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Loading... Travels in the Scriptorium: A Novelby Paul Auster
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This one didn't grab me the way his others have. (  )miriamparker | Mar 19, 2009 |   "Is this a prison? Is it a house? The old man has no memory. But perhaps he isn't even old? So let's drop the epithet old and refer to the person as Mr Blank. For this should tell both you and him everything you need to know; that you are trapped inside some meaningless pretentious crap that is passing itself off as cutting-edge post-modern metaphysicality." - John Crace, The Guardian, Monday 16 October 2006 (  )lmckend | Jan 6, 2009 |  niet interessant ( )huizenga | Dec 29, 2008 | An engaging story about a man, mr. Blank, who is seemingly trapped in a sterile room. He has no idea why he was put there. Mr Blanck's mind is fragmented, unfocussed, and his behavior is erratic, not unlike that of a mental patient. A few people enter the room, one at a time (mostly). They gradually bring back pieces of his past. The story of his life however remains fragmented. At a certain moment Mr Blank reads a story and is later asked to complete it. He completes it in his mind with great ingenuity and imagination. How the story is related to mr Blank's past is left in the open. The second story he reads, consists of the first paragraphs of this book itself. It describes Mr Blank sitting in his room (or cell), wondering what he is doing there. He does not however complete that story. So far so good, the book is engaging, with a few nice twists, and very well written. It has a nice theme, namely writing and the life of fictional characters. Only the ending I found annoying. I don't understand why Auster includes the last paragraphs in which he makes it explicit that Mr Blank is a fictional character and where he adds some terrible cliches on the nature of the fictional character (mr Blank in this case). (  )HenkEllermann | Nov 29, 2008 | bostonbibliophile | Oct 29, 2008 | 0.046 seconds to build listing
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0805081453, Hardcover)A man pieces together clues to his past—and the identity of his captors—in this fantastic, labyrinthine novel An old man awakens, disoriented, in an unfamiliar chamber. With no memory of who he is or how he has arrived there, he pores over the relics on the desk, examining the circumstances of his confinement and searching his own hazy mind for clues. Determining that he is locked in, the man—identified only as Mr. Blank—begins reading a manuscript he finds on the desk, the story of another prisoner, set in an alternate world the man doesn’t recognize. Nevertheless, the pages seem to have been left for him, along with a haunting set of photographs. As the day passes, various characters call on the man in his cell—vaguely familiar people, some who seem to resent him for crimes he can’t remember—and each brings frustrating hints of his identity and his past. All the while an overhead camera clicks and clicks, recording his movements, and a microphone records every sound in the room. Someone is watching. Both chilling and poignant, Travels in the Scriptorium is vintage Auster: mysterious texts, fluid identities, a hidden past, and, somewhere, an obscure tormentor. And yet, as we discover during one day in the life of Mr. Blank, his world is not so different from our own. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:24 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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