Customer Reviews

Oracle Night: A Novel

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Heard a wonderful interview several weeks back with Paul Auster and Terry Gross on "Fresh Air," so I was very much looking forward to reading this book. While there were some entertaining and thought-provoking passages in the book, I, overall, have to agree with the previous posters who've given this book 1- and 2-star ratings.

I don't want to repeat their criticism or rephrase it with my own so much as I want to underscore it. The book imploded about half-way through and never recovered -- forced happy ending and all.

I'm not sure if the two-star rating is for me or for Mr. Auster: me for being dumb, or the author for writing a half-senseless story. I love symbolism, and have enjoyed many novels most find too weird and 'out there.' But ORACLE NIGHT just plain lost me.

There was no sense of connection between several episodes. It's like they were plopped in, maybe from other stories, just for the heck of it. A quilt may have an underlying meaning to it; to a degree, ORACLE NIGHT seems to be random patchwork.

There are only a few possible explanations for the existence of Paul Auster's "Oracle Night":
1. Auster signed a multi-book deal and had one due.
2. Auster had two stories (neither with an ending) too short to be published as a single book.
3. Auster wanted to see if he could pass anything off as literature.

Whatever the reason, this book is what happens when good writers go bad.

Auster's man character in this book, writer Sidney Orr, went bad once already. He is recovering from a mystery illness that nearly left him pushing up daisies. Away from his pen for a year, he ventures down to The Olde Curiousity Shoppe...excuse me, The Paper Palace, owned by the stereotypically inscrutable Mr. M.R. Chang, and picks up a mysterious, blue notebook made in Portugal (don't question the location--you won't find an answer.) This curious notebook subsequently allows our hero to break through his writers block.

The gripping tale that flows out of Sidney's rediscovered chops is the story of a man who must reexamine his life after a near-smooshing by a wayward concrete gargoyle that flies its roost from a building he's walking under. This character decides to abandon his wife and randomly catch a flight to Kansas City. Eventually moneyless, he hooks up with the taxi driver who picked him up and finds himself overseeing a bizarre, underground museum of phone books the taxi driver has tended unseen for years. Even worse for this escapee from his own life, he winds up trapped in a bomb shelter inside the museum with no one to rescue him.

Now this is an interesting story so far, but at this point Auster completely folds and abandons the whole story-within-the-story, introducing a pivotal new character into Sidney's life and a whole 'nother plotline. But this abandonment of the tale unfolding in his mystery notebook and the switch into a new series of events in his life--a highly improbable set that is unfortunately devoid of interest--leads to one of the most unsatisfying endings of any book I've ever read.

Meant to be a meditation on synchronicity, "Oracle Night" instead becomes the mere musings of a talented author who didn't have anything new to say. It's so inconsequential in its moral, the entire book could have been the word "whoa" and it would have had more to say about the human condition than what Auster wrote. The supposed "deep" message can only be deemed so by junior high English students. Remedial junior high English students.

The current condition of fiction today is desperate. A random pick of any recent novel will more often than not yield page bloat, lightweight characterizations, morally bankrupt morals, pointless plotlines, and a flat finale. Paul Auster becomes yet another decent author to phone one in to his editor.

I don't give out five-star and one-star ratings lightly, but "Oracle Night" is so utterly devoid of any reason for existing that I've got to go with the lone star or face many sleepless nights because of guilt for leading others astray. Skip this one entirely and thank me later.

ORACLE NIGHT starts out innocuous: while recovering from a serious illness writer Sidney decides to pick up the pen again and write. During one of his daily walks through his Brooklyn neighborhood he encounters a stationary shop that he never noticed before. Inside he becomes acquainted with the store's proprietor, M.R. Chang, who has immigrated to the United States to live the American Dream. While browsing the aisles Sidney decides to purchase a blue notebook made in Portugal. But what should be a routine purchase actually results in a bizarre adventure through both reality and fiction. Reading this novel is like reading a story about a story that is yet about another story. Not only is the reader introduced into Sidney's everyday life but they are also become familiarized with the story that Sidney begins to write in the blue notebook that, incidentally, also contains a novel with its own story. Got that?

Contained within the convoluted plot and sub-plots are serious philosophical lessons for the protagonist. What at first glance appears to be a series of mere coincidences between the differentiated plot levels actually strengthens the underlying message of this book. We often have knowledge of our existence that transcends the present. At first the coincidences seemed contrived, but as the novel progressed I starting going with the flow and was subsequently rewarded.

Despite how this book unfolds, I was never confused or disorientated. The fragmented strings that first appear to hang out on their own are indeed interconnected in their own manner and are nicely tied together at the end. I enjoyed the journey of reading ORACLE NIGHT. At first glance this appears to be just another slim book but between the covers is a story that worked well for me. Although I had guessed the ending this didn't significantly deter from my overall satisfaction. Paul Auster's gift of prose and imagination are admirable and result in a rewarding and pleasing book. Recommended.

It is no understatement that Paul Auster is one of the top literary writers alive and working today. He never fails to astonish with his playful approach to writing, experimenting with form, while entertaining the reader at the same time. This is a difficult thing to do. When attempting to write a metafictional piece, in some cases, form overrides the story itself, and the general reader is left wondering, scratching their respective heads, and abandoning the work. Auster, for me at any rate, has never failed to maintain my attention, interest and respect as a reader of all his work. Oracle Night, Auster's eleventh novel, is an hypnotic, mythical, magical experience, that draws the reader in with its peculiar ideas, circumstances and characters, yet at the same time, proposes some heavy and important questions concerning writers, the process of writing and the shear power of the written word.

The narrator of the text, Sidney Orr, a young writer, has been recovering from a near fatal illness and hasn't put pen to paper for some time. On one of his daily walks, he stumbles upon a stationary shop, the Paper Palace, run by a mysterious Chinaman. As Orr enters the store, time seems to stop, and there he discovers a set of beautiful Portuguese notebooks. He decides to buy the blue one, (a significant colour as we discover later) purchases it, which begins a journey of writing, coincidence, tales within tales, and the altering of time itself. When finally putting pen to paper in the blue notebook, the words flow, as they have never done before. Orr felt as if he was merely a bystander, as the words gushed forth effortlessly, forming a tale. While in the midst of writing, something strange occurs: Orr's wife walks into the room to check on him, and he isn't there. Orr could not explain this, because he knew he never left the room. Was he merely so immersed in the work that he absentmindedly left his desk, or was it something else? The blue notebook seems to be no ordinary notebook, but what exactly is it? It appears to be the nexus point of premonition, the creator of possible futures, which could possibly change everything.

Many things happen, inside the writing and outside the writing, and somehow there is a connection. Can one create the future through the written word? As the character, John Trause, an accomplished novelist and friend, says to Orr: "We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future."

This a book about the power of the story and the written word set in the subtle, mundane and at times haunting realities of our day to day existence. This novel asks many questions, and leaves it to us to find the answers. One of Auster's better novels.

"Thoughts are real... Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about... Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future." (pp.221-2) Picking up on the Flitcraft episode from "The Maltese Falcon" - in which a man's response to a near-death experience is to walk out on his life - Paul Auster's eleventh novel tells the story of nine days in the life of writer Sidney Orr. Recovering from a serious illness, Orr begins a sketch for a novel in his new blue notebook, and it seems to have an oracular influence on his life. As always with Auster, this delicious conceit is just the way into something far more serious and, on this occasion, a veritable babushka doll of plots involving time travel, Portuguese stationery, mysterious manuscripts, prophecies, a love triangle, a nuclear shelter in Kansas City, and the 1937/8 Warsaw telephone book. Some reviewers have decried the lack of resolution to some of the stories Auster's characters kick around, but can you really expect a piece of postmodern metafiction to offer you a neatly resolved, Grisham-style plot? Still, I couldn't put this down. I read it in a single afternoon, mainly because I found the ideas so compelling. Auster's theme here is the imagination, or more specifically the literary imagination. Is the kind of imagination at work in storytelling a way of ordering the chaos, a way of tracing - or creating - patterns of meaning in the randomness of life? Do we write about what is already happening beneath the surface of our selves and our relationships? What is the price of this? Does such art do violence to the lives it touches by way of appropriation? (If you like this theme, then I strongly recommend "What I Have Written" by John Scott - another highly literary and erotic piece of metafiction involving untimely death and a mysterious manuscript.) Auster fans will find much that's familiar in "Oracle Night": the notebook, the locked room, the poverty-stricken writer suddenly flush with money and time, and even Boris Stepanovich popping in from "In The Country of Last Things". But there's something new here, too: a real sense of playfulness and fun that was lacking from some of Auster's earlier work.

Auster's previous novel, "The Book of Illusions" was a severe letdown for the Auster fan in me. I was expecting more from Oracle Night. I did not really get it. It's not as boring as "Book of..." but Auster seems happy to lay out a bunch of potential storylines and then leave them unresolved. I don't know if it is writer's block or a reflexion on storytelling, but it does not work. The book is enjoyable to read, to a certain extent, but I kept hoping for the storyline to go somewhere. It never did. As soon as the plot seemed to be going in a direction, it just abruptly went elsewhere, as if the author had realized there was no other way out but a quick jump to another idea. In other word, this a novel without focus and when it ends, it does not seem like the story was over, but simply that the manuscript had reached the proper amount of pages to be called a novel. Maybe Auster should have published a novella concentrating on one of the many story ideas in the book. I mean, there are enough story ideas for at least 3 or 4 short novels, if Auster cared to explore these ideas properly. This book feels like a rushed job, unfortunately. I know Mr. Auster has the talent to do much better than this.