Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Oracle Night (2004)by Paul Auster
Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I read a lot of Paul Auster in the 1980's and it was enjoyable to reconnect with him via this one. Auster has a wonderfully engaging style, his books are well plotted and always intriguing. Oracle Night didn't disappoint. ( ) Sydney, a Brooklyn writer recovering from a near-fatal illness wanders into a stationery store owned by Mr. Chan, purchases a blue notebook, and for the first time in a long while begins writing, the story magically pouring from his pen. He writes of an editor, Nick Bowen, who is given a strange manuscript by a long dead writer to edit. But on his way to the office one day, Nick is nearly killed by a heavy falling object, and this experience impels him to just drop everything in his life and run away to the first place he can buy a plane ticket for, Kansas City as it happens. In Kansas City, Nick becomes involved with a man who collects worldwide telephone books and stores them in a "museum" hidden away underground under the railroad tracks, where Nick becomes trapped with no way out when the telephone book collector suddenly dies of heart disease.....So we have a story within a story, within a story: The manuscript of a novel called Oracle Night by a deceased writer, being edited by Nick, who has just abandoned his life to run away to Kansas City, as written/imagined by Sydney, a writer in Brooklyn who hasn't written in a while, as written/imagined by Paul Auster (a writer living in Brooklyn I believe). There's layer after layer here, and it was sometimes a challenge keeping track of whose story we were in, especially if I had set the book aside for a few days. But it was all thoroughly enjoyable. I'm a fan of most of the Paul Auster books I've read. I like the way he frequently plays games with the reader of his books, and I constantly marvel at his imaginative powers. 4 stars Once again I was drawn into this book by the strong narrative voice. Sidney Orr is recovering from a near fatal illness. He is a writer, but since his illness has been unable to write. One day he sees a blue notebook in a stationary shop and feels compelled to buy it and start writing. The words flow and the reader is now following two story lines. Meanwhile, his wife Grace seems a bit distanced and eventually reveals she is pregnant. Their friend John asks him to visit his son, who is in drug rehab. When the plot for his novel becomes stuck, John who is an accomplished writer offers to send him a possible movie manuscript to help pay his hospital bill, Sidney starts considering his wife's strange behaviour and comes to a sudden realisation. The story comes to a violent tragic end. Auster uses footnotes to fill in background details to the story. These continue over several pages and then you have to go back and pick up the storyline. An interesting device which might upset some readers. I was initially totally absorbed with this story within a story format but then I started to predict the plot, perhaps I was meant to. I guess life can throw you sudden curve balls which change the trajectory of one's life. Overall a good book that kept me turning pages. A complicated novel about an author who's writing a book about an author who's reading a book about another author (etc...) and in the process finds himself digging unexpected stuff about his own life out of his subconscious. But there's also a Magic Notebook and a Mysterious Chinaman (do they really still have those?) and it all somehow boils down to a fistfight between two men about a woman. Very stylish, but I'm not sure what it did for me, if anything. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher SeriesCompactos Anagrama (418) Keltainen kirjasto (372) Punane raamat (66) rororo (23987) Is contained in
Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the 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 bewildering 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 shut down 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. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |