'The weird world rolls on' ------some spoilers------, 29 Nov 2008
`I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle though another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.'

Man in the Dark opens with August Brill, a Pulitzer prize winning critic, lying in the pitch black as he recovers from a car accident in his daughter's house. Grandfather, daughter Miriam and granddaughter Katya share the house since the `the roof fell in on Katya' and she dropped out of film school.

Brill tells himself stories as he lies awake - he wants to divert his mind from his worries; the death of his wife, of his granddaughter's boyfriend Titus, of his daughter's failed marriage. He and his granddaughter Katya have been spending their time watching films together, conscious displacement activity to avoid thinking about their lives.

In the alternate world he conjures up an alter ego - Owen Brick wakes up in a deep hole dressed in uniform. It's a world where the twin towers were never bombed. Instead of a war in Iraq the disputed US election of 2000 has led to a civil war in America. Throughout the night Brill alternates between the worlds until he abandons Brick to his American wilderness `with no chance to say a last word or think a last thought'. Brick then starts to confront the list of subjects he told us he was avoiding; his wife Sonia, the shocking story of Titus' death and his worries about his daughter. Then he and Katya have a long insomniac conversation on the same topics.

For me, the characters became more and more sympathetic as we gradually learn more of their back stories and see their connection to each other. Auster's themes of stories within stories, war and writing knit together well in this short novel.

The book covers just one wakeful night and ends with a plan for going out to breakfast - a hopeful end to a thoughtful book which challenges us to confront our thoughts about our weird world.


Lazy, 28 Oct 2008
Auster never writes badly, but this is a lazy lazy book. The first half is an ambling, pointless collection of stories that go nowhere. It's like he's shoehorned bits of writing in from elsewhere and no editor has said "hang on, what's the point of this?" The conceit of the novel that here is a man creating a dream/story to keep him from thinking of terrible memories runs out of steam very quickly and Auster seems to just end it abruptly when it's clear it's a blind alley. The idea that he somehow creates an alternative reality, a world without the 9/11 attacks is nonsense. Towards the end of the book that are flashes of quite moving and affective prose, but that's not much to say for a very disappointing book.

A collection of anecdotes, 27 Sep 2008
Marginally better than his last, but this colection of bits and pieces, and a semi-novel that he appears to have got bored with, just add to the impression that Paul Auster has really lost his way, or can't be bothered any more, which is a real shame.

The set up is interesting. The narrator is a 70 year old who is spinning stories to himself at night because he can't sleep. One of these stories concerns an alternative America where 9/11 never happened and there is a civil war instead. This scenario makes up the novel-within-the-novel, and we're instroduced to its characters, one of whom is given the task of killing the alternative world's creator - the narrator.

This might have been interesting, but it's really a device for Auster to play with SF ideas of alternate universes and histories. Dozens of hack SF writers have done this, and better. It's an irrelevance, there to pad out what is a very very slim story indeed.

Even this story, slim as it is, is padded out with irrelevancies, anecdotes from some of the characters, background data that would be fine if it were his synopsis or notes for a novel, but very annoying that it's sold as the novel itself.

Then we have the conclusion, the interminable dialogue (done in that horribly trendy no-speech-marks style) between the narrator and his grand daughter, all building up to the novel's horrific conclusion. Which demonstrates - what? The irrelevance of fiction itself? That would explain the pointless novel-within-the-novel. Or just that Paul Auster has now resorted to throwing a few ideas together and calling it a novel.

This might sound harsh, but Paul Auster has produced so many fine novels that have engrossed me for days and lingered in my mind long afterwards that it's very disappointing to read the skimpy fare of his last two books. I always buy him in hardback, but this might be the last time.

Auster losing his direction..., 07 Sep 2008
The last few offerings from the once brilliant Paul Auster suggest an author who has (hopefully temporarily) lost his way. If we had read Man In The Dark by an unknown, then it would be filed away as mildly interesting but showing some real flashes of brilliance. That the author is Auster can`t fail to disappoint. We realise that Auster has a story to tell here and many important points to be made, but the lasting impression is nothing more than a somewhat shmaltzy sentimental filler. The reminiscing between grandfather and granddaughter that concludes the novel is excrutiatingly out of place in an Auster book and one can only hope that the author re-discovers his former superb standard in the coming years.
Auster knows he`s good....and the book is written in my opinion with the view that his fans will welcome and drool over anything that he cares to submit.
Not this one !

Short, simple, but profoundly moving, 01 Sep 2008
Whether through its shortness of length or through the familiarity with typical Paul Auster subject matter, there seems to be a tendency in other reviews here so far to underestimate the true worth of the author's latest novel. Man in the Dark may indeed appear short and simple on the surface, but the importance of its subject matter and the emotional depth it covers is nonetheless remarkable.

Through August Brill, the man in the dark, Auster tries to make sense of the world through the medium of the writer spinning ideas in his head. Yes, that's nothing new with Auster and there's certainly a sense of post-modern reflection on the nature of writing and the duty of the writer, but as with Brooklyn Follies and his collection of True Tales Of American Life, Auster is interested in ordinary people and the impact of the exceptional or significant moments on their lives.

Those significant events affecting American people today are alluded to in the book's references to Iraq and the Twin Towers. It's not Auster's intention to confront such grand events, however significant they might seem, but to reduce them to the smaller scale in considering how people learn to deal with such experiences. That does not make Man In The Dark a lesser work. Through memories, shared experiences of joy and suffering, through the fictions they create and the movies they watch, his characters struggle to make sense of an absurd world ever more inclined to bring new unspeakable horrors. Auster masterfully brings these all together into a profoundly moving piece that is richer in meaning and worth than its apparent brevity suggests.

'The weird world rolls on' ------some spoilers------, 29 Nov 2008
`I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle though another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.'

Man in the Dark opens with August Brill, a Pulitzer prize winning critic, lying in the pitch black as he recovers from a car accident in his daughter's house. Grandfather, daughter Miriam and granddaughter Katya share the house since the `the roof fell in on Katya' and she dropped out of film school.

Brill tells himself stories as he lies awake - he wants to divert his mind from his worries; the death of his wife, of his granddaughter's boyfriend Titus, of his daughter's failed marriage. He and his granddaughter Katya have been spending their time watching films together, conscious displacement activity to avoid thinking about their lives.

In the alternate world he conjures up an alter ego - Owen Brick wakes up in a deep hole dressed in uniform. It's a world where the twin towers were never bombed. Instead of a war in Iraq the disputed US election of 2000 has led to a civil war in America. Throughout the night Brill alternates between the worlds until he abandons Brick to his American wilderness `with no chance to say a last word or think a last thought'. Brick then starts to confront the list of subjects he told us he was avoiding; his wife Sonia, the shocking story of Titus' death and his worries about his daughter. Then he and Katya have a long insomniac conversation on the same topics.

For me, the characters became more and more sympathetic as we gradually learn more of their back stories and see their connection to each other. Auster's themes of stories within stories, war and writing knit together well in this short novel.

The book covers just one wakeful night and ends with a plan for going out to breakfast - a hopeful end to a thoughtful book which challenges us to confront our thoughts about our weird world.


Lazy, 28 Oct 2008
Auster never writes badly, but this is a lazy lazy book. The first half is an ambling, pointless collection of stories that go nowhere. It's like he's shoehorned bits of writing in from elsewhere and no editor has said "hang on, what's the point of this?" The conceit of the novel that here is a man creating a dream/story to keep him from thinking of terrible memories runs out of steam very quickly and Auster seems to just end it abruptly when it's clear it's a blind alley. The idea that he somehow creates an alternative reality, a world without the 9/11 attacks is nonsense. Towards the end of the book that are flashes of quite moving and affective prose, but that's not much to say for a very disappointing book.

A collection of anecdotes, 27 Sep 2008
Marginally better than his last, but this colection of bits and pieces, and a semi-novel that he appears to have got bored with, just add to the impression that Paul Auster has really lost his way, or can't be bothered any more, which is a real shame.

The set up is interesting. The narrator is a 70 year old who is spinning stories to himself at night because he can't sleep. One of these stories concerns an alternative America where 9/11 never happened and there is a civil war instead. This scenario makes up the novel-within-the-novel, and we're instroduced to its characters, one of whom is given the task of killing the alternative world's creator - the narrator.

This might have been interesting, but it's really a device for Auster to play with SF ideas of alternate universes and histories. Dozens of hack SF writers have done this, and better. It's an irrelevance, there to pad out what is a very very slim story indeed.

Even this story, slim as it is, is padded out with irrelevancies, anecdotes from some of the characters, background data that would be fine if it were his synopsis or notes for a novel, but very annoying that it's sold as the novel itself.

Then we have the conclusion, the interminable dialogue (done in that horribly trendy no-speech-marks style) between the narrator and his grand daughter, all building up to the novel's horrific conclusion. Which demonstrates - what? The irrelevance of fiction itself? That would explain the pointless novel-within-the-novel. Or just that Paul Auster has now resorted to throwing a few ideas together and calling it a novel.

This might sound harsh, but Paul Auster has produced so many fine novels that have engrossed me for days and lingered in my mind long afterwards that it's very disappointing to read the skimpy fare of his last two books. I always buy him in hardback, but this might be the last time.

Auster losing his direction..., 07 Sep 2008
The last few offerings from the once brilliant Paul Auster suggest an author who has (hopefully temporarily) lost his way. If we had read Man In The Dark by an unknown, then it would be filed away as mildly interesting but showing some real flashes of brilliance. That the author is Auster can`t fail to disappoint. We realise that Auster has a story to tell here and many important points to be made, but the lasting impression is nothing more than a somewhat shmaltzy sentimental filler. The reminiscing between grandfather and granddaughter that concludes the novel is excrutiatingly out of place in an Auster book and one can only hope that the author re-discovers his former superb standard in the coming years.
Auster knows he`s good....and the book is written in my opinion with the view that his fans will welcome and drool over anything that he cares to submit.
Not this one !

Short, simple, but profoundly moving, 01 Sep 2008
Whether through its shortness of length or through the familiarity with typical Paul Auster subject matter, there seems to be a tendency in other reviews here so far to underestimate the true worth of the author's latest novel. Man in the Dark may indeed appear short and simple on the surface, but the importance of its subject matter and the emotional depth it covers is nonetheless remarkable.

Through August Brill, the man in the dark, Auster tries to make sense of the world through the medium of the writer spinning ideas in his head. Yes, that's nothing new with Auster and there's certainly a sense of post-modern reflection on the nature of writing and the duty of the writer, but as with Brooklyn Follies and his collection of True Tales Of American Life, Auster is interested in ordinary people and the impact of the exceptional or significant moments on their lives.

Those significant events affecting American people today are alluded to in the book's references to Iraq and the Twin Towers. It's not Auster's intention to confront such grand events, however significant they might seem, but to reduce them to the smaller scale in considering how people learn to deal with such experiences. That does not make Man In The Dark a lesser work. Through memories, shared experiences of joy and suffering, through the fictions they create and the movies they watch, his characters struggle to make sense of an absurd world ever more inclined to bring new unspeakable horrors. Auster masterfully brings these all together into a profoundly moving piece that is richer in meaning and worth than its apparent brevity suggests.

Read again!, 05 Jun 2008
My short recommendation is that as soon as I finished this book I wanted to turn back to the first page and read it again. I suspect you keep drawing new things from it the more times you read it. Just like listening to very good music...

painless way into postmodernist metafiction, 06 Feb 2008
This is a series of subtle interlocking novellas set in New York published over 85 and 86: City of Glass, "Ghosts" and "Locked Room with the first set in the period, the 2nd in the 40's and the last one in the 70's. They use mystery conventions of the gumshoe detective (think Humphrey Bogart) but in a subversive way as an existentialist reflection on writing, and story creation and communication but at the pace of a thriller; it more Kafka then Chandler with haunting imagery and surreal coincidences. But it also has deep emotional and psychological depths.

To give you a flavour of the book, in the City of Glass the main Character is Daniel Quinn a writer who has abandoned writing except for mystery writing owing to the death of his wife and child. He is successful enough to only need to write one novel a year which he has just done and then he drifts. He is clearly depressed and only feels alive when he is the private eye of his novels. One night he receives a midnight phone call asking for a detective called Paul Auster( yes the real author is also a later character in the story) and after several rejections he decides to act as if were his private eye character. His clients are a child-man who is a survivor of a dreadful abuse by his father (he was deprived of language as part of an experiment in discovering the natural language of man before the fall of the Tower of Babel) and his wife a nurse who had married him so that he could leave the hospital. The father now elderly is being released from Mental hospital and they fear that the son will be killed and want protection.

The story then takes many twists and turns and ends with the author as character being criticised by a final narrator who may be one of the characters from the other stories for what happens to Daniel Quinn during the course of the story.

In the Locked Room all the characters are named after colours and it's a classical stake-out story but is it? Or is it a reflection on the lives of characters once that have been created and written about?

The final story is of two friends who have drifted apart, one wanted to be a writer and is now a critic unable to create works of his own imagination. He discovers that his friend has disappeared leaving a wife and baby and a locked room of manuscripts. These turn out to be masterpieces of novels, plays, and poems far beyond his capability of writing. In preparing those for publishing he re-enters and re-evaluates his life long friendship and what it meant but at a cost as he faces a secret that tests him and his relationships to destruction.

Paul Auster's draws on his own colourful work life in his struggle to become a writer so the stories have a grain of gritty realism. But they are interlinked by an interest in the impact of coincidences and lives lived in minimalist even ascetic ways against a background of a loss, failure and absent fathers and reflections on writing and storytelling. If you want a painless way into postmodernist metafiction then this is the book for you. Highly recommended


Very Different, 04 Feb 2008
Two things I have got out of reading this book. First, this author must be one of the best in breaking down complex characters and take the plot where you don't expect it to go. Second, he never finishes the story, at least not in a normal way. I read his book "Travels in the scriptorium" last month and got the same feeling. Nevertheless a five star rating is the least you can give to such a wonderful read.



Kafka Gets Private-eyesed, 29 Oct 2007
Where Kafka's characters find themselves being frustrated and circumscribed by a system (The Castle & The Trial etc), in Auster's world (New York) this task, it seems, has been privatised and has become the job of private detectives, or those hiring them. It's a very strange world and just as in the narrative where, you can't decide who's following who, the reader (in my case) couldn't decide, whether I was reading the author or the author was reading me. As nothing remarkable continues to happen, throughout the book, there emerges a strange feeling that something is being implied about the reader's identity: that we become the thing we pursue.

I am not sure what 'modern' means when it is applied to other art-forms but from this I would gather that it means, when applied to a novel, a form where something is going on in the relationship between the narrator and the reader which is independent of the actual narrative. So a simple story about one human simply observing another, begins to suggest uncomfortable questions about the reader's relationship with other people and how that relationship cannot but form identity. At times in the depths of these stories, there seems to be some kind of hidden koan at work on the problem of individual identity: this can be slightly disconcerting.

It is a very strange reading experience, which some will find slightly unpleasant or simply bewildering, but as a psychological experiment it really is fascinating.

So, I wouldn't recommend it to everyone but for those willing to try out a rather different sort of reading experience, it is well worth a try.


Intriguing but Unfulfilling , 25 Sep 2007
First and foremost this is not a trilogy in the conventional sense. It is not one story told across three episodes but rather three separate stories which follow the same loose theme. This basic similarity, along with a couple of duel appearances of minor characters leads to the three plots being labelled as 'inter-connected' - this is simply misleading. The book can be better described as a collection of short stories.

There is no doubt that Paul Auster is a talented author and the three plots have great potential. The problem arises when he sacrifices complexity and culmination of the plot in favour of a psychoanalytical exploration of his characters. What results is a largely uneventful time period with long swathes of writing about how the character is feeling and why. The endings are ambiguous and rarely answer the main questions posed in the early stages of each story. You get the sense that Auster is attempting to write a literary classic when the book is much better suited to a good old-fashioned detective story.

One of the main drawbacks is reality. There are things the characters do (or don't do) that would never happen but which are pivotal to the story. Furthermore the main characters in each story all go through a sort of breakdown, the causes for which are totally unrealistic. This implausibility left me with the impression that Auster only created the plot as a stage for his 'monologues' on theology and mentality, and as such was not overly concerned about them. Indeed his writing is far more eloquent in those parts.

There are positive aspects which is why I gave this book three stars. It is very well written and there are intriguing nuances such as including himself as a character in one story, and naming the characters as colours in another! The plot foundations are exciting even though the execution is mundane, and the fate of the characters at the end has a powerful effect on the reader.

The New York Trilogy is a unique book, and will probably be adored by people who don't need definitive endings, or who enjoy delving into issues of identity and morality. However, I was looking for a good detective story, and what I found was unrealistic, unfulfilling, and rather waffling!

'The weird world rolls on' ------some spoilers------, 29 Nov 2008
`I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle though another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.'

Man in the Dark opens with August Brill, a Pulitzer prize winning critic, lying in the pitch black as he recovers from a car accident in his daughter's house. Grandfather, daughter Miriam and granddaughter Katya share the house since the `the roof fell in on Katya' and she dropped out of film school.

Brill tells himself stories as he lies awake - he wants to divert his mind from his worries; the death of his wife, of his granddaughter's boyfriend Titus, of his daughter's failed marriage. He and his granddaughter Katya have been spending their time watching films together, conscious displacement activity to avoid thinking about their lives.

In the alternate world he conjures up an alter ego - Owen Brick wakes up in a deep hole dressed in uniform. It's a world where the twin towers were never bombed. Instead of a war in Iraq the disputed US election of 2000 has led to a civil war in America. Throughout the night Brill alternates between the worlds until he abandons Brick to his American wilderness `with no chance to say a last word or think a last thought'. Brick then starts to confront the list of subjects he told us he was avoiding; his wife Sonia, the shocking story of Titus' death and his worries about his daughter. Then he and Katya have a long insomniac conversation on the same topics.

For me, the characters became more and more sympathetic as we gradually learn more of their back stories and see their connection to each other. Auster's themes of stories within stories, war and writing knit together well in this short novel.

The book covers just one wakeful night and ends with a plan for going out to breakfast - a hopeful end to a thoughtful book which challenges us to confront our thoughts about our weird world.


Lazy, 28 Oct 2008
Auster never writes badly, but this is a lazy lazy book. The first half is an ambling, pointless collection of stories that go nowhere. It's like he's shoehorned bits of writing in from elsewhere and no editor has said "hang on, what's the point of this?" The conceit of the novel that here is a man creating a dream/story to keep him from thinking of terrible memories runs out of steam very quickly and Auster seems to just end it abruptly when it's clear it's a blind alley. The idea that he somehow creates an alternative reality, a world without the 9/11 attacks is nonsense. Towards the end of the book that are flashes of quite moving and affective prose, but that's not much to say for a very disappointing book.

A collection of anecdotes, 27 Sep 2008
Marginally better than his last, but this colection of bits and pieces, and a semi-novel that he appears to have got bored with, just add to the impression that Paul Auster has really lost his way, or can't be bothered any more, which is a real shame.

The set up is interesting. The narrator is a 70 year old who is spinning stories to himself at night because he can't sleep. One of these stories concerns an alternative America where 9/11 never happened and there is a civil war instead. This scenario makes up the novel-within-the-novel, and we're instroduced to its characters, one of whom is given the task of killing the alternative world's creator - the narrator.

This might have been interesting, but it's really a device for Auster to play with SF ideas of alternate universes and histories. Dozens of hack SF writers have done this, and better. It's an irrelevance, there to pad out what is a very very slim story indeed.

Even this story, slim as it is, is padded out with irrelevancies, anecdotes from some of the characters, background data that would be fine if it were his synopsis or notes for a novel, but very annoying that it's sold as the novel itself.

Then we have the conclusion, the interminable dialogue (done in that horribly trendy no-speech-marks style) between the narrator and his grand daughter, all building up to the novel's horrific conclusion. Which demonstrates - what? The irrelevance of fiction itself? That would explain the pointless novel-within-the-novel. Or just that Paul Auster has now resorted to throwing a few ideas together and calling it a novel.

This might sound harsh, but Paul Auster has produced so many fine novels that have engrossed me for days and lingered in my mind long afterwards that it's very disappointing to read the skimpy fare of his last two books. I always buy him in hardback, but this might be the last time.

Auster losing his direction..., 07 Sep 2008
The last few offerings from the once brilliant Paul Auster suggest an author who has (hopefully temporarily) lost his way. If we had read Man In The Dark by an unknown, then it would be filed away as mildly interesting but showing some real flashes of brilliance. That the author is Auster can`t fail to disappoint. We realise that Auster has a story to tell here and many important points to be made, but the lasting impression is nothing more than a somewhat shmaltzy sentimental filler. The reminiscing between grandfather and granddaughter that concludes the novel is excrutiatingly out of place in an Auster book and one can only hope that the author re-discovers his former superb standard in the coming years.
Auster knows he`s good....and the book is written in my opinion with the view that his fans will welcome and drool over anything that he cares to submit.
Not this one !

Short, simple, but profoundly moving, 01 Sep 2008
Whether through its shortness of length or through the familiarity with typical Paul Auster subject matter, there seems to be a tendency in other reviews here so far to underestimate the true worth of the author's latest novel. Man in the Dark may indeed appear short and simple on the surface, but the importance of its subject matter and the emotional depth it covers is nonetheless remarkable.

Through August Brill, the man in the dark, Auster tries to make sense of the world through the medium of the writer spinning ideas in his head. Yes, that's nothing new with Auster and there's certainly a sense of post-modern reflection on the nature of writing and the duty of the writer, but as with Brooklyn Follies and his collection of True Tales Of American Life, Auster is interested in ordinary people and the impact of the exceptional or significant moments on their lives.

Those significant events affecting American people today are alluded to in the book's references to Iraq and the Twin Towers. It's not Auster's intention to confront such grand events, however significant they might seem, but to reduce them to the smaller scale in considering how people learn to deal with such experiences. That does not make Man In The Dark a lesser work. Through memories, shared experiences of joy and suffering, through the fictions they create and the movies they watch, his characters struggle to make sense of an absurd world ever more inclined to bring new unspeakable horrors. Auster masterfully brings these all together into a profoundly moving piece that is richer in meaning and worth than its apparent brevity suggests.

Read again!, 05 Jun 2008
My short recommendation is that as soon as I finished this book I wanted to turn back to the first page and read it again. I suspect you keep drawing new things from it the more times you read it. Just like listening to very good music...

painless way into postmodernist metafiction, 06 Feb 2008
This is a series of subtle interlocking novellas set in New York published over 85 and 86: City of Glass, "Ghosts" and "Locked Room with the first set in the period, the 2nd in the 40's and the last one in the 70's. They use mystery conventions of the gumshoe detective (think Humphrey Bogart) but in a subversive way as an existentialist reflection on writing, and story creation and communication but at the pace of a thriller; it more Kafka then Chandler with haunting imagery and surreal coincidences. But it also has deep emotional and psychological depths.

To give you a flavour of the book, in the City of Glass the main Character is Daniel Quinn a writer who has abandoned writing except for mystery writing owing to the death of his wife and child. He is successful enough to only need to write one novel a year which he has just done and then he drifts. He is clearly depressed and only feels alive when he is the private eye of his novels. One night he receives a midnight phone call asking for a detective called Paul Auster( yes the real author is also a later character in the story) and after several rejections he decides to act as if were his private eye character. His clients are a child-man who is a survivor of a dreadful abuse by his father (he was deprived of language as part of an experiment in discovering the natural language of man before the fall of the Tower of Babel) and his wife a nurse who had married him so that he could leave the hospital. The father now elderly is being released from Mental hospital and they fear that the son will be killed and want protection.

The story then takes many twists and turns and ends with the author as character being criticised by a final narrator who may be one of the characters from the other stories for what happens to Daniel Quinn during the course of the story.

In the Locked Room all the characters are named after colours and it's a classical stake-out story but is it? Or is it a reflection on the lives of characters once that have been created and written about?

The final story is of two friends who have drifted apart, one wanted to be a writer and is now a critic unable to create works of his own imagination. He discovers that his friend has disappeared leaving a wife and baby and a locked room of manuscripts. These turn out to be masterpieces of novels, plays, and poems far beyond his capability of writing. In preparing those for publishing he re-enters and re-evaluates his life long friendship and what it meant but at a cost as he faces a secret that tests him and his relationships to destruction.

Paul Auster's draws on his own colourful work life in his struggle to become a writer so the stories have a grain of gritty realism. But they are interlinked by an interest in the impact of coincidences and lives lived in minimalist even ascetic ways against a background of a loss, failure and absent fathers and reflections on writing and storytelling. If you want a painless way into postmodernist metafiction then this is the book for you. Highly recommended


Very Different, 04 Feb 2008
Two things I have got out of reading this book. First, this author must be one of the best in breaking down complex characters and take the plot where you don't expect it to go. Second, he never finishes the story, at least not in a normal way. I read his book "Travels in the scriptorium" last month and got the same feeling. Nevertheless a five star rating is the least you can give to such a wonderful read.



Kafka Gets Private-eyesed, 29 Oct 2007
Where Kafka's characters find themselves being frustrated and circumscribed by a system (The Castle & The Trial etc), in Auster's world (New York) this task, it seems, has been privatised and has become the job of private detectives, or those hiring them. It's a very strange world and just as in the narrative where, you can't decide who's following who, the reader (in my case) couldn't decide, whether I was reading the author or the author was reading me. As nothing remarkable continues to happen, throughout the book, there emerges a strange feeling that something is being implied about the reader's identity: that we become the thing we pursue.

I am not sure what 'modern' means when it is applied to other art-forms but from this I would gather that it means, when applied to a novel, a form where something is going on in the relationship between the narrator and the reader which is independent of the actual narrative. So a simple story about one human simply observing another, begins to suggest uncomfortable questions about the reader's relationship with other people and how that relationship cannot but form identity. At times in the depths of these stories, there seems to be some kind of hidden koan at work on the problem of individual identity: this can be slightly disconcerting.

It is a very strange reading experience, which some will find slightly unpleasant or simply bewildering, but as a psychological experiment it really is fascinating.

So, I wouldn't recommend it to everyone but for those willing to try out a rather different sort of reading experience, it is well worth a try.


Intriguing but Unfulfilling , 25 Sep 2007
First and foremost this is not a trilogy in the conventional sense. It is not one story told across three episodes but rather three separate stories which follow the same loose theme. This basic similarity, along with a couple of duel appearances of minor characters leads to the three plots being labelled as 'inter-connected' - this is simply misleading. The book can be better described as a collection of short stories.

There is no doubt that Paul Auster is a talented author and the three plots have great potential. The problem arises when he sacrifices complexity and culmination of the plot in favour of a psychoanalytical exploration of his characters. What results is a largely uneventful time period with long swathes of writing about how the character is feeling and why. The endings are ambiguous and rarely answer the main questions posed in the early stages of each story. You get the sense that Auster is attempting to write a literary classic when the book is much better suited to a good old-fashioned detective story.

One of the main drawbacks is reality. There are things the characters do (or don't do) that would never happen but which are pivotal to the story. Furthermore the main characters in each story all go through a sort of breakdown, the causes for which are totally unrealistic. This implausibility left me with the impression that Auster only created the plot as a stage for his 'monologues' on theology and mentality, and as such was not overly concerned about them. Indeed his writing is far more eloquent in those parts.

There are positive aspects which is why I gave this book three stars. It is very well written and there are intriguing nuances such as including himself as a character in one story, and naming the characters as colours in another! The plot foundations are exciting even though the execution is mundane, and the fate of the characters at the end has a powerful effect on the reader.

The New York Trilogy is a unique book, and will probably be adored by people who don't need definitive endings, or who enjoy delving into issues of identity and morality. However, I was looking for a good detective story, and what I found was unrealistic, unfulfilling, and rather waffling!

Really enjoyable but not the usual standard, 28 Aug 2008

I came to 'The Brooklyn Follies' after reading 'The Book of Illusions' and 'The Music of Chance.' If you are looking for a similiar experience you have come to the wrong place. The characters while engaging and well written, especially Tom, do not have the same depth or pathos of other Auster narratives. The story is decidedly 'heart warming' and while there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, the solutions Nathan presents to life's problem's are, at times, a little one dimensional and contrived. I also agree with other reviewers that the use of 9/11 was a little clumsy.
Having said all this, I did still very much enjoy this book as Auster is an accomplished, interesting and engaging writer who does raise interesting questions and themes about modern life. As a stand alone book it is still good but it doesn't compare to 'The Book of Illusions' or 'The Music of Chance' for me.

brilliant, 13 Apr 2008
It was my third book by Auster and I absolutely loved it. It's vibrant, the language is funny and moving. I loved the literary stories within about Kafka, Poe and Thoreau and many others. It's an optimistic novel about people who want to make their lives worthwile. It shows the beauty of every day and it did make me feel great.
Read it and enjoy!

Not a bad way to pass the time of day, 06 Jun 2007
This was my first Paul Auster book and I did enjoy his style and the general storyline did hold my attention. It does feel a little like a soap opera, the characters are sympathetic as they battle with their modern day issues in Brooklyn. Nathan is a believable narrator with many faults as well as strengths as the storyline ambled along. I did not think there was anything outstanding about it though and the story is relatively tame and gentle except of course for the last paragraph or so. I can see what Auster was trying to do with bring Sept 11th into the book but I don't think it worked. It did show the arbitrary nature of such a dramatic event overshadowing people's lives but I think he needed to write a bit more about it. I wouldn't rush to read another Auster but find it hard to criticise this book too much.

Surprisingly Accessible Auster, 02 Jun 2007
The first Auster I read was New York Stories which absolutely blew me away. By comparison this is a much lesser book and has a number of weaknesses. The characters are somewhat 2D, especially Rory and David, and all of the plot lines tie up too easily. However, I came to this from reading a number of down beat, "real life" novels, and it really cheered me up, I definitely enjoyed it. So, if you are looking for great literature, don't bother. If you are looking for a life affirming, up beat book, thoroughly recommended

Don't read the reviews, read the book, andmake your own mind up!, 08 May 2007
I have read a few of Austers books, and especially enjoyed The New York Trilogy, to which this book vaguely references. Where NYT was riddled in historical and litterary references,and an obsession with the ontological foundation of language, The Brooklyn Follies is altogether more accessible.

It made me happy, it made me laugh, it made me sad, it almost made me sick, and at several points it made me jump out of my skin as if something great had been revieled to me...

The story is good, but Auster uses the story as a vessel to reveal things greater than the story itself.

[...]
In my opinion, it's a great book. One of the best I've read.

'The weird world rolls on' ------some spoilers------, 29 Nov 2008
`I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle though another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.'

Man in the Dark opens with August Brill, a Pulitzer prize winning critic, lying in the pitch black as he recovers from a car accident in his daughter's house. Grandfather, daughter Miriam and granddaughter Katya share the house since the `the roof fell in on Katya' and she dropped out of film school.

Brill tells himself stories as he lies awake - he wants to divert his mind from his worries; the death of his wife, of his granddaughter's boyfriend Titus, of his daughter's failed marriage. He and his granddaughter Katya have been spending their time watching films together, conscious displacement activity to avoid thinking about their lives.

In the alternate world he conjures up an alter ego - Owen Brick wakes up in a deep hole dressed in uniform. It's a world where the twin towers were never bombed. Instead of a war in Iraq the disputed US election of 2000 has led to a civil war in America. Throughout the night Brill alternates between the worlds until he abandons Brick to his American wilderness `with no chance to say a last word or think a last thought'. Brick then starts to confront the list of subjects he told us he was avoiding; his wife Sonia, the shocking story of Titus' death and his worries about his daughter. Then he and Katya have a long insomniac conversation on the same topics.

For me, the characters became more and more sympathetic as we gradually learn more of their back stories and see their connection to each other. Auster's themes of stories within stories, war and writing knit together well in this short novel.

The book covers just one wakeful night and ends with a plan for going out to breakfast - a hopeful end to a thoughtful book which challenges us to confront our thoughts about our weird world.


Lazy, 28 Oct 2008
Auster never writes badly, but this is a lazy lazy book. The first half is an ambling, pointless collection of stories that go nowhere. It's like he's shoehorned bits of writing in from elsewhere and no editor has said "hang on, what's the point of this?" The conceit of the novel that here is a man creating a dream/story to keep him from thinking of terrible memories runs out of steam very quickly and Auster seems to just end it abruptly when it's clear it's a blind alley. The idea that he somehow creates an alternative reality, a world without the 9/11 attacks is nonsense. Towards the end of the book that are flashes of quite moving and affective prose, but that's not much to say for a very disappointing book.

A collection of anecdotes, 27 Sep 2008
Marginally better than his last, but this colection of bits and pieces, and a semi-novel that he appears to have got bored with, just add to the impression that Paul Auster has really lost his way, or can't be bothered any more, which is a real shame.

The set up is interesting. The narrator is a 70 year old who is spinning stories to himself at night because he can't sleep. One of these stories concerns an alternative America where 9/11 never happened and there is a civil war instead. This scenario makes up the novel-within-the-novel, and we're instroduced to its characters, one of whom is given the task of killing the alternative world's creator - the narrator.

This might have been interesting, but it's really a device for Auster to play with SF ideas of alternate universes and histories. Dozens of hack SF writers have done this, and better. It's an irrelevance, there to pad out what is a very very slim story indeed.

Even this story, slim as it is, is padded out with irrelevancies, anecdotes from some of the characters, background data that would be fine if it were his synopsis or notes for a novel, but very annoying that it's sold as the novel itself.

Then we have the conclusion, the interminable dialogue (done in that horribly trendy no-speech-marks style) between the narrator and his grand daughter, all building up to the novel's horrific conclusion. Which demonstrates - what? The irrelevance of fiction itself? That would explain the pointless novel-within-the-novel. Or just that Paul Auster has now resorted to throwing a few ideas together and calling it a novel.

This might sound harsh, but Paul Auster has produced so many fine novels that have engrossed me for days and lingered in my mind long afterwards that it's very disappointing to read the skimpy fare of his last two books. I always buy him in hardback, but this might be the last time.

Auster losing his direction..., 07 Sep 2008
The last few offerings from the once brilliant Paul Auster suggest an author who has (hopefully temporarily) lost his way. If we had read Man In The Dark by an unknown, then it would be filed away as mildly interesting but showing some real flashes of brilliance. That the author is Auster can`t fail to disappoint. We realise that Auster has a story to tell here and many important points to be made, but the lasting impression is nothing more than a somewhat shmaltzy sentimental filler. The reminiscing between grandfather and granddaughter that concludes the novel is excrutiatingly out of place in an Auster book and one can only hope that the author re-discovers his former superb standard in the coming years.
Auster knows he`s good....and the book is written in my opinion with the view that his fans will welcome and drool over anything that he cares to submit.
Not this one !

Short, simple, but profoundly moving, 01 Sep 2008
Whether through its shortness of length or through the familiarity with typical Paul Auster subject matter, there seems to be a tendency in other reviews here so far to underestimate the true worth of the author's latest novel. Man in the Dark may indeed appear short and simple on the surface, but the importance of its subject matter and the emotional depth it covers is nonetheless remarkable.

Through August Brill, the man in the dark, Auster tries to make sense of the world through the medium of the writer spinning ideas in his head. Yes, that's nothing new with Auster and there's certainly a sense of post-modern reflection on the nature of writing and the duty of the writer, but as with Brooklyn Follies and his collection of True Tales Of American Life, Auster is interested in ordinary people and the impact of the exceptional or significant moments on their lives.

Those significant events affecting American people today are alluded to in the book's references to Iraq and the Twin Towers. It's not Auster's intention to confront such grand events, however significant they might seem, but to reduce them to the smaller scale in considering how people learn to deal with such experiences. That does not make Man In The Dark a lesser work. Through memories, shared experiences of joy and suffering, through the fictions they create and the movies they watch, his characters struggle to make sense of an absurd world ever more inclined to bring new unspeakable horrors. Auster masterfully brings these all together into a profoundly moving piece that is richer in meaning and worth than its apparent brevity suggests.

Read again!, 05 Jun 2008
My short recommendation is that as soon as I finished this book I wanted to turn back to the first page and read it again. I suspect you keep drawing new things from it the more times you read it. Just like listening to very good music...

painless way into postmodernist metafiction, 06 Feb 2008
This is a series of subtle interlocking novellas set in New York published over 85 and 86: City of Glass, "Ghosts" and "Locked Room with the first set in the period, the 2nd in the 40's and the last one in the 70's. They use mystery conventions of the gumshoe detective (think Humphrey Bogart) but in a subversive way as an existentialist reflection on writing, and story creation and communication but at the pace of a thriller; it more Kafka then Chandler with haunting imagery and surreal coincidences. But it also has deep emotional and psychological depths.

To give you a flavour of the book, in the City of Glass the main Character is Daniel Quinn a writer who has abandoned writing except for mystery writing owing to the death of his wife and child. He is successful enough to only need to write one novel a year which he has just done and then he drifts. He is clearly depressed and only feels alive when he is the private eye of his novels. One night he receives a midnight phone call asking for a detective called Paul Auster( yes the real author is also a later character in the story) and after several rejections he decides to act as if were his private eye character. His clients are a child-man who is a survivor of a dreadful abuse by his father (he was deprived of language as part of an experiment in discovering the natural language of man before the fall of the Tower of Babel) and his wife a nurse who had married him so that he could leave the hospital. The father now elderly is being released from Mental hospital and they fear that the son will be killed and want protection.

The story then takes many twists and turns and ends with the author as character being criticised by a final narrator who may be one of the characters from the other stories for what happens to Daniel Quinn during the course of the story.

In the Locked Room all the characters are named after colours and it's a classical stake-out story but is it? Or is it a reflection on the lives of characters once that have been created and written about?

The final story is of two friends who have drifted apart, one wanted to be a writer and is now a critic unable to create works of his own imagination. He discovers that his friend has disappeared leaving a wife and baby and a locked room of manuscripts. These turn out to be masterpieces of novels, plays, and poems far beyond his capability of writing. In preparing those for publishing he re-enters and re-evaluates his life long friendship and what it meant but at a cost as he faces a secret that tests him and his relationships to destruction.

Paul Auster's draws on his own colourful work life in his struggle to become a writer so the stories have a grain of gritty realism. But they are interlinked by an interest in the impact of coincidences and lives lived in minimalist even ascetic ways against a background of a loss, failure and absent fathers and reflections on writing and storytelling. If you want a painless way into postmodernist metafiction then this is the book for you. Highly recommended


Very Different, 04 Feb 2008
Two things I have got out of reading this book. First, this author must be one of the best in breaking down complex characters and take the plot where you don't expect it to go. Second, he never finishes the story, at least not in a normal way. I read his book "Travels in the scriptorium" last month and got the same feeling. Nevertheless a five star rating is the least you can give to such a wonderful read.



Kafka Gets Private-eyesed, 29 Oct 2007
Where Kafka's characters find themselves being frustrated and circumscribed by a system (The Castle & The Trial etc), in Auster's world (New York) this task, it seems, has been privatised and has become the job of private detectives, or those hiring them. It's a very strange world and just as in the narrative where, you can't decide who's following who, the reader (in my case) couldn't decide, whether I was reading the author or the author was reading me. As nothing remarkable continues to happen, throughout the book, there emerges a strange feeling that something is being implied about the reader's identity: that we become the thing we pursue.

I am not sure what 'modern' means when it is applied to other art-forms but from this I would gather that it means, when applied to a novel, a form where something is going on in the relationship between the narrator and the reader which is independent of the actual narrative. So a simple story about one human simply observing another, begins to suggest uncomfortable questions about the reader's relationship with other people and how that relationship cannot but form identity. At times in the depths of these stories, there seems to be some kind of hidden koan at work on the problem of individual identity: this can be slightly disconcerting.

It is a very strange reading experience, which some will find slightly unpleasant or simply bewildering, but as a psychological experiment it really is fascinating.

So, I wouldn't recommend it to everyone but for those willing to try out a rather different sort of reading experience, it is well worth a try.


Intriguing but Unfulfilling , 25 Sep 2007
First and foremost this is not a trilogy in the conventional sense. It is not one story told across three episodes but rather three separate stories which follow the same loose theme. This basic similarity, along with a couple of duel appearances of minor characters leads to the three plots being labelled as 'inter-connected' - this is simply misleading. The book can be better described as a collection of short stories.

There is no doubt that Paul Auster is a talented author and the three plots have great potential. The problem arises when he sacrifices complexity and culmination of the plot in favour of a psychoanalytical exploration of his characters. What results is a largely uneventful time period with long swathes of writing about how the character is feeling and why. The endings are ambiguous and rarely answer the main questions posed in the early stages of each story. You get the sense that Auster is attempting to write a literary classic when the book is much better suited to a good old-fashioned detective story.

One of the main drawbacks is reality. There are things the characters do (or don't do) that would never happen but which are pivotal to the story. Furthermore the main characters in each story all go through a sort of breakdown, the causes for which are totally unrealistic. This implausibility left me with the impression that Auster only created the plot as a stage for his 'monologues' on theology and mentality, and as such was not overly concerned about them. Indeed his writing is far more eloquent in those parts.

There are positive aspects which is why I gave this book three stars. It is very well written and there are intriguing nuances such as including himself as a character in one story, and naming the characters as colours in another! The plot foundations are exciting even though the execution is mundane, and the fate of the characters at the end has a powerful effect on the reader.

The New York Trilogy is a unique book, and will probably be adored by people who don't need definitive endings, or who enjoy delving into issues of identity and morality. However, I was looking for a good detective story, and what I found was unrealistic, unfulfilling, and rather waffling!

Really enjoyable but not the usual standard, 28 Aug 2008

I came to 'The Brooklyn Follies' after reading 'The Book of Illusions' and 'The Music of Chance.' If you are looking for a similiar experience you have come to the wrong place. The characters while engaging and well written, especially Tom, do not have the same depth or pathos of other Auster narratives. The story is decidedly 'heart warming' and while there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, the solutions Nathan presents to life's problem's are, at times, a little one dimensional and contrived. I also agree with other reviewers that the use of 9/11 was a little clumsy.
Having said all this, I did still very much enjoy this book as Auster is an accomplished, interesting and engaging writer who does raise interesting questions and themes about modern life. As a stand alone book it is still good but it doesn't compare to 'The Book of Illusions' or 'The Music of Chance' for me.

brilliant, 13 Apr 2008
It was my third book by Auster and I absolutely loved it. It's vibrant, the language is funny and moving. I loved the literary stories within about Kafka, Poe and Thoreau and many others. It's an optimistic novel about people who want to make their lives worthwile. It shows the beauty of every day and it did make me feel great.
Read it and enjoy!

Not a bad way to pass the time of day, 06 Jun 2007
This was my first Paul Auster book and I did enjoy his style and the general storyline did hold my attention. It does feel a little like a soap opera, the characters are sympathetic as they battle with their modern day issues in Brooklyn. Nathan is a believable narrator with many faults as well as strengths as the storyline ambled along. I did not think there was anything outstanding about it though and the story is relatively tame and gentle except of course for the last paragraph or so. I can see what Auster was trying to do with bring Sept 11th into the book but I don't think it worked. It did show the arbitrary nature of such a dramatic event overshadowing people's lives but I think he needed to write a bit more about it. I wouldn't rush to read another Auster but find it hard to criticise this book too much.

Surprisingly Accessible Auster, 02 Jun 2007
The first Auster I read was New York Stories which absolutely blew me away. By comparison this is a much lesser book and has a number of weaknesses. The characters are somewhat 2D, especially Rory and David, and all of the plot lines tie up too easily. However, I came to this from reading a number of down beat, "real life" novels, and it really cheered me up, I definitely enjoyed it. So, if you are looking for great literature, don't bother. If you are looking for a life affirming, up beat book, thoroughly recommended

Don't read the reviews, read the book, andmake your own mind up!, 08 May 2007
I have read a few of Austers books, and especially enjoyed The New York Trilogy, to which this book vaguely references. Where NYT was riddled in historical and litterary references,and an obsession with the ontological foundation of language, The Brooklyn Follies is altogether more accessible.

It made me happy, it made me laugh, it made me sad, it almost made me sick, and at several points it made me jump out of my skin as if something great had been revieled to me...

The story is good, but Auster uses the story as a vessel to reveal things greater than the story itself.

[...]
In my opinion, it's a great book. One of the best I've read.

Scaling the dizzy heights? (8/10), 16 Nov 2008
It's impossible to write about Paul Auster's Mr Vertigo and completely avoid the dreaded term `Magic Realism' - even if it's a genre the writer is not commonly associated with. The fact that the novel centres around a street urchin taught how to fly by a Hungarian showman named Master Yehudi should ensure all haters of that genre keep their distance. However, it's all in the telling, and Auster infuses his novel with a page-turning, fairy-tale magic with none of the prissiness and pretention that often mars revisionistic approaches to the form. If, like Henry Perowne of Ian McEwan's `Saturday`, you find the focus on "the supernatural" as "the recourse of an insufficient imagination ... an evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real", then you might not want to touch this novel. "When anything can happen, nothing much matters," Perowne grumbles, and I can see his point - it's a whinge I often direct at CGI-saturated modern cinema. Obviously we don't read novels or watch films solely to see reality reflected back at us, but I agree that it is immensely disengaging to feel, when reading a novel, that anything at all can happen. The rules governing a novel or film's imaginative universe - however fantastical - must be respected. Events should be at least believable within the logic of the make-beleive world in which they occur.

Clearly, to suggest that `Mr Vertigo''s author has "insufficient imagination" is patently ridiculous. If "learning to fly became a metaphor for bold aspiration" (Perowne again), then Auster doesn't labour over the point. `Mr Vertigo''s beauty is that - while epic in scope and with all the vivid expansiveness of a Pinocchio or Gulliver's Travels - he pulls it off with trademark lightness of touch, with humour and irony, but without sacrificing the emotional gravity that makes such yarns so affecting. Written in the hilarious vernacular of a wise-cracking street kid from St. Louis, Mr Vertigo finds its protagonist suffering (but by turns also rather enjoying) the slings and arrows of American fortune: from The Depression and The Klu Klux Klan, from Baseball to the Prohibition and the Chicago mob.

Labelling such a fable a journey into the heart the American Dream is a lazy critical cliche - but if the novel is really a fable about the "bold aspiration" of The Dream, then it's a refreshingly, fittingly positive spin on that journey. Where many US novelists have endeavoured to reveal the dark side of American aspirationalism, `Mr Vertigo''s narrative evokes the dizzying, exhilirating sense of freedom that The Dream once represented. The novel toys with various rags to riches myths that have had resonance in American popular culture: a boy with superhuman powers, a lovable gangster, a baseball star. What is most impressive, though, is how Auster makes his cultural-historic connections without the reader really noticing: the story itself is so much fun we forget about the layers of allegory and parody beneath.


That's what I call a novel, 29 Oct 2008
I loved reading this book. It is unpretentious. The plot is original, the characters extremely likeable and it is very well written. It almost felt like a story being read to me. It took me on a journey and not many novels can do that.

Magic from Master Auster!, 14 Oct 2008
Mr Vertigo is a wonderful picaresque tale of the rise to fame - and the subsequent decline - of Walt Rawley, "ragamuffin, from honky-tonk row", unwanted by his charge Uncle Slim. Walt's world is transformed beyond belief when a mysterious stranger, Master Yehudi, makes him an extraordinary offer: to teach him to fly.

Under the fierce discipline of Master Yehudi, Walt is subjected to a harsh regimen of rigorous training, a series of gruelling endurance ordeals, each trial marking a step towards his ultimate goal of mastering the art of levitation, walking on air. Technique perfected, Walt goes on the road with Master Yehudi, on tour across America, dazzling audiences coast-to-coast with his amazing displays of "anti-gravitational feats" that, though implausible, are convincing in their description and detail - and marvellously entertaining! Auster elucidates the mystifying technique of levitating so smoothly and plausibly that we are ready to suspend our disbelief and slip easily into the world he creates. Public acclaim turns Walt into a national celebrity: known as "Walt the Wonder Boy", he is now the master of his art.

Walt's powerful narrative, recalling in old-age events that took place many decades before, takes us on a fast-paced trip through 1920's Americana - Lindberg's solo flight, to cite but one example. Walt's astounding breakthrough feat of levitating over a small pond in Kansas (at precisely the same time as Lindberg's historic flight across the Atlantic) is a metaphor for American spirit and enterprise heralding an age where there are no limits to what may be achieved. ("It was as if the sky had suddenly opened itself up to man") On the road to stardom, Walt runs into trouble involving a Ku-Klux-Kan lynching and a kidnapping by mean-and-nasty Uncle Slim who, rankled by Walt's astonishing success, hankers after a slice of the rich pickings he thinks Walt is raking in following his new-found celebrity status.

The latter part of the novel marks a dramatic downward shift in Walt's fortunes. At the height of his powers, Walt is suddenly brought down to earth, his world spiralling downwards from the fabulous to the criminal to the mundane, gradually fading into the obscurity of a humdrum existence far removed from those heady, intoxicating days when he was "an unstoppable force" taking America by storm. Alone, moving into old-age, Walt is rescued by the sudden idea of writing his story - this book. Go with the flow! Enjoy the trip! Magic from Master Auster! Highly recommended!

What can I say?... Simply wonderful., 05 Jan 2008
One of the best books I have ever read. The first line instantly grabs you into the story: "I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water" This book took my imagination beyond reality, with eccentric, yet totally believable characters. Highly recommended.

A rare theme very skillfully narrated, 19 Nov 2007
Before reading Mr. Vertigo I had already enjoyed reading Auster's "Moon Palace" and "The New York Trilogy". What encouraged me to continue reading Auster's novels is his mesmerizing narration and the carefully-crafted plot where characters appear, vanish and reappear at unexpected intervals.
Auster managed once again to make me defer other (more pressing) issues of my everyday life in order to find out what happens to Walt, Master Yehudi, and Mrs W. I honestly found it very difficult to put the book down.
Highly recommended!

'The weird world rolls on' ------some spoilers------, 29 Nov 2008
`I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle though another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.'

Man in the Dark opens with August Brill, a Pulitzer prize winning critic, lying in the pitch black as he recovers from a car accident in his daughter's house. Grandfather, daughter Miriam and granddaughter Katya share the house since the `the roof fell in on Katya' and she dropped out of film school.

Brill tells himself stories as he lies awake - he wants to divert his mind from his worries; the death of his wife, of his granddaughter's boyfriend Titus, of his daughter's failed marriage. He and his granddaughter Katya have been spending their time watching films together, conscious displacement activity to avoid thinking about their lives.

In the alternate world he conjures up an alter ego - Owen Brick wakes up in a deep hole dressed in uniform. It's a world where the twin towers were never bombed. Instead of a war in Iraq the disputed US election of 2000 has led to a civil war in America. Throughout the night Brill alternates between the worlds until he abandons Brick to his American wilderness `with no chance to say a last word or think a last thought'. Brick then starts to confront the list of subjects he told us he was avoiding; his wife Sonia, the shocking story of Titus' death and his worries about his daughter. Then he and Katya have a long insomniac conversation on the same topics.

For me, the characters became more and more sympathetic as we gradually learn more of their back stories and see their connection to each other. Auster's themes of stories within stories, war and writing knit together well in this short novel.

The book covers just one wakeful night and ends with a plan for going out to breakfast - a hopeful end to a thoughtful book which challenges us to confront our thoughts about our weird world.


Lazy, 28 Oct 2008
Auster never writes badly, but this is a lazy lazy book. The first half is an ambling, pointless collection of stories that go nowhere. It's like he's shoehorned bits of writing in from elsewhere and no editor has said "hang on, what's the point of this?" The conceit of the novel that here is a man creating a dream/story to keep him from thinking of terrible memories runs out of steam very quickly and Auster seems to just end it abruptly when it's clear it's a blind alley. The idea that he somehow creates an alternative reality, a world without the 9/11 attacks is nonsense. Towards the end of the book that are flashes of quite moving and affective prose, but that's not much to say for a very disappointing book.

A collection of anecdotes, 27 Sep 2008
Marginally better than his last, but this colection of bits and pieces, and a semi-novel that he appears to have got bored with, just add to the impression that Paul Auster has really lost his way, or can't be bothered any more, which is a real shame.

The set up is interesting. The narrator is a 70 year old who is spinning stories to himself at night because he can't sleep. One of these stories concerns an alternative America where 9/11 never happened and there is a civil war instead. This scenario makes up the novel-within-the-novel, and we're instroduced to its characters, one of whom is given the task of killing the alternative world's creator - the narrator.

This might have been interesting, but it's really a device for Auster to play with SF ideas of alternate universes and histories. Dozens of hack SF writers have done this, and better. It's an irrelevance, there to pad out what is a very very slim story indeed.

Even this story, slim as it is, is padded out with irrelevancies, anecdotes from some of the characters, background data that would be fine if it were his synopsis or notes for a novel, but very annoying that it's sold as the novel itself.

Then we have the conclusion, the interminable dialogue (done in that horribly trendy no-speech-marks style) between the narrator and his grand daughter, all building up to the novel's horrific conclusion. Which demonstrates - what? The irrelevance of fiction itself? That would explain the pointless novel-within-the-novel. Or just that Paul Auster has now resorted to throwing a few ideas together and calling it a novel.

This might sound harsh, but Paul Auster has produced so many fine novels that have engrossed me for days and lingered in my mind long afterwards that it's very disappointing to read the skimpy fare of his last two books. I always buy him in hardback, but this might be the last time.

Auster losing his direction..., 07 Sep 2008
The last few offerings from the once brilliant Paul Auster suggest an author who has (hopefully temporarily) lost his way. If we had read Man In The Dark by an unknown, then it would be filed away as mildly interesting but showing some real flashes of brilliance. That the author is Auster can`t fail to disappoint. We realise that Auster has a story to tell here and many important points to be made, but the lasting impression is nothing more than a somewhat shmaltzy sentimental filler. The reminiscing between grandfather and granddaughter that concludes the novel is excrutiatingly out of place in an Auster book and one can only hope that the author re-discovers his former superb standard in the coming years.
Auster knows he`s good....and the book is written in my opinion with the view that his fans will welcome and drool over anything that he cares to submit.
Not this one !

Short, simple, but profoundly moving, 01 Sep 2008
Whether through its shortness of length or through the familiarity with typical Paul Auster subject matter, there seems to be a tendency in other reviews here so far to underestimate the true worth of the author's latest novel. Man in the Dark may indeed appear short and simple on the surface, but the importance of its subject matter and the emotional depth it covers is nonetheless remarkable.

Through August Brill, the man in the dark, Auster tries to make sense of the world through the medium of the writer spinning ideas in his head. Yes, that's nothing new with Auster and there's certainly a sense of post-modern reflection on the nature of writing and the duty of the writer, but as with Brooklyn Follies and his collection of True Tales Of American Life, Auster is interested in ordinary people and the impact of the exceptional or significant moments on their lives.

Those significant events affecting American people today are alluded to in the book's references to Iraq and the Twin Towers. It's not Auster's intention to confront such grand events, however significant they might seem, but to reduce them to the smaller scale in considering how people learn to deal with such experiences. That does not make Man In The Dark a lesser work. Through memories, shared experiences of joy and suffering, through the fictions they create and the movies they watch, his characters struggle to make sense of an absurd world ever more inclined to bring new unspeakable horrors. Auster masterfully brings these all together into a profoundly moving piece that is richer in meaning and worth than its apparent brevity suggests.

Read again!, 05 Jun 2008
My short recommendation is that as soon as I finished this book I wanted to turn back to the first page and read it again. I suspect you keep drawing new things from it the more times you read it. Just like listening to very good music...

painless way into postmodernist metafiction, 06 Feb 2008
This is a series of subtle interlocking novellas set in New York published over 85 and 86: City of Glass, "Ghosts" and "Locked Room with the first set in the period, the 2nd in the 40's and the last one in the 70's. They use mystery conventions of the gumshoe detective (think Humphrey Bogart) but in a subversive way as an existentialist reflection on writing, and story creation and communication but at the pace of a thriller; it more Kafka then Chandler with haunting imagery and surreal coincidences. But it also has deep emotional and psychological depths.

To give you a flavour of the book, in the City of Glass the main Character is Daniel Quinn a writer who has abandoned writing except for mystery writing owing to the death of his wife and child. He is successful enough to only need to write one novel a year which he has just done and then he drifts. He is clearly depressed and only feels alive when he is the private eye of his novels. One night he receives a midnight phone call asking for a detective called Paul Auster( yes the real author is also a later character in the story) and after several rejections he decides to act as if were his private eye character. His clients are a child-man who is a survivor of a dreadful abuse by his father (he was deprived of language as part of an experiment in discovering the natural language of man before the fall of the Tower of Babel) and his wife a nurse who had married him so that he could leave the hospital. The father now elderly is being released from Mental hospital and they fear that the son will be killed and want protection.

The story then takes many twists and turns and ends with the author as character being criticised by a final narrator who may be one of the characters from the other stories for what happens to Daniel Quinn during the course of the story.

In the Locked Room all the characters are named after colours and it's a classical stake-out story but is it? Or is it a reflection on the lives of characters once that have been created and written about?

The final story is of two friends who have drifted apart, one wanted to be a writer and is now a critic unable to create works of his own imagination. He discovers that his friend has disappeared leaving a wife and baby and a locked room of manuscripts. These turn out to be masterpieces of novels, plays, and poems far beyond his capability of writing. In preparing those for publishing he re-enters and re-evaluates his life long friendship and what it meant but at a cost as he faces a secret that tests him and his relationships to destruction.

Paul Auster's draws on his own colourful work life in his struggle to become a writer so the stories have a grain of gritty realism. But they are interlinked by an interest in the impact of coincidences and lives lived in minimalist even ascetic ways against a background of a loss, failure and absent fathers and reflections on writing and storytelling. If you want a painless way into postmodernist metafiction then this is the book for you. Highly recommended


Very Different, 04 Feb 2008
Two things I have got out of reading this book. First, this author must be one of the best in breaking down complex characters and take the plot where you don't expect it to go. Second, he never finishes the story, at least not in a normal way. I read his book "Travels in the scriptorium" last month and got the same feeling. Nevertheless a five star rating is the least you can give to such a wonderful read.



Kafka Gets Private-eyesed, 29 Oct 2007
Where Kafka's characters find themselves being frustrated and circumscribed by a system (The Castle & The Trial etc), in Auster's world (New York) this task, it seems, has been privatised and has become the job of private detectives, or those hiring them. It's a very strange world and just as in the narrative where, you can't decide who's following who, the reader (in my case) couldn't decide, whether I was reading the author or the author was reading me. As nothing remarkable continues to happen, throughout the book, there emerges a strange feeling that something is being implied about the reader's identity: that we become the thing we pursue.

I am not sure what 'modern' means when it is applied to other art-forms but from this I would gather that it means, when applied to a novel, a form where something is going on in the relationship between the narrator and the reader which is independent of the actual narrative. So a simple story about one human simply observing another, begins to suggest uncomfortable questions about the reader's relationship with other people and how that relationship cannot but form identity. At times in the depths of these stories, there seems to be some kind of hidden koan at work on the problem of individual identity: this can be slightly disconcerting.

It is a very strange reading experience, which some will find slightly unpleasant or simply bewildering, but as a psychological experiment it really is fascinating.

So, I wouldn't recommend it to everyone but for those willing to try out a rather different sort of reading experience, it is well worth a try.


Intriguing but Unfulfilling , 25 Sep 2007
First and foremost this is not a trilogy in the conventional sense. It is not one story told across three episodes but rather three separate stories which follow the same loose theme. This basic similarity, along with a couple of duel appearances of minor characters leads to the three plots being labelled as 'inter-connected' - this is simply misleading. The book can be better described as a collection of short stories.

There is no doubt that Paul Auster is a talented author and the three plots have great potential. The problem arises when he sacrifices complexity and culmination of the plot in favour of a psychoanalytical exploration of his characters. What results is a largely uneventful time period with long swathes of writing about how the character is feeling and why. The endings are ambiguous and rarely answer the main questions posed in the early stages of each story. You get the sense that Auster is attempting to write a literary classic when the book is much better suited to a good old-fashioned detective story.

One of the main drawbacks is reality. There are things the characters do (or don't do) that would never happen but which are pivotal to the story. Furthermore the main characters in each story all go through a sort of breakdown, the causes for which are totally unrealistic. This implausibility left me with the impression that Auster only created the plot as a stage for his 'monologues' on theology and mentality, and as such was not overly concerned about them. Indeed his writing is far more eloquent in those parts.

There are positive aspects which is why I gave this book three stars. It is very well written and there are intriguing nuances such as including himself as a character in one story, and naming the characters as colours in another! The plot foundations are exciting even though the execution is mundane, and the fate of the characters at the end has a powerful effect on the reader.

The New York Trilogy is a unique book, and will probably be adored by people who don't need definitive endings, or who enjoy delving into issues of identity and morality. However, I was looking for a good detective story, and what I found was unrealistic, unfulfilling, and rather waffling!

Really enjoyable but not the usual standard, 28 Aug 2008

I came to 'The Brooklyn Follies' after reading 'The Book of Illusions' and 'The Music of Chance.' If you are looking for a similiar experience you have come to the wrong place. The characters while engaging and well written, especially Tom, do not have the same depth or pathos of other Auster narratives. The story is decidedly 'heart warming' and while there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, the solutions Nathan presents to life's problem's are, at times, a little one dimensional and contrived. I also agree with other reviewers that the use of 9/11 was a little clumsy.
Having said all this, I did still very much enjoy this book as Auster is an accomplished, interesting and engaging writer who does raise interesting questions and themes about modern life. As a stand alone book it is still good but it doesn't compare to 'The Book of Illusions' or 'The Music of Chance' for me.

brilliant, 13 Apr 2008
It was my third book by Auster and I absolutely loved it. It's vibrant, the language is funny and moving. I loved the literary stories within about Kafka, Poe and Thoreau and many others. It's an optimistic novel about people who want to make their lives worthwile. It shows the beauty of every day and it did make me feel great.
Read it and enjoy!

Not a bad way to pass the time of day, 06 Jun 2007
This was my first Paul Auster book and I did enjoy his style and the general storyline did hold my attention. It does feel a little like a soap opera, the characters are sympathetic as they battle with their modern day issues in Brooklyn. Nathan is a believable narrator with many faults as well as strengths as the storyline ambled along. I did not think there was anything outstanding about it though and the story is relatively tame and gentle except of course for the last paragraph or so. I can see what Auster was trying to do with bring Sept 11th into the book but I don't think it worked. It did show the arbitrary nature of such a dramatic event overshadowing people's lives but I think he needed to write a bit more about it. I wouldn't rush to read another Auster but find it hard to criticise this book too much.

Surprisingly Accessible Auster, 02 Jun 2007
The first Auster I read was New York Stories which absolutely blew me away. By comparison this is a much lesser book and has a number of weaknesses. The characters are somewhat 2D, especially Rory and David, and all of the plot lines tie up too easily. However, I came to this from reading a number of down beat, "real life" novels, and it really cheered me up, I definitely enjoyed it. So, if you are looking for great literature, don't bother. If you are looking for a life affirming, up beat book, thoroughly recommended

Don't read the reviews, read the book, andmake your own mind up!, 08 May 2007
I have read a few of Austers books, and especially enjoyed The New York Trilogy, to which this book vaguely references. Where NYT was riddled in historical and litterary references,and an obsession with the ontological foundation of language, The Brooklyn Follies is altogether more accessible.

It made me happy, it made me laugh, it made me sad, it almost made me sick, and at several points it made me jump out of my skin as if something great had been revieled to me...

The story is good, but Auster uses the story as a vessel to reveal things greater than the story itself.

[...]
In my opinion, it's a great book. One of the best I've read.

Scaling the dizzy heights? (8/10), 16 Nov 2008
It's impossible to write about Paul Auster's Mr Vertigo and completely avoid the dreaded term `Magic Realism' - even if it's a genre the writer is not commonly associated with. The fact that the novel centres around a street urchin taught how to fly by a Hungarian showman named Master Yehudi should ensure all haters of that genre keep their distance. However, it's all in the telling, and Auster infuses his novel with a page-turning, fairy-tale magic with none of the prissiness and pretention that often mars revisionistic approaches to the form. If, like Henry Perowne of Ian McEwan's `Saturday`, you find the focus on "the supernatural" as "the recourse of an insufficient imagination ... an evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real", then you might not want to touch this novel. "When anything can happen, nothing much matters," Perowne grumbles, and I can see his point - it's a whinge I often direct at CGI-saturated modern cinema. Obviously we don't read novels or watch films solely to see reality reflected back at us, but I agree that it is immensely disengaging to feel, when reading a novel, that anything at all can happen. The rules governing a novel or film's imaginative universe - however fantastical - must be respected. Events should be at least believable within the logic of the make-beleive world in which they occur.

Clearly, to suggest that `Mr Vertigo''s author has "insufficient imagination" is patently ridiculous. If "learning to fly became a metaphor for bold aspiration" (Perowne again), then Auster doesn't labour over the point. `Mr Vertigo''s beauty is that - while epic in scope and with all the vivid expansiveness of a Pinocchio or Gulliver's Travels - he pulls it off with trademark lightness of touch, with humour and irony, but without sacrificing the emotional gravity that makes such yarns so affecting. Written in the hilarious vernacular of a wise-cracking street kid from St. Louis, Mr Vertigo finds its protagonist suffering (but by turns also rather enjoying) the slings and arrows of American fortune: from The Depression and The Klu Klux Klan, from Baseball to the Prohibition and the Chicago mob.

Labelling such a fable a journey into the heart the American Dream is a lazy critical cliche - but if the novel is really a fable about the "bold aspiration" of The Dream, then it's a refreshingly, fittingly positive spin on that journey. Where many US novelists have endeavoured to reveal the dark side of American aspirationalism, `Mr Vertigo''s narrative evokes the dizzying, exhilirating sense of freedom that The Dream once represented. The novel toys with various rags to riches myths that have had resonance in American popular culture: a boy with superhuman powers, a lovable gangster, a baseball star. What is most impressive, though, is how Auster makes his cultural-historic connections without the reader really noticing: the story itself is so much fun we forget about the layers of allegory and parody beneath.


That's what I call a novel, 29 Oct 2008
I loved reading this book. It is unpretentious. The plot is original, the characters extremely likeable and it is very well written. It almost felt like a story being read to me. It took me on a journey and not many novels can do that.

Magic from Master Auster!, 14 Oct 2008
Mr Vertigo is a wonderful picaresque tale of the rise to fame - and the subsequent decline - of Walt Rawley, "ragamuffin, from honky-tonk row", unwanted by his charge Uncle Slim. Walt's world is transformed beyond belief when a mysterious stranger, Master Yehudi, makes him an extraordinary offer: to teach him to fly.

Under the fierce discipline of Master Yehudi, Walt is subjected to a harsh regimen of rigorous training, a series of gruelling endurance ordeals, each trial marking a step towards his ultimate goal of mastering the art of levitation, walking on air. Technique perfected, Walt goes on the road with Master Yehudi, on tour across America, dazzling audiences coast-to-coast with his amazing displays of "anti-gravitational feats" that, though implausible, are convincing in their description and detail - and marvellously entertaining! Auster elucidates the mystifying technique of levitating so smoothly and plausibly that we are ready to suspend our disbelief and slip easily into the world he creates. Public acclaim turns Walt into a national celebrity: known as "Walt the Wonder Boy", he is now the master of his art.

Walt's powerful narrative, recalling in old-age events that took place many decades before, takes us on a fast-paced trip through 1920's Americana - Lindberg's solo flight, to cite but one example. Walt's astounding breakthrough feat of levitating over a small pond in Kansas (at precisely the same time as Lindberg's historic flight across the Atlantic) is a metaphor for American spirit and enterprise heralding an age where there are no limits to what may be achieved. ("It was as if the sky had suddenly opened itself up to man") On the road to stardom, Walt runs into trouble involving a Ku-Klux-Kan lynching and a kidnapping by mean-and-nasty Uncle Slim who, rankled by Walt's astonishing success, hankers after a slice of the rich pickings he thinks Walt is raking in following his new-found celebrity status.

The latter part of the novel marks a dramatic downward shift in Walt's fortunes. At the height of his powers, Walt is suddenly brought down to earth, his world spiralling downwards from the fabulous to the criminal to the mundane, gradually fading into the obscurity of a humdrum existence far removed from those heady, intoxicating days when he was "an unstoppable force" taking America by storm. Alone, moving into old-age, Walt is rescued by the sudden idea of writing his story - this book. Go with the flow! Enjoy the trip! Magic from Master Auster! Highly recommended!

What can I say?... Simply wonderful., 05 Jan 2008
One of the best books I have ever read. The first line instantly grabs you into the story: "I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water" This book took my imagination beyond reality, with eccentric, yet totally believable characters. Highly recommended.

A rare theme very skillfully narrated, 19 Nov 2007
Before reading Mr. Vertigo I had already enjoyed reading Auster's "Moon Palace" and "The New York Trilogy". What encouraged me to continue reading Auster's novels is his mesmerizing narration and the carefully-crafted plot where characters appear, vanish and reappear at unexpected intervals.
Auster managed once again to make me defer other (more pressing) issues of my everyday life in order to find out what happens to Walt, Master Yehudi, and Mrs W. I honestly found it very difficult to put the book down.
Highly recommended!

Moon Palace, 12 Feb 2008
This is the first Paul Auster novel I have read. It took me a while to get into it, the first 20 pages or so were difficult to absorb but then I couldn't put it down. I love his style of story telling and shall definately read more of his.

I always keep a copy within easy reach, 30 Dec 2007
I have been a big Auster fan for some time - even wrote my MA's thesis on one of his opus.

Moon Palace is the one book that I am drawn to on a regular basis. I read it regularly and have found myself the owner of various editions in different languages.

A coming of age story, full of sadness and joy, I recommend it regularly.

Most readers tend to refer to the NY Trilogy, while commonalities of themes are definite, I would tend to draw a line between these and consider them as separate entities.


Captivating, 04 Dec 2006
I have just read the various reviews of 'Moon Palace' present here om Amazon.co.uk, and I must admit that it surprises me to see that the book has got so bad grades as it has.

'Moon Palace' is to me, a guy in his early twenties with limited knowledge on the theories of post-modern literature and what not, so I can only tell you what I got out of it.

The book is to me a great story of coincidences and how some people continue to choose paths that seems wrong to you, but makes perfect sense to the protagonist. M.S. Fogg, the protagonist, is a person that you do not really know whether you like or not, but given his sad childhood with an absent father and a mother that dies tragically, maybe it is not so difficult to understand why Fogg does what he does.

As in all Auster books, Auster creates a really great background story to all the characters, describing them so lively that you are convinced they must have been real persons. Both Thomas Effing, Kitty Wu, Solomon Barber and Miss Hume are presented really well, and whereas the protagonist sort of becomes a character a background, all the other steal the picture quite well.

How Mr Auster creates these stories I do not know, but it is certain that I will have read each and every one of them before long.

One of the authors best books!, 07 Jul 2006
I totally disagree with the negative critics of "Moon Palace". The NY trilogy is a great work, however, this is in my opinion a very moving and touching story. "Moon Palace", "Mr. Vertigo" and "The Book of Illusions" are books I will always remember and definitely re-read. Books like "Timbuktu", "The Brooklyn Follies" and "Oracle Night" did not have the same emotional or "metaphysical" impact on me as a reader, but "Moon Palace" certainly did.
Weather you are going to like it or not depend entirely on YOU. Reading the reviews above clearly demonstrates this!

Being a great fan of Paul Auster, I have enjoyed all his books and been very fortunate to read some of them in Danish before they were published in English. Thank you Mr. Auster!!!


Second rate, 26 Feb 2005
I can't tell you how disappointed I was with this book. I rate Auster as one of the West's finest contemporary authors, and, like many others, rate New York Trilogy extremely highly. I'm also fond of many of his other books - The Country Of Last Things is especially good - but found this text to be too needy and too desperate to fall in line with the rest of his work.

This is in no way a 'bad' book, but is certainly not Auster at his best. And while I agree that it is a completely separate work from New York Trilogy, one can't help making comparisons. I think the main problem with Moon Palace is that it tries too hard to fit into the contemporary postmodern genre, and as such emerges as not so much as a postmodern classic but as formulaeic 'airport literature'.

If you want to read second-rate postmodern literature, then good news, this book is for you. If you want to read the REAL stuff, Thomas Pynchon is your man. Despite this, Paul Auster is an important literary talent, and if you're looking for a good read, grab one of his other texts and you won't go far wrong - if you haven't read New York Trilogy, shame on you, go and buy it now!

'The weird world rolls on' ------some spoilers------, 29 Nov 2008
`I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle though another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.'

Man in the Dark opens with August Brill, a Pulitzer prize winning critic, lying in the pitch black as he recovers from a car accident in his daughter's house. Grandfather, daughter Miriam and granddaughter Katya share the house since the `the roof fell in on Katya' and she dropped out of film school.

Brill tells himself stories as he lies awake - he wants to divert his mind from his worries; the death of his wife, of his granddaughter's boyfriend Titus, of his daughter's failed marriage. He and his granddaughter Katya have been spending their time watching films together, conscious displacement activity to avoid thinking about their lives.

In the alternate world he conjures up an alter ego - Owen Brick wakes up in a deep hole dressed in uniform. It's a world where the twin towers were never bombed. Instead of a war in Iraq the disputed US election of 2000 has led to a civil war in America. Throughout the night Brill alternates between the worlds until he abandons Brick to his American wilderness `with no chance to say a last word or think a last thought'. Brick then starts to confront the list of subjects he told us he was avoiding; his wife Sonia, the shocking story of Titus' death and his worries about his daughter. Then he and Katya have a long insomniac conversation on the same topics.

For me, the characters became more and more sympathetic as we gradually learn more of their back stories and see their connection to each other. Auster's themes of stories within stories, war and writing knit together well in this short novel.

The book covers just one wakeful night and ends with a plan for going out to breakfast - a hopeful end to a thoughtful book which challenges us to confront our thoughts about our weird world.


Lazy, 28 Oct 2008
Auster never writes badly, but this is a lazy lazy book. The first half is an ambling, pointless collection of stories that go nowhere. It's like he's shoehorned bits of writing in from elsewhere and no editor has said "hang on, what's the point of this?" The conceit of the novel that here is a man creating a dream/story to keep him from thinking of terrible memories runs out of steam very quickly and Auster seems to just end it abruptly when it's clear it's a blind alley. The idea that he somehow creates an alternative reality, a world without the 9/11 attacks is nonsense. Towards the end of the book that are flashes of quite moving and affective prose, but that's not much to say for a very disappointing book.

A collection of anecdotes, 27 Sep 2008
Marginally better than his last, but this colection of bits and pieces, and a semi-novel that he appears to have got bored with, just add to the impression that Paul Auster has really lost his way, or can't be bothered any more, which is a real shame.

The set up is interesting. The narrator is a 70 year old who is spinning stories to himself at night because he can't sleep. One of these stories concerns an alternative America where 9/11 never happened and there is a civil war instead. This scenario makes up the novel-within-the-novel, and we're instroduced to its characters, one of whom is given the task of killing the alternative world's creator - the narrator.

This might have been interesting, but it's really a device for A