ORACLE NIGHT [signed]

Auster, Paul, 1947-2024

ISBN 10: 0805073205 / ISBN 13: 9780805073201

Published by Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2003

About this Item

Octavo, 243 pages. In Very Good condition with a Very Good dust jacket. Spine is blue with blue print. Dust jacket in mylar. Price unclipped: "$23.00". Boards quarter bound with black paper to spine and grey paper to boards. Signed in ink by the author on the title page. NOTE: Shelved in Netdesk Column N. 1387693. FP New Rockville Stock. Seller Inventory # 1387693

Bibliographic Details

Title: ORACLE NIGHT [signed]

Publisher: Henry Holt and Company, New York

Publication Date: 2003

Binding: Hardcover

Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: First edition.

About this title

Synopsis:

Recovering from a near-fatal illness, Sidyney Orr, a thirty-four-year-old novelist, purchases a mysterious blue notebook from a Brooklyn stationery shop and is drawn into a bizarre world of eerie premonitions and baffling events that threaten to destroy his marriage and faith in reality. 100,000 first printing.

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