Oracle Night

Paul Auster

ISBN 10: 0571223966 / ISBN 13: 9780571223961

Published by Faber and Faber, 2004

About this Item

243 pages. Text tanned. The discovery of a mysterious notebook turns a man's life upside-down in this compulsively readable novel by 'one of the great writers of our time' ( San Fra ncisco Chronicle ).Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, n.

Seller Inventory # 4765b

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Oracle Night
• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571223966
• ISBN 13: 9780571223961
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Mystery fiction

About this title

Synopsis

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 . . .

Review

Paul Auster's 11th novel Oracle Night is as intelligent and compellingly written as any he has produced. Sydney Orr is a writer recovering from an illness that almost killed him. Out on his daily constitutional he happens upon a curious stationery shop, the Paper Palace, and purchases a blue Portuguese notebook. The notebook casts a curious hold over Orr and seems to enable him to write, something he hasn't done since coming out of hospital. He writes a story about a books' editor who, on serendipitously avoiding some falling masonry, decides to read the near-accident as a reason to change his life. He takes an unread, recently discovered, manuscript of an important writer from the 1930s, Sylvia Maxwell, and disappears off to Kansas City. Reinvention and the associated idea that identity is fluid, re-imaginable, are linked, as is often the case with Auster, to the idea of chance.

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