Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and puzzling events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.
Why does his wife suddenly break down in tears in the backseat of a taxi just hours after Sidney begins writing in the notebook? Why does M. R. Chang, the owner of the stationery shop, precipitously close his business the next day? What are the connections between a 1938 Warsaw telephone directory and a lost novel in which the hero can predict the future? At what point does animosity explode into violence? To what degree is forgiveness the ultimate expression of love?
Paul Auster’s mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book—only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. At once a meditation on the nature of time and a journey through the labyrinth of one man’s imagination, Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster’s reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today.
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The Obsession With A Blue Notebook
JJ(San Francisco)
My childhood obsession never included dolls or jewels or anything with glitz. Whenever I was in a store, I always made a beeline towards the paper supply counter. I was obsessed with notebooks. Especially those good-looking ones with hard covers, which open to solid white sheets of papers. Well, actually, those notebooks didn’t exist in stores from my childhood. Notebooks belonged to my childhood were made from recycled papers. The paper was yellowish and coarse. Occasionally an old block letter would sneak in, superiorly laughing at the zigzag fibers, the only other remnants of an old newspaper from its previous reincarnation. Before you start thinking I might have grown up in a hippie colony where environmental crazed hippies made notebooks from recycled paper. I should clarify. I grow up in the 70’s China. Recycle was not trendy, but a necessity. The higher quality notebooks had red or blue plastic covers, on which printed famous quotes from Chairman Mao, in gold color.
With that obsession in mind, you might understand now why I was attracted to Paul Auster’s new novel, Oracle Night. I’ve heard Terry Gross interviewing him on NPR and knew the book started with a magical blue notebook. Later I saw it in the bookstore and on amazon. I thought it had the most beautifully designed book jacket’a blue cloth-bound notebook. I was delighted on Saturday when I found an audio book version of it in the library, and Paul Auster himself read it.
I’m on tape 3 right now. There are six tapes total. It surprised me how much I enjoyed it so far. Auster is a writer with superior techniques. In Oracle Night, there are basically three sets of stories going on. Auster’s story is about a writer Sydney, who has just recovered from a serious illness and has just started writing again, in Sydney’s new story, the main character is an editor, who is editing another story. They are like Russian dolls, being placed one inside of another. Unlike Russian dolls, however, one isn’t smaller than its predecessors. They are somehow all inter- related in some mysterious way. He has the ability to keep me engaged in this complicated web of stories and not confusing the three sets of characters in anyway.
I remember my earlier experience with him, and remember his stories being strange but readable. I also remember my not liking it at the end because they were alway......
full review2005-12-07 14:56 | comment
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