Auster invites us into his labyrinth again, then twists and turns us around with various possibilities, and leaves us hanging wondering where the heck we have been to and where the heck this story will end up.

This is one of his sparsest novels. Mr. Blank— the unknown old man who wakes up in a sterile but clean room with a bed, an adjoining bathroom, a swivel chair and desk, some manuscripts and a pile of photographs—is either a spymaster or a writer. Perhaps Spymaster is an apt description for Fiction Writer. Mr. Blank is on some treatment regimen that has robbed him of his energy and memory. He has a series of visitors, each revealing a piece of his past, each featured in one of the photographs on his desk; each has been in his employ during which he had sent them on dangerous assignments abroad, the results of which did not often end satisfactorily. A camera takes a picture per second, recording all his movements, burps and farts. He is ministered to by nurses, Anna and Sophie, who also provide him sexual favours, given that his incarceration is devoid of touch and love, and he is still capable of sex even though his body is failing him. And yet, Mr. Blank is afraid to check the door to his room to see whether it is unlocked. Instead he spends his time perambulating around the room on the swivel chair, reading the manuscripts, and trying to recall his earlier life. He appears to have agreed to this incarceration, a clue perhaps to the fact that he is a writer, safest while spending his time in his room in isolation with only his characters and stories for company.

The manuscript that he reads has an eerie resemblance to his own life, that is, as much of that life which is revealed through his visitors and his own faulty memory. However, the story in the manuscript is set in the early 1800’s in some fictitious country and appears to be a metaphor for how the west was won in the USA, replete with the decimation of indigenous tribes by white settlers. If he was writing about what he knew, was Blank himself a racist who committed murder and genocide? When the manuscript ends abruptly, Mr. Blank is intent on finishing it and dives into the myriad possibilities on where this story could go. This is where Auster treats us to a showcase of storytelling virtuosity and provides us the second clue to the fact that Mr. Blank is indeed an author living inside his own fiction. The title “Scriptorium” alludes to this too. That Blank likes certain characters, even loves them like Anna, and dislikes others like Flood, strengthens this supposition. An unknown narrator appears at the end, summing up the case, and this adds another dimension to the “story within the story”; perhaps there is a third story, or many more—the classic Auster labyrinth.

Is there a way out of this maze? Auster seems to suggest not. The author once ensconced in his world reaps the reward and the punishment for creating it. His characters punish him too, for the descriptive labels that have been stuck to various objects in the room get moved around mysteriously, and Blank struggles to restore the order by sticking them back properly, again conveying that very human of drives, of needing to control one’s environment if only for one’s sanity. Is he suffering from Alzheimers? This thought crossed my mind at one point, but Blank seems to dredge up characters we haven’t even met, leading me to believe that under that cloud of medication lies a sound mind trying to assert control.

The temptation for the reader of such surrealistic novels is to try and make sense of them. Some have compared this book to Kafka or the Kabbalah. But I never made sense of Kafka or Kabbalah, both were too deep for me, so let me skip the comparisons and make one punt at a more surface level possibility. I could be wrong, but this is only one reader’s perspective: Auster was visioning his own end as a writer. If so, it is a story without a happy ending.

Regresar a Paul Auster es regresar a un terreno amigable, a una zona de confortable, el de las narraciones bien engrasadas, en las que te ha de cuantificar el número de segundos que dura un beso en la boca o el rato que dura una siesta, también el de los juegos literarios con la percepción de la realidad, referencias literarias y una diversa gama de artificios narrativos que aparecen de forma intermitente en algunas de sus novelas, mientras que en otras se interesa por otros recursos.

Este Viajes por el Scriptorium está concebido sin duda como un libro para iniciados en Auster, múltiples personajes de otras novelas son mencionados de forma esquinada en el día que dura la narración del libro o intervienen directamente, cuando alguien llamado Míster Blank despierta en un cuarto casi vacío y comienza a preguntarse quién es y qué hace ahí metido. La trama del libro no destaca por su frenesí. En el transcurso de ese día básicamente se nos narra la visita de un médico, dos enfermeras, un abogado, alguna llamada telefónica y el único punto de fuga es un relato, escrito en unas hojas de papel apiladas encima de un escritorio.

En este relato conocemos el periplo de un joven oficial, en un estilo que nos recuerda al Desierto de los tártaros, sólo que sin esperas acongojantes, sólo misteriosas muertes y reapariciones de personajes, tribus más allá de las fronteras, algunos misterios y una incierta fuga a tierras foráneas que puede caer del lado de la traición o de la conspiración.

A banda de eso, se detalla el transcurso de ese día, subrayando y poniendo en relieve lo penosos de actos tan comunes como orinar o simplemente alimentarse. La decrepitud del personaje es notoria, sobre todo por sus problemas para recordar nada, así que sin duda Auster nos esboza una historia sobre la vejez, el reverso ficticio de otros libros suyos (como ahora Diario de invierno) sobre el mismo tema, aunque abordados desde la ficción pura, conjuntándose con la historia del autor atrapado dentro de su propia ficción.

Lo que insufla aire a ese moroso discurrir de Míster Blank por su habitación es cómo Auster nos hace comprender que no se trata solamente de un hombre amnésico, que no logra ubicarse en el mundo, que existe una capa más, un motivo metafísico, pues ese personaje podría constituir un avatar del propio autor de la novela, una expresión metafórica del demiurgo. No en vano, también se nos explica que esa habitación está vigilada por unas cámaras y el sonido ambiente está registrado por unos micrófonos ocultos, de forma que registra todo lo que ahí sucede y queda reflejado en el libro que leemos. Se nos avisa que alguien está mirando y eso es verdad, somos nosotros, los lectores. Eso, unido a lo dicho al inicio, la aparición de personajes de ficción de otras novelas de Auster, tales como Benjamin Sachs de Leviatán o el David Zimmer de El libro de las ilusiones, aporta la sal y la pimienta en el atribulado día de Míster Blank. Además, todos los personajes parece que quieren ajustar cuentas con Míster Blank, incluso se le quiere imponer un castigo medieval, en fin, que también tiene su humor burlón para consigo mismo.

Por lo tanto, en un juego meta literario, el libro se narra a sí mismo, es una ventana al mundo de ficción de Paul Auster. Yo comprendo que no haya despertado entusiasmo. Los pegotes kafkianos, como que Míster Blank está atrapado en esa habitación por unas fuerzas invisibles, no están del todo logrado, los personajes femeninos tienen nulo interés, sólo son emanaciones eróticas, los diálogos siempre tienen ese tono desmañado y algo amanerado. Pero leer a Paul Auster, aunque no siembre en mí el fervor, siempre son horas gratas en las que te notas acomodado en esas habitaciones que son sus libros.

This is very much in the vein of The Locked Room and Oracle Night and indeed makes reference to characters from those earlier books (Sophie Fanshawe and Peter Stillman from the former; John Trause from the latter). Mr. Blank lives in a sparse room containing manuscript pages and a stack of photographs. He is tended by a nurse named Anna Blume (a character name that recurs in Baumgartner) and given a rainbow of pharmaceuticals. Whether the pills help or keep him pacified is unclear. The haziness of his memory could be due to age or the drugs. He receives various visitors he feels he should recognize but can’t, and from the comments they make he fears he is being punished for dangerous missions he spearheaded. Even Anna, object of his pitiable sexual desires, is somehow his moral superior.

Everyday self-care is struggle enough for him, but he does end up reading and adding to the partial stories on the table, including a dark Western set in an alternative 19th-century USA. Whatever he’s done in the past, he’s now an imprisoned writer and this is a day in his newly constrained life.

The novella is a deliberate assemblage of typical Auster tropes and characters; there’s a puppet-master here, but no point. An indulgent minor work. But that’s okay as I still have plenty of appealing books from his back catalogue to read.

[Interestingly, the American cover has a white horse in the centre of the room, an embodiment of Mr. Blank’s childhood memory of a white rocking-horse he called Whitey.]

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.