- Audio Cassette
- Publisher: Harper; Unabridged edition (Nov 13 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0060589841
- ISBN-13: 978-0060589844
- Product Dimensions: 16.4 x 10.8 x 6.7 cm
- Shipping Weight: 245 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #947,984 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
One morning in September 1982, a struggling novelist recovering from a near-fatal illness purchases, on impulse, a blue notebook from a new store in his Brooklyn neighborhood. So begins Auster's artful, ingenious 12th novel, which is both a darkly suspenseful domestic drama and a moving meditation on chance and loss. Reflecting on a past conversation and armed with his new notebook, Sidney Orr is compelled to write about a man who walks away from his comfortable, staid life after a brush with death a contemporary retelling of the Flitcraft episode in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. Orr's description of his fictional project takes over for a while, but through a framing narrative and a series of long, occasionally digressive footnotes, he teasingly reveals himself, his lovely wife, Grace, and their mutual friend, the famous novelist John Trause. While Orr's hero finds himself locked in a bomb shelter, Grace begins behaving strangely, the stationery shop is shuttered, John's drug-addicted son looms menacingly in the background and the blue notebook exerts a troubling power. The plot of this bizarrely fascinating novel strains credibility, but Auster's unique genius is to make the absurd coherent; his stories have a dreamlike, hallucinatory logic. The title comes from the name of the novel that appears within the story Orr is writing, and hints at the book's theme: that fiction might be at some level prophetic, not merely reflecting reality but shaping it. There is tension, however, between power and impotence: as Orr puts it, "Randomness stalks us every day of our lives, and those lives can be taken from us at any moment for no reason at all."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Auster's approach to storytelling becomes more mystical, more intense, more labyrinthine, and more noir with each novel. Like The Book of Illusions (2002), Auster's newest metaphysical fable portrays a man haunted by the vagaries of memory, the promise of death, the longing to be good. He also lives in fear that his wife will leave him. Struggling to fully recover from a nearly fatal illness, Sidney, a writer living in Brooklyn, is intrigued when a close friend (and a more famous writer) suggests that Sidney write a variation on a Dashiell Hammett tale about a man who abruptly walks away from his life. After purchasing a seemingly enchanted blue notebook (blue has magical and moral connotations for Auster), Sidney begins feverishly writing a dark, fabulously archetypal fairy tale about a book editor named Nick, a rediscovered manuscript of a World War I novel titled Oracle Night in which a British officer is blinded and then cursed with the unbearable gift of prophecy, and Ed Victory, a man on a strange mission in Kansas City. As one spellbinding and provocative storyline leads breathlessly to another, characters and readers alike are lured deep into the maze of the psyche until Auster orchestrates a terrifying denouement that burns away all ambiguity, leaving his hero enraptured by the radiance of what matters most: love. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Another stellar Auster effort,
By
This review is from: Oracle Night: A Novel (Paperback)
Oracle Night continues author Paul Auster's writing style of delivering stories within stories within stories.To whit. The story focuses on novelist Sidney Orr who, while recovering from an illness, purchases a blue notebook. Over the course of a week, the notebook consumes his life. And after a period of inactivity on the writing front, the notebook inspires Orr to start writing/working on a novel again. Of course while he starts work on his new book, other aspects of Orr's life start to swirl around him leading to no end of confusion on his part. In short, I liked this book. I didn't like it as much as some of Auster's other novels, notably The Brooklyn Follies or The New York Trilogy, but I found this novel quite entertaining. I took a vested interest in Sidney Orr and wanted to keep reading the book to find out how it ended. Auster did a good job, in my opinion, of pulling the reader in. My only complaint about the novel is that as part of the story, Auster had his protagonist Orr start writing a story in his blue notebook. The story, I thought, as quite good and I was disappointed that because of certain turns in the novel itself, we never get to learn how the story Orr was writing ends. As a reader, we're left hanging. This minor complaint aside though, I thought Oracle Night as a good book and I recommend it to anyone looking for an entertaining novel to read.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magnificent Work By An Underappreciated Writer,
By
This review is from: Oracle Night: A Novel (Hardcover)
Paul Auster is both one of the best writers around and also one of the most underappreciated. However, he does enjoy a certain cult status with readers who appreciate truly imaginative fiction. The book begins when one Sidney Orr goes out and buys a blue notebook. That does not sound terribly interesting, but its what Orr does with the notebook that makes this book special. Orr writes a novel in the blue notebook purporting to forcast future events. As the novel progresses, it exerts a strange influence on the folks in Orr's life. As the above demonstrates, Oracle Night is a strange work, but its the wonderful writing that makes it hard to put the book down. This is truly a magnificent piece of work.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Gassy, precious, arrogant, and ultimately merely deflated,
By Erica Bell (Washington State) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Oracle Night: A Novel (Hardcover)
A novel about a NYC loft-type writer-guy writing a novel about a NYC writer-gal writing a novel about a guy who can see into the future. Please. It had much promise, too---especially his tale about a man deserting his old life to forge an anonymous one in a new, non- New York city (yes, Virginia, they exist), who, by a circuitous and well-tried route via An Old Black Cab Driver, ends up locking himself in a....well, I won't give it away. It's one of the few bright spots of the book. I don't think Mr. Auster actually meant to be so tired and shopworn. I just don't think that some writers realise that not everyone is enthralled with the NYC Writer-As-Mage image. Of course words have meaning. Of course they have power. In the right hands, they transcend everything human. Not so here. The prose is weirdly stilted and empty of all subtlety. The story meanders around nine days of disjointed happenings, with the writer seeming to shout periodically, "This is Important!" Nope. It's not. Other writers have tackled the city as character, and the writer as shamen---the lilting, dreamlike "Mother London" of Michael Moorcock comes to mind. This weird offering is either too subtle--or too silly---for my poor sensibilities and unfortunately, I don't care enough about the characters to discern which it is.
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