Oracle Night

Auster here takes story-telling and uses that as a means to ponder reality and every labyrinthine way this translates through perception. He takes the maze and straightens it out so that every turn, every fork, every dead end corridor or way in or out is set parallel. Then what is left is something like the strata of rock, each layer signifying different eras in soil but here the unknowable passage we take from our point of view, fractured, subjective and incomplete. Auster takes that sample in stone and removes it from its original position, cuts out a slab, showing each layer stark in its particular colour and bleeding into every other, and polishes it until it reflects a clear light. Then he lays it down flat so that there is no show more point of orientation, we can't make out the bottom from the top, but we can glide over its slippery surface taking great care and occasionally glance down at some weird reflection.

The way in of the story within a story within a story within a going on for infinity is almost the least relevant aspect when experiencing this novel. Sure, it is the point of entry, the conceit, but that is not what is delivered whilst reading this. This is not a puzzle waiting to be solved, or a challenge, or somewhere to find solidity. I feel I float through the best of what he does and it is difficult to get a handle on what is being reached for. In The New York Trilogy Auster writes:

"It was something like the word 'it' in the phrase 'it is raining' or 'it is night'. What that 'it' referred to Quinn had never known."

And that is where I find this novel: walking hand in hand with the 'it'. For all the urban mysticism, the disambiguation folding back on itself, the necessary clarity of prose, the deft straddling of psychological nuance and the conveyance of time and perception relative to existence, I'm none the wiser. Perhaps that is precisely 'it'.

I have added a blue notebook to my Christmas wishlist. show less

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 show more 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 show less

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 show more 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. show less

This is a dense story, with many ramifications, stories nested within the story and metaphysical coincidences. Thanks to Auster's precise writing and impeccable storytelling, the reader never feels lost in the multiple plots. Reading Oracle Night is quite like wandering the rooms of a museum: they are arranged in a precise, chronological order, yet multiple doors allow visitors to momentarily get back in time or immerge in a different genre before returning to the main exhibit. This meandering must be how a writer feels when he is obsessed with a story, and Auster manages to bring this feeling to his readers in a remarkable way.

El primer libro que leo de Auster, a pesar de las advertencias. Supongo que gana cinco estrellas porque no tengo con qué compararlo.

Cuarenta páginas antes del final pensé que no iba a llegar a nada. En seguida descubrí que la cadena de casualidades e historias ficticias que crean historias reales armonizaba a la perfección, tanto me acabo de descubrir llamando "historia real" a una novela.

En definitiva a las historias las barre el tiempo, y todo lo que existe es construido por palabras.

Un escritor manipula los ladrillos que lo manipulan a él.

A strange little book about a writer who buys a notebook at a mysterious stationery store and finds that the stories he writes in it affect his real life. The premise was more interesting than the execution, I think, and the mysterious Asian man who owns the store becomes such a disturbing stereotype that I didn't know what to think (at first it's a self-conscious use of a noir trope and our narrator is aware of it as such, but when Mr. Chang starts bringing said narrator to sinister brothels and making threats, I got really uncomfortable). Auster makes it clear that he's working with noir conventions and so everything is stylized and overdramatized, but that made it difficult for me to care about any of the characters. I was a bit show more disappointed; the only other book of his I've read was Mr. Vertigo, which I loved. This one was interesting as a writing exercise but not necessarily as a novel. show less

When Sydney Orr, a writer on the mend from a serious illness, buys a beautiful blue notebook one day, he immediately starts writing a story. When the protagonist of this story ends up in a hopeless situation (locked up in an underground cellar with no one knowing of this cellar's existence), he decides to abandon this idea for a novel. He is asked to write the screenplay for an adaptation of the Time Machine by H.G. Wells, which he is prepared to do as it pays very well, but his treatment is rejected. A famous writer friend gives him a never published early work to adapt for the movies, but he manages to lose the manuscript in the subway. This same friend (John Trause) asks for Sidney's help with his son Jacob, who is currently in a show more rehabilitation center for drug addicts. Sidney visits him there, but to no avail. On the very night that John Trause, who had been suffering from phlebitis/thrombosis, dies of a pulmonary embolism, Jacob comes to Sidney and Grace's home to ask them for 5000 dollar to help him pay off his drug dealers. He beats up Grace until Sidney threatens him with a kitchen knife. Grace has a miscarriage and is in a terrible state. It turns out that John Trause had mailed Sidney and Grace a cheque for 36.000 dollars to help them with their financial problems right before his death. Jacob is found some time later with two bullets in his head.

Oracle Night knocked me out flat. This is storytelling at its very best. You are drawn into one story and from there you are plunged into the next one and the next one and the next one and in the end it all fits together. Auster's writing style is so smooth, his characters are so utterly human and understandable. This novel also gives you an insight into the life of an author. It must be a terrible feeling to find one of your protagonists in a fix like the one described in this story and not being able to get him out of it. As an author, your created the protagonist, you created the situation and yet you cannot come up with a solution. Even I, as a reader, was haunted by this. show less