Oracle Night seems like one of Auster's more perfunctory novels. There is the usual blend of a narrator getting over some big personal tragedy, reflections on the power of language (writing especially in this case), recurring coincidences, a female love interest in trouble, etc. The opening conceit of the blank notebook and Sid's need to fill it has this really interesting, ominous vibe going to it. But Auster doesn't seem all that committed to really diving into it, and by the end of the book it felt like little more than a forgotten pretext to set the whole narrative up instead of an organic development within the story. There are some really nice passages though, and it's interesting to read one of his books that has a decidedly more domestic kind of feel to it than a lot of his other work. But the ending feels rushed, and the whole strung-out-son-of-a-family-friend who suddenly pops up to wreak havoc in everyone's lives feels kind of like a cheap deus ex machina. I'd expect that kind of weak stuff from someone's first novel, not their umpteenth.

It's been a long time since I've had a new favourite writer. Paul Auster is my new favourite writer.

'If you have never read Auster before,' proclaims a quote displayed on the cover of this edition of Oracle Night, 'this is the place to start.' I hadn't read Auster before beginning this book, but I'd been meaning to for a while - especially since I've now read three of his wife (Siri Hustvedt)'s books and have gathered that their work ie very similar in style and theme. I wasn't out looking for an Auster book, I was just browsing at the library, but when I spotted it, the intriguing summary and that quote were good enough for me.

Oracle Night is short, but packed with detail. It's a multi-layered story, beginning with Sidney Orr - a novelist who is recovering from a severe illness - buying a unique Portuguese notebook in a rather odd stationery store. On the recommendation of his friend, also a novelist, Sidney begins to flesh out an idea for a story concerning a man who suffers a near-death experience and impulsively leaves his wife and home, resolving to start his life anew in a different city. The narrative follows both the progression of this tale and its protagonist Nick Bowen, and the 'real' story of Sidney, whose relationship with his wife Grace (the history of which is detailed in a number of footnotes) begins to flounder soon after he acquires the notebook. Meanwhile, Sidney attempts to re-write HG Wells' The Time Machine as a modern film script, turning it into an unconventional romance, and the Nick narrative also has a further strand wherein the character is profoundly affected by the contents of a lost manuscript, the title of which is Oracle Night. Like I said, multi-layered.

There are definitely elements of the weird about this story - the disappearance and relocation of the Paper Palace and its enigmatic proprietor, the 'powers' of the notebook - but it isn't a paranormal or fantasy novel. This really appealed to me - I love the combination of literary prose and hints of the unexplained. I also LOVED the writing. It is very like Hustvedt's, though it's also quite easy to tell the difference. Despite all the intricacies of the plot, it often seems secondary to the way the story is told, the ideas it explores. There are parallels galore and the book often touches on the relationship between fiction and reality and/or language and action.

I'd have liked this book to be longer (and it easily could have been), but overall it was a fantastic read which piqued my interest in Auster enough for me to go straight on to another of his books - The New York Trilogy - after finishing it.

هذه اول رواية اقرأها لبول أوستر، احد اشهر كتاب امريكا المعاصرين، ولن تكون الاخيرة ان شاء الله...
شيقة جدا وذات حبكة قوية.. متداخله الأمكنة والازمنة...
تدور عن كاتب روائي يدعى "سندي أور" يشرع في كتابة رواية جديدة بعد تماثله للشفاء، مستخدما دفتر أزرق برتغالي الصنع، سيكون له فيما بعد سحرا ابداعياً على بطله
وينقلنا أوستر بين روايته هذه وبين نص الرواية التي يكتبها بطله "سندي" وبطلها الاخر "نيك بوين" وهو محررا في دار نشر في نيويورك
معاناة الكاتب ومخاض الابداع الروائي هما جوهر الرواية،
الأحساس بالزمن، الحاضر، الماضي، والتنبأ بالمستقبل، هي ادوات الكاتب في حبكته السردية المتداخلة
كيف لحادثة عشوائية ان تغير حياة انسان؟ وتجعله بمواجهة قدراً جديدا؟
وهل ينجح في ألاّ يفكر في الماضي ويمضي قُدماً؟
هل نحن مسجونون بالحاضر؟ ان تركنا للماضي وتنبئنا بالمستقبل، كلاهما قد يقضيان علينا.. فاللحظة الراهنة وإن كانت "سجناً" هي الأهم وربما الأفضل.
هل هناك فعلا قدرة تنبؤية للكتابة الابداعية؟ ومن هذه الفكرة بالذات تبرز فكرة" ليلة التنبؤ "
و ليلة التنبؤ هي نص روائي -فلسفي قصير عن التنبؤ بالمستقبل- يصل الى نيك بوين، لكن يكون له دورا في حياته فيما بعد.. إذ يبدأ بوين في رؤية رابطة بين نفسه وبين قصة الرواية، بطريقة مجازية غير مباشرة " كان الكتاب يتكلم معه بشكل وثيق وحميم عن ظروفه الخاصة الحالية".
يصل سندري اور الى طريق مسدود في روايته، ونحتار معه في كيفيه اخراج بطله " بوين" من سجنه.. لكنه في النهاية يمزق روايته هذه بعد ان عجز عن اخراج بطله، وبعد ان تتعقد حياته مع زوجته واصدقائه.
وفي شدة معاناته مع كل هؤلاء، يتذكر سندي دفتره الازرق، وبطله المسجون، فيقرر ان يكتب قصة اخرى " قصة تخيلية تحليلية" عن زوجته وعن شكوكه نحوها. وبعد امتلاء الدفتر الازرق، يقرر تمزيقه الى قطع صغيرة، وحتى الصفحات البيضاء يمزقها، وهو بهذا يشير الى تركه للماضي وقراره ببدأ حياة جديدة مع نص جديد..

دخولي لعالم " بول أوستر" بدأ برؤيتي لفلم "دخان
Smok" وهو من تأليفه،
من الفلم ومن هذه الرواية " ليلة التنبؤ" اعتقد ان أوستر يستخدم عناصر اساسية في رواياته، فلابد من ان يكون هنالك كاتب يعاني فيما يكتب، وهناك دخان، وهناك تنقل بالزمن من خلال الصور واستخدام الكاميرا، واستعراض مراحل الحياة من خلال الصور ايضا، فبعض ابطاله " كما في دخان" يستخدم كاميرته في تصوير نفس الزاوية- وهي الجادةالي امام دكانه- وبنفس الوقت يوميا ولمدة خمس سنوات، لكن كل لقطة هي لقطة جديدة، اذ هناك مارة جدد وصباح جديد.
وفي هذه الرواية " ليلة التنبؤ" ايضا هنالك البومات صور تؤثر في حياة بطل روايته واشخاص آخرين يمرون بنا سريعا في الرواية..
السرقة وتعارض الحاجة للمال، من قبل الكاتب، وتسرعه في إنتاجه الابداعي زاوية اخرى يسلط عليها اوستر الضوء..
ليلة التنبؤ رواية ارشح قراءتها بشوق و" دخان" فلم ورواية ارشحهما بقوة اكبر.. ربما لتمتعي بهما اكثر.

The story-within-the-story device gives Paul Auster plenty of freedom to orchestrate this postmodern novel. These are the (fake) jottings of an active writer and they include daily occurrences (diarylike), ideas for plots, a coherent free-flow of thoughts and musings, a scrapbook of so much mixed media which describes a vivid world dabbling in the surreal. His avoiding the usage of quotation marks in the story-within-the-story’s dialogue conveys the continuity of the writer’s imagination. He uses literary irony, sometimes his character’s descriptions are so remarkably like those he makes of his acquaintances. Plot-wise there is jumping around, making whole days lapse only one paragraph, creating different story lines and times, using repetition to give the reader a vague sense of déjà vu.

Chapterless, it continues in the major tradition of the thriller (continued & realized to its most masterful level in 2006 with Scott Smith’s novel of visceral horror The Ruins) to be easy-to-follow, despite having no rests between climaxes & plot revelations. The “narcissistic novel” brand is befitting of 'Oracle Night.'
t
Let’s not forget Auster's trademark use of footnotes. More than creating an “academic” (i.e. entitled) voice, this tool can pump in more information to an otherwise “short” novel. Footnotes are small pockets of compressed data; additionally they allow the reader to interact with the text itself. He flips the pages prematurely to get the "hidden" back story, breaking the rules of literature by traversing through the main plot itself...

This is a book about books through & through.

To Auster-ικό λογοτεχνικό σύμπαν είναι -όπως πάντα- πολύ καλά δομημένο. Εξαιρετική σκιαγράφηση των χαρακτήρων, με το σύνηθες "ομιχλώδες τοπίο" να πλανάται πάνω από τα κίνητρα και τις πράξεις τους, χωρίς να αποκαλύπτονται τελικά όλες οι πτυχές της προσωπικότητας τους.
Ο Auster καταφέρνει με μοναδικό τρόπο να "υφαίνει" μικρές ιστορίες και περιστατικά φαινομενικά ασήμαντα σε σχέση με την κύρια πλοκή και μέσα σε αυτά να "φυτεύει" ιδιαίτερα και σημαντικά νοήματα που θέλει να περάσει στον αναγνώστη.
Δεν μπορώ να το εξηγήσω παραπάνω, αυτός ο τρόπος γραφής δεν είναι τίποτα λιγότερο από εθιστικός.

There aren't many books that make a serious attempt to explore synchronicity, but this is one. I think Sidney goes from a rationalist to a fabulist/mystic though is own limitations often keep him from knowing what he knows. His happiness for being alive at the end of the book is more felt than understood and I liked that; also, that the book self refers to the Trause note which is basically to look for another notebook (of which the novel is the product 20 years later) that allows Sidney to begin to understand the mystery of his being.

What I also really liked about this novel is it stimulated my own thinking about a number of themes including feeling trapped (o, the day day job), the fantasy of walking away from it all (flitcraft) and the realization that without any integrated change, you'll repeat the same pattern, etc.

thanks to Paul Auster (and Siri) for a wonderful read.

This reminded me most of The Locked Room, the final volume of the New York Trilogy. There’s even a literal locked room in a book within the book by the narrator, a writer named Sidney Orr. It’s 1982 and Orr is convalescing from a sudden, life-threatening illness. At a stationer’s shop, he buys a fine blue notebook from Portugal, hoping its beauty will inspire him to resume his long-neglected work. When he and his wife Grace go to visit John Trause, Grace’s lifelong family friend and a fellow novelist, Orr learns that Trause uses the same notebooks. Only the blue ones, mind you. No other color fosters the same almost magical creativity.

For long stretches of the novel, Orr is lost in his notebook (“I was there, fully engaged in what was happening, and at the same time I wasn’t there—for the there wasn’t an authentic there anymore”), writing in short, obsessive bursts. In one project, a mystery inspired by an incident from The Maltese Falcon, Nick Bowen, a New York City editor, has a manuscript called Oracle Night land on his desk. Spooked by a near-death experience, he flees to Kansas City, where he gets a job working on a cabdriver’s phone book archive, “The Bureau of Historical Preservation,” which includes a collection from the Warsaw ghetto. But then he gets trapped in the man’s underground bunker … and Orr has writer’s block, so leaves him there. Even though it’s fiction (within fiction), I still found that unspeakably creepy.

In the real world, Orr’s life accumulates all sorts of complications over just nine September days. Some of them are to do with Grace and her relationship with Trause’s family; some of them concern his work. There’s a sense in which what he writes is prescient. “Maybe that’s what writing is all about, Sid,” Trause suggests. “Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future.” The novel has the noir air I’ve come to expect from Auster, while the layering of stories and the hints of the unexplained reminded me of Italo Calvino and Haruki Murakami. I even caught a whiff of What I Loved, the novel Auster’s wife Siri Hustvedt published the same year. (It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve spotted similar themes in husband‒wife duos’ work – cf. Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss; Zadie Smith and Nick Laird.)

This is a carefully constructed and satisfying novel, and the works within the work are so absorbing that you as the reader get almost as lost in them as Orr himself does. I’d rank this at the top of the Auster fiction I’ve read so far, followed closely by City of Glass.


Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

Insisto, quiero uno de esos cuadernos hechos en Portugal. Una maravillosa forma de entender al escritor y su inspiración. La historia, tan emotiva como trágica.

Ψιλοαπογοητευτικό..

And here I am back with Paul Auster and my ongoing love/hate relationship with him. What keeps drawing me back to him is his treatment of writers and the craft of writing in his stories, and I feel, through reading Auster, that I'm gaining some new insight through his characters. There have been a few sour grapes in our literary relationship, but there's this overwhelming "What is he up to now?" feeling that brings me back.

So here we have Sidney Orr, just released from the hospital after recovering from an almost fatal disease. He stops in a Brooklyn stationery store and finds a blue notebook made in Portugal which he purchases. The book seems to have a strange power, a very prophetic power, and therein lies Auster's story.

Orr's own story is told largely through footnotes, which help the reader delve a little into his personal life and his relationship with his wife, Grace, and their mutual friend and fellow author, John Trause. As in any true friendship, mutual as it may be, real life sometimes gets in the way and complications arise. Therein lies another part of Auster's story.

On top of that, the story that Orr starts writing in his new blue notebook is somewhat a contemporary retelling of The Maltese Falcon, encouraged by Trause. But the story Orr writes and his own life intertwine and therein lies yet another part of Auster's story.

I love the overlapping stories, and the footnotes, and the characters. There's a discussion on color psychology which was fun in an education on symbolism in literature, if one wants to go into it that much, which of course I did.

And so from here I feel comfortable with Auster again, and will pick up another down the line I'm sure until I hit another sour grape. And then I'll pout about it until I trick myself into reading something else by him, and etc.

არ არსებობს ისეთი პერიოდი, ოსტერს რომ არ შეემსუბუქებინოს. აღარ ვიცი რა რიგითობით დავალაგო მისი წიგნები. რაც წამიკითხავს ყველა საოცრად მიყვარს. იმით დავიწყებ, რომ ამ წიგნს ძალიან დიდი ხანი ვეძებდი, ერთადერთი იყო შემორჩენილი რაც არ მქონდა წაკითხული და აი, ძლივს, საბას დახმარებით მერგო ეს ბედნიერება. (როგორც კი ხელახლა დაბეჭდავენ, კოლექციას შევმატებ)
ალბათ, ახალსაც ვერაფერს ვიტყვი. ხელახლა თუ აღვნიშნავ, რაც არ მომბეზრდება, რომ ეს კაცი არის გენიალური. მიყვარს მისი წერის სტილი, ბურუსში გახვეული პერსონაჟები, ჩახლართული ფლოთი და უორიგინალურესი ნარატივის ზეიმი. საოცრად გამოსდის მკითხველის ინტერესის შენარჩუნება, არასდროს მბეზრდება კითხვის პროცესი. ამასთან, ხშირად ვხვდები ალუზიას მის სხვა წიგნებთან: უცნაური ტელეფონის ნომერი, რომელიც კლებადი ციფრებით შედგება (4 3 2 1 ?!), ისევ და ისევ ნიუ იორკი, ისევ და ისევ ბრუკლინი. მოკლედ, ოსტერიზმით შეპყრობილს, რომ მიმიშვა, შემიძლია საათობით ვისაუბრო ამ კაცზე. მიყვარს მიყვარს და მიყვარს.