Oracle Night

So, Auster's usual themes are here: writing about writers and writing he discusses themes such as identity, disappearance, creativity, chance. But, despite what initially looks like a tricky structure (with footnotes and stories within stories) this is really a novel about love and forgiveness. Notwithstanding the dubious reputation of being a "writer's writer" the philosophical Auster has written a comparatively simple, very moving, quite brilliant novel. If the novel's ending is a little too neat, and the drama, as the narrative moves to a close, a little too soap opera, this hardly matters. --Mark Thwaite

Reader Reviews:

A Misleading Use of Anton Mesmer's Surname (0/0 people found this helpful)

To find this novel "mesmerising," as its publishers apparently did, you would need to be pretty easily mesmerised. Likewise, to agree that it "reads like an old-fashioned ghost story," you would need to have read some pretty disappointing examples of that genre.

What, in fact, it does read like is one of those pieces of fiction very popular with "literary" novelists who have got to come up with something for their publishers but lack worthwhile ideas and so fall back on writing about writers and writing. This is, in my view, an uninspired and self-indulgent example of its kind and for Henry Holt and Company to claim
it as a basis for dubbing Paul Auster "one of the boldest and most original writers at work in America today" sounds to me like sales-promoting dishonesty or sheer self-delusion.

Anyone who wants to send me a stamped, addressed jiffy-bag, is welcome to my copy of the book (which I bought first-hand but very cheap) for nothing! It appears to be one of the original edition, in a blue jacket-cover, with page-edges made to resemble those of a book of sermons by some Victorian divine.

Great suspense spoiled by rushed ending (0/0 people found this helpful)

Although I've owned a copy of "The New York Trilogy" for a while now, I'd not as yet got around to reading it and so I was interested to note the comment from Herald on the front cover of "Oracle Night" - 'If you have never read Auster before...this is the place to start'.

This book is an intriguing blend of eerie suspense and touching commentary on falling in love. The notebook plays a role in the narrative that is not as macabre as for example, inanimate objects can be in the fiction of Stephen King, yet it still retains an unsettling significance in the lives of the main protagonist.

Auster's use of interweaving storylines is enacted superbly and ensure that "Oracle Night" is a compulsive read. Furthermore, his insights into the creative process of writing fiction are intriguing, particularly when Sidney hits a dead end in the story of Nick - perhaps this is an early warning of the somewhat disappointing ending, in which the notebook and the character of Chang cede importance and indeed may be regarded as red herrings and the storyline is wrapped up within a mere few pages. As another reviewer opined, it smacks of a lack of time or perhaps artistic frustration.

Nevertheless, the book is a captivating read that immerses the reader in a hazy few days of confusion and activity, and is well worth a read.

Nobody does it better... (1/1 people found this helpful)

No-one does the self-referential novelist's novel quite as well as Paul Auster. From his quintessential 1980s New York Trilogy up to 2002's The Book of Illusions, his world has always been a mixture of stark urban realism and metaphysical ambiguity. Complex and mythic, pitilessly plotted, these novels nevertheless reveal a deep compassion for the frailties of the creative spirit.

In Oracle Night, Sidney Orr, a novelist recovering from a serious illness, is slowly overtaken by the power of a blank notebook he finds in a Manhattan stationer's. The book shifts his writer's block - but there's a heavy debt to pay. First the store and its owner mysteriously disappear, and then gradually everything in Orr's life is called into question - his marriage, his friendships, his mental health, even the fabric of what he calls reality.

Auster uses the notebook as a device to open closed worlds in his hero's psyche. At first, it seems magical, talismanic. As Orr begins to write, Auster's stories proliferate like nested Chinese boxes. Memories gather, characters reminisce, other texts are referenced. Anecdotal flashbacks sprawl over footnotes which threaten to overwhelm the primary narrative. When Orr writes in his book, he seems to phase out of normal reality; time telescopes itself, the telephone rings silently, his wife looks into his study and sees no-one. He embarks on a promising new novel about a man who begins his life again. He dashes off a screenplay idea for a Hollywood studio.

But just as Orr is celebrating the return of his powers, the rug is pulled from under him. The wife he worships drifts away as unresolved issues from their past threaten to overwhelm their future. His best friend and mentor John Trause - a character whose life seems partly based on Auster's own - may not be all he seems. The mysterious shopkeeper reappears in a new, darker guise. Portents and premonitions circle like vultures. Worst of all, Orr's promising new novel hits a brick wall. Has his golden renaissance been illusory?

Oracle Night is in part a ghost story - but the ghosts are not the ordinary kind. They're the elusive creatures of a haunted city, the friends and family Orr only thinks he knows, all of them driven by the weirdly independent power of his own storytelling. Auster has an almost religious respect for the power of the written word, but it's a double-edged sword. He believes in the capacity of fiction to curse and destroy as well as to ennoble and redeem, and the lives - real and fictional - within this book shimmer with multiple possibilities while the writer suffers the agonies of the quasi-divine. Can the words a man writes really influence his flesh-and-blood future, Auster asks, or does a storyteller operate outside normal reality? Is it possible to remember your own future? Do books carry prophecies their creators know nothing about?

In the novel's last few pages the multiple storylines coalesce into a single alchemical climax, a materialised reality which not all the characters can survive. Auster claims he wrote the book "in a trance" and no matter how much detail it borrows from reality, the surreal logic of this disturbing novel mimics the idiom of a dream.

Decent, but a bit full of itself (0/0 people found this helpful)

With the rather self-important tone of a man who's a good writer but not as good as he thinks he is, I found this to be exactly what I expected after the first few pages. Introverted and a bit egotistical, the novel is perfectly decent but didn't surprise me at all. It's almost as though he's aimed for surreal and different, but doing it by convention for that style and to my mind only the Japanese are naturally odd enough to pull that off properly. It's left me a little ambivalent towards him, I was put off reading another because the plot was a clone of this one but may well give the New York books a try since they're older and apparently superior.

Well-written, but incomplete story lines (4/4 people found this helpful)

Sidney Orr is a 34-year old writer in New York who is recovering from a near fatal illness. As part of his rehabilitation he roams the streets of his neighbourhood, where one day he finds the Paper Palace, a stationary shop where he buys a blue Portuguese notebook from the Chinese owner. When he gets home he immediately starts to write a story about a man who one day walks out on his wife and disappears without a trace. But after a while he gets stuck and does not know how to continue. In the meantime he finds out that his wife is pregnant, his house is broken into, he endangers his marriage when he encounters the Chinese shopowner Mr Chang again, his best friend, the renowned author John Trause, has health problems and the son of this best friend ends up in a rehab centre. And all that in the timespan of nine days. As Sidney tries to cope with all this he needs his blue notebook to make sense of all the developments.

This book gets mixed reviews on Amazon and I see the problems that some people have with the two relatively unfinished story lines. Paul Auster can definitely write: even though the story as such was not terribly interesting to me (except for the story within the story of the guy who disappears without a trace), the book is so well-written that I was simply forced to read on.

Paul Auster

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