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Loading... Timbuktuby Paul Auster
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  dczapka | Nov 3, 2009 |  Translated into Persian, rank 70/1001 kousha | Oct 19, 2009 | Heartwrenching and beautiful... I love the perspective. Quick read and well worth it. (  ) amaryann21 | Sep 28, 2009 | The Voice and the Cliches: As a fan of Auster's works (I liked NY Trilogy, In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace, Invention of Solitude, Hand to Mouth), I went into this book fearing the worst. A couple of friends told me it wasn't very good, and they were unfortunately correct.The two most detrimental factors that contributed to the failure of this book are as follows:1) The fairy-tale-esque narrator voice. Mostly it's condescending, and very quickly it becomes annoying. I don't know what Auster was thinking, choosing this particular narrative style. It just doesn't work.2) Cliches. There's so much lazy writing in this novel -- just start counting the number of cliches Auster uses. It's criminal. iayork | Aug 9, 2009 | New Yorker Auster has always written about sharp reversals of fortune, and the subject of this novel - a mongrel dog named Mr Bones, whose master is nearing death - offers wonderful scope to explore the theme. Auster's triumph is that we never doubt for a moment that the dog can reason like an intelligent child and understand human speech. This broadly comic tale offers glimpses of a profound and humane wisdom glinting beneath its assured surface. edella | Jul 15, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0312263996, Paperback)In Timbuktu Paul Auster tackles homelessness in America using a dog as his point-of-view character. Strange as the premise seems, it's been done before, in John Berger's King, and it actually works. Filtering the homeless experience through the relentlessly unsentimental eye of a dog, both writers avoid miring their tales in an excess of melodrama. Whereas Berger's book skips among several characters, Timbuktu remains tightly focused on just two: Mr. Bones, "a mutt of no particular worth or distinction," and his master, Willy G. Christmas, a middle-aged schizophrenic who has been on the streets since the death of his mother four years before. The novel begins with Willy and Mr. Bones in Baltimore searching for a former high school English teacher who had encouraged the teenage Willy's writerly aspirations. Now Willy is dying and anxious to find a home for both his dog and the multitude of manuscripts he has stashed in a Greyhound bus terminal. "Willy had written the last sentence he would ever write, and there were no more than a few ticks left in the clock. The words in the locker were all he had to show for himself. If the words vanished, it would be as if he had never lived."Paul Auster is a cerebral writer, preferring to get to his reader's gut through the brain. When Willy dies, he goes out on a sea of words; as for Mr. Bones, this is a dog who can think about metaphysical issues such as the afterlife--referred to by Willy as "Timbuktu": What if no pets were allowed? It didn't seem possible, and yet Mr. Bones had lived long enough to know that anything was possible, that impossible things happened all the time. Perhaps this was one of them, and in that perhaps hung a thousand dreads and agonies, an unthinkable horror that gripped him every time he thought about it.Once Willy dies and Mr. Bones is on his own, things go from bad to worse as the now masterless dog faces a series of betrayals, rejections, and disappointments. By stepping inside a dog's skin, Auster is able to comment on human cruelties and infrequent kindnesses from a unique world view. But reader be warned: the world in Timbuktu is a bleak one, and even the occasional moments of grace are short lived. --Alix Wilber (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:53 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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The story revolves around a dog named Mr. Bones--a dog that, though never anthropomorphized, is nevertheless capable of extraordinarily complex and humanlike thought. His owner, Willy Christmas, is a homeless man on a quest to find his old teacher in Baltimore before dying. When Willy collapses in the city, Mr. Bones takes off to escape being sent to the pound, and over the course of the coming days, meets a number of new owners that give him insight into what his life really means.
Auster's style is incredibly compelling throughout the book, as he mostly deals with characters that are less than highly educated but still have powerful, resonating emotions and ideas. It's easy to think that characters as simple as, say, Willy could never possibly feel the kinds of things that Auster describes, but he couches them in such straightforward stories and memories that it all feels cogent and coherent. He never plays dumb with the reader or betrays his characters, and it makes the read that much more enjoyable.
Dog lovers will obviously find lots to love about this book, but Paul Auster's gift is that he takes a story like this and makes it far deeper and more affecting that it appears on the surface. By the time you turn the final page, you are so invested in Mr. Bones that you almost miss him, even as he is left in a curiously ambiguous space. For such a brief, basic tale, Timbuktu packs a wallop, and is surely not one to be missed.