded in the most surprising ways. As it is a story of two writers it also contains subplots of the works they are working on, and how these effect the major story of the main characters.
Auster is an unbelievably interesting writer. He can suddenly in the midst of a whole tell a story for two pages which is tremendously effecting. In this work within the fictional work being written by Orr about a man who has simply walked away from his family to make a new life, there is a small story from the Holocaust. It is about a mother getting milk to give to the baby she is carrying around who has been dead for days. The way Auster tells this story is just one example of his mastery.
The relationship between Sidney Orr the narrator-writer and his wife the beautiful Gracie is at the heart of this work. But we have a feeling of mystery and question in their relations to the very end. One long speculative effort at Orr at solving the problem does not necessarily provide the answer. The book ends in a surprising and horrible way.
Auster's power to surprise, his capacity for creating characters of tremendous interest, his ability to make the reader urgently want to know what will happen next, his rich knowledge of human life and situation are also evident in this truly first- rate novel.
After reading it I wonder if there is any writer of fiction working today who has the gifts and the skills , the sheer mastery, that Auster does. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Pays respect to the sources Auster used
The World That Is The Book: Paul Auster's Fiction by Aliki Varvogli (Lecturer in English and American Literature, University of Dundee) is a thorough study of the fictional works of Paul Auster, including "The New York Trilogy," "Timbuktu," and much more. A scholarly, college-level study of the long-lasting meaning behind Auster's classic works, The World That Is The Book recognizes and pays respect to the sources Auster used to challenge the traditional uses of the written word and the role of literary genre. The World That Is The Book is very highly recommended reading for those who seek to better appreciate Paul Auster's literary work. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description