The Book of Illusions: A Novel [Paperback]

 

 

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There were some really gripping bits of this novel. The characters are consitently, coherently drawn, it does a good job slipping back and forth between time and place, and it manages to create suspense and drama from a fairly understated story line. I particularly like the physicality of the descriptions. I really got a sense for what nealry all the characters looked and sounded like. And they all stayed in character - there weren't departures from character to scoot the plot along.

However, it fell short it two fairly glaring areas for me.

1) The romance elements are barely plausible. They struck me as middle-school melodramatic. People sort of pop from indifference into world-shattering love, and stay in puppy-dog devotion until circumstances tear them apart.

2) The attempt to discribe brilliant cinema fell so far short as to be almost comic in its attempt. Writing about visual art is really hard to do, and I respect the ambition of giving it a go here. Any description, even a good one, leaves you with a pretty thin shadow of the real thing, so no fault of Auster's that this is short of compelling. But this particular part of the book goes past the forgivable and into the groan-out-loud bad. Hard to say more without a spoiler here, but let me just say that I'm very glad that Auster is writer and not a film maker.

This was at the low end of a 4 star read for me. Lose the pretention, make the characters as real in their relations to each other as they are in their thoughts and actions, and leave brilliant films to the imagination, and it would have been a really notable read. As it is, its a solidly crafted, middle of the road, enjoyable but forgettable book.

"If someone makes a movie and no one sees it, does the movie exist or not?" This is one of the tantalizing paradoxes which underlie The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster's tenth novel. Auster is consumed with delineating the myriad mirages which the world is made of, the mysteries which consume us and the personal realities which no one else can comprehend.

The narrator of Illusions, David Zimmer, is a man in the throes of grief over the accidental deaths of his wife and sons. While channel surfing one day, he happens upon a film clip of silent film comedian Hector Mann, who had disappeared in 1929 and is considered long-dead. He begins to search out the forgotten films of Mann, eventually publishing a book on the subject, and is floored when he receives a letter inviting him to visit with Mann, who is now a recluse directing films for his own satisfaction.

In past efforts, Auster has veered stylistically from the post-modern mysteries of his New York Trilogy to the Saul Bellow-like personal explorations of Moon Palace and Leviathan. Here, Auster balances his two passions, intertwining a warmly graceful tale of personal loss and redemption with his obsession with stories within stories, coincidences, mirrors, mazes, and masks. As Zimmer tells it, it is "a book of fragments, a compilation of sorrows and half-remembered dreams."

Auster manages an impressive feat within his pages; he creates a written world of celluloid illusions so wonderful, so precise, that one wishes Mann's filmography was not only a myth of Auster's imagination. Zimmer's discourses on Mann's use of facial expressions, slapstick, and melancholy within the silent film framework prove Auster could have a second career as film historian if he so wished.

The illusion of film is not Auster's only quest; it is the illusions that make up the solid universe which ultimately fascinate him. Understanding that the novel itself is an illusion, Auster opts for a stylistic artifice along the lines of his entirely style-driven City of Glass, deliberately luring the reader in with his involving tale, then disassociating the reader with clever statements that draw attention to themselves (for example, a sexual encounter is described as a "spectacle of verbs").

Auster's post-modern sensitivities can alienate the reader to frustration at points; the coincidences in the narrative pile up at a frightening pace. He is aware of this conundrum, explaining that "the truth was that most things made no sense . . . the laws of physics stipulated that every person in the world occupied a certain amount of space - which meant that everyone was necessarily somewhere." It's a neat piece of writing, but it comes across as a cheat, a deus ex machina to hang plot contrivances upon.

However, the ultimate effect of The Book of Illusions is an elegant despondency that never outstays its welcome. Auster fashions a world of loss, of grief, of mourning, rebirth, and betrayal. If, in the end, it is all an illusion, then it is a masterful one.

An unexpected thing happened while reading this book at an airport. An acquaintance remarked: "Are you learning how to do magic tricks?"

The title, as good a place to start as any, in fact carries lots of import in this novel, Paul Auster's eighth. Illusions perhaps alludes to the illusion one has about one's effect on others and the importance of one's work and, in the end, the illusion of life as a whole. Even the word Book could refer to the book that the main persona has written about the work of a mysterious silent filmmaker who vanished, or the book that his eventual love interest writes about the filmmaker's life, or even the journal that the filmmaker keeps.

All in all, The Book of Illusions can provoke a lot of thought if one so chooses. If not, just take it as a skilfully crafted, sympathetically observed, entertaining read.
Auster, thank goodness, has moved on from his little exercise in composition that is his previous novel, Timbuktu. Charming and heartfelt as it is, Timbuktu is just too simple, way below what the author is capable of in terms of understanding and conveying the complexities of human frailty, relation and emotion.

This novel is richly layered and somewhat challenging. There are stories within stories and several techniques used to induce the reader into getting involved in the proceedings and believing they are happening to real people.

There is no conventional protagonist and antagonist - everyone is capable of being both. The one who writes in the first person is Prof David Zimmer (probably named after Auster's son Daniel, and Z as opposed to A for Auster; if you've read his other books, you know the author loves little nods like these).
Like John Irving's stories, many people drop like flies in this novel too. Zimmer's wife and two sons die in a plane crash, leaving him with a fear of flying and a debilitating depression cum death wish. One day, he chances upon silent filmmaker Hector Mann's comedy on television which makes Zimmer laugh for the first time in many months. He decides to study and write about Mann's work - for a reason to get up in the morning. How he finds all of the filmmaker's prints is another pivotal plot point.

However, this Mann is a strange fish who left his house one day and is not heard of again for 50 years, and presumed dead by most.

One day, Zimmer receives a letter from Mann's purported wife, Frieda, asking him to visit the filmmaker in New Mexico. He thinks it's a hoax. Then a woman, Alma, shows up at his house asking him to go to Mann at once as he's at death's door. There is more that happens after he meets Mann and Frieda, deeply involving Alma who has become lovers with Zimmer.

In between we learn of what has happened to the filmmaker in those 50 years as Alma is writing a book about his life. We are also treated to engaging descriptions of a few of his comedies and a feature film he made in New Mexico which is one of the many produced only to be destroyed right after Mann's death as a form of penance for a sin we will not go into here. Okay, if you must know, just before his disappearance, he had inadvertently, gravely wronged someone dear to him and has been punishing himself for it ever since.

Zimmer, in the first half of the book, also takes us through his research which includes clippings and articles about Mann while he was hot in Hollywood. This is one of the tricks authors employ nowadays for the cause of plausibility.

Hector Mann as an Austerian creation is as flawed and passionate and self-loathing as any of his other "players" such as in Leviathan and Moon Palace. Their acute sense of decency and fair play is stretched to the limit by their wrong moves and bad assumptions. Auster seems never afraid to let his persona lapse into the most childish reaction, fall into the deepest despair and do the most wrong thing possible. Also, because of the plot, Auster has allowed himself to go into the description of more sexual activity than in his other novels.

Furthermore, the author has not forsaken his penchant for melodrama, most evident in The Moon Palace, but in The Book of Illusions, it is admirably controlled and well intentioned. If we must further compare this with his previous novels, one can observe that it has less of the moralising tendencies of Mr Vertigo and the out-and-out fatalistic despair of The Music of Chance.

A hardworking reader might want to look out for two things: the motif of a gift and whether there is a good ending or merely a termination of the story as in The New York Trilogy. The gift motif does occur several times but the things that befall the "gifts" are heart-rending and, yes, there is a proper ending which is not totally unexpected.
For all its earnestness, The Book of Illusions is not above a few jibes here and there.

With the World Trade Center tragedy, in overreaction, some say the Irony Age may be over. However, with Auster's naming of a cheap hotel where whores ply their trade and where Mann makes a deal to become an anonymous porn actor, one can be sure that the cheeky habit of taking a swipe at establishment is still very much alive.

Ah, the name of the hotel, you ask? Auster called it, of all things, the White House Hotel.

(as published in The Star, Malaysia on Oct 18, 2002)

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4.0 out of 5 stars a compelling novel about the redemptive power of creation
How do you pull yourself together after a crisis? How can you begin to laugh, carry on casual conversations, go to work, when what sustained your life has been lost? Read more

Published on April 3 2010 by Nathan Andersen

4.0 out of 5 stars Another fine outing by Auster
The story focuses on David Zimmer. An author who has walled himself away from the world after the death of his wife and two boys. Read more

Published on Mar 11 2009 by NorthVan Dave

1.0 out of 5 stars You'll have to fight to finish it.
This had to be one of the most plodding overwritten books I've ever been unfortunate enough to read. Read more

Published on Nov 5 2004 by W. Miller

5.0 out of 5 stars Another breathtaking piece of fiction by Auster
Auster's book is a modern fairy tale of troubled lives searching for a purpose to continue living in a world of loneliness, regret and self pitty. Read more

Published on July 7 2004 by P. KALAY

3.0 out of 5 stars Ends abrupt-- Auster gave up. Good nonetheless
I really got into the character building Auster did. The book moved smoothly and creatively. The reader at no point was lost in what Auster was working with. Read more

Published on Jun 2 2004 by Renee

3.0 out of 5 stars Three and a half stars. Kind of plodding.
I find Auster's ideas interesting, but his execution plods a litle. I didn't find this book to be brilliant, but it was capably done, a little melodramatic in content, but I... Read more

Published on April 21 2004 by a.

1.0 out of 5 stars Nothing New
After reading Mr. Auster's dopey Timbuktu (I wrote a damning review of that too) I thought the man was out of ideas, and The Book of Illusions proves it. Read more

Published on April 20 2004

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book!
Paul Auster shows just how great a writer he is with this book.
You are immediately wrapped up in the world of Hector Mann. Read more

Published on April 7 2004 by David T. Brown

4.0 out of 5 stars Good overall !
A nice and pleasant experience reading this book. I would rate it 3.7 or 3.8 Nothing really special but a very fine story !

Published on Mar 26 2004 by KeepKage

4.0 out of 5 stars Illusions & Delusions
In this book Auster continues to dazzle readers with a unique and powerful writing style. His sentence structure and precision in language makes virtually all his books a... Read more

Published on Mar 18 2004 by Jon Linden

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