Man in the Dark: A Novel (Paperback)

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year " Man in the Dark is an undoubted pleasure to read. Auster really does possess the wand of the enchanter."&mdashMichael Dirda, The New York Review of Books From a "literary original" ( The Wall Street Journal ) comes a book that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a world capable of the most grotesque violence. Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident at his daughter's house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget: his wife's recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend, Titus. The retired book critic imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America the twin towers did not fall and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union and a bloody civil war ensued. As the night progresses, Brill's story grows increasingly intense, and what he is desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. Paul Auster is the bestselling author of The Book of Illusions , and The New York Trilogy , among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded The Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other honors are the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix Médicis étranger for Leviathan . He has also been short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award ( The Book of Illusions ), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction ( The Music of Chance ), and the Edgar Award ( City of Glass ). His work has been translated into thirty-five languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Longlisted for the International IMPAC Literary Award A work of fiction with a dark political twist, Paul Auster's Man in the Dark speaks to the realities that America inhabits as wars flame around the world. Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter’s house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget—his wife’s recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter’s boyfriend, Titus. The retired book critic imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America the twin towers did not fall and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union and a bloody civil war ensued. As the night progresses, Brill’s story grows increasingly intense, and what he is so desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. Joined in the early hours by his granddaughter, he gradually opens up to her and recounts the story of his marriage. After she falls asleep, he at last finds the courage to revisit the trauma of Titus’s death. "This is perhaps Auster’s best book . . . Man In The Dark is so unlike anything Auster has ever written that it doesn’t make sense to compare it with his earlier work . . . Here we have multiple worlds and three generations . . . Auster’s book leaves one with a depth of feeling much larger than might be expected from such a small and concise work of art."— Stephen Elliott, San Francisco Chronicle "'I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.' That's the first line from Paul Auster's new novel, Man in the Dark , and in some ways it's a perfect opening, as accurate as anything in describing the world, or worlds, you'll encounter over the coming 180 pages, a world turning in the head of Auster's 72-year-old everyman, August Brill. Auster has captivated generations of readers with his expansive imagination and style—a style that could be called lazy, in the best sense of the word, like a dog with his tongue out, rolling in the sun. But this, his latest novel, is something else. In this book, Auster has taken a turn similar to the turn Philip Roth took in American Pastoral and Leonard Michaels took in his Nachman stories. He's turned his attention outward, to the larger scope of the new century . . . Despite all the threads, which just barely connect, the book works beautifully. And though it's complicated to explain, it's an incredibly clear and easy book to read. Never a minimalist, Auster somehow takes on the largest questions of our time inside small tales of one family. With August as his storyteller, Auster has created a giant canvas out of what seems like a few effortless strokes, strokes often stunning in their simple beauty . . . This is perhaps Auster's best book. But maybe that's an unfair description. Man in the Dark is so unlike anything Auster has ever written that it doesn't make sense to compare it with his earlier work. Sure, you can recognize the author of Oracle Night and Brooklyn Follies . But it's as if that gentle mind has been joined by the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut, the adamant pacifist, author of Slaughterhouse Five and creator of Billy Pilgrim, a prisoner of war who became 'unstuck in time.' Here we have multiple worlds and three generations, also unstuck in time. But like Vonnegut's classic anti-war novel, Auster's book leaves one with a depth of feeling much larger than might be expected from such a small and concise work of art."— Stephen Elliott, San Francisco Chronicle "Are you a Paul Auster fan? Or, perhaps, are you emphatically not ? Either way, read Man in the Dark , Auster's latest, which is inventive, tender, and darkly lined with the American predicament . . . Paul Auster has outdone himself, perhaps precisely by not trying to outdo anything."— John Brenkman, The Village Voice "On superficial acquaintance, Paul Auster’s new novel, Man in the Dark , appears to be merely the latest strain in a recent pandemic of dystopian fantasies, in this instance an alternate history of America in which the 9/11 terrorist attacks never happened but something even worse did: A second American civil war. In Auster’s parallel universe, the battle is joined not by the blue and the grey but rather by the Blue and the Red, as the bitterly disputed 2000 election degenerates into secession and an all-out battle for the Union. With 13 million dead and counting, the real-world election and its fusillades of lawsuits and partisan bomb-throwing suddenly seem terribly innocent in contrast to this ugly imagined world in which the only winner is gore. But as it turns out, Auster is after something entirely different, in this haunting and beautifully crafted work, than speculative fiction. The dystopia isn’t Auster’s but rather his central character’s, August Brill, the titular 'man in the dark'. Brill, a 72-year-old retired literary critic, is a deeply traumatized human husk who, like a character out of a Bergman movie, is sharing a house with his equally damaged and desperate daughter and granddaughter . . . The novel weaves in a number of other strands, including the story of Brill’s marriage to his late wife, which Brill recounts to Katya in beautiful and touching detail, a couple of harrowing tales of the Second World War, and the story of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s unhappy and aimless daughter Rose, the subject