Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #95184 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Paul Auster's 11th novel Oracle Night is as intelligent and compellingly written as any he has produced. Sydney Orr is a writer recovering from an illness that almost killed him. Out on his daily constitutional he happens upon a curious stationery shop, the Paper Palace, and purchases a blue Portuguese notebook. The notebook casts a curious hold over Orr and seems to enable him to write, something he hasn't done since coming out of hospital. He writes a story about a books' editor who, on serendipitously avoiding some falling masonry, decides to read the near-accident as a reason to change his life. He takes an unread, recently discovered, manuscript of an important writer from the 1930s, Sylvia Maxwell, and disappears off to Kansas City. Reinvention and the associated idea that identity is fluid, re-imaginable, are linked, as is often the case with Auster, to the idea of chance.

So, Auster's usual themes are here: writing about writers and writing he discusses themes such as identity, disappearance, creativity, chance. But, despite what initially looks like a tricky structure (with footnotes and stories within stories) this is really a novel about love and forgiveness. Notwithstanding the dubious reputation of being a "writer's writer" the philosophical Auster has written a comparatively simple, very moving, quite brilliant novel. If the novel's ending is a little too neat, and the drama, as the narrative moves to a close, a little too soap opera, this hardly matters. --Mark Thwaite

Synopsis
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 bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality...

From the Back Cover
The discovery of a mysterious notebook turns a man's life upside-down in this compulsively readable novel by 'one of the great writers of our time.' (San Francisco Chronicle)

Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in 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 bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.

Paul Auster's mesmerizing 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. 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.

Customer Reviews

As ever, an intriguing work
The novels of Auster are always intriguing, clever, well-written page turners that excite, challenge but often frustrate the reader. And this is no exception. A story about an author who recovering from a near fatal health condition finds a notebook and begins to write. The subsequent occurences leave him on the brink and nearly destroy all he holds dear.
This is a novel full of twists and turns and clever ideas which promise much and (as with a lot of Auster novels) end leaving the reader ultimately unfulfilled. Read with caution, if you like ideas and the concept of novels within novels and existential posturings then enjoy. If you are expecting neat finishes and smart conclusions then best avoid and stick with something more conventional.

A Misleading Use of Anton Mesmer's Surname
To find this novel "mesmerising," as its publishers apparently did, you would need to be pretty easily mesmerised. Likewise, to agree that it "reads like an old-fashioned ghost story," you would need to have read some pretty disappointing examples of that genre.

What, in fact, it does read like is one of those pieces of fiction very popular with "literary" novelists who have got to come up with something for their publishers but lack worthwhile ideas and so fall back on writing about writers and writing. This is, in my view, an uninspired and self-indulgent example of its kind and for Henry Holt and Company to claim
it as a basis for dubbing Paul Auster "one of the boldest and most original writers at work in America today" sounds to me like sales-promoting dishonesty or sheer self-delusion.

Anyone who wants to send me a stamped, addressed jiffy-bag, is welcome to my copy of the book (which I bought first-hand but very cheap) for nothing! It appears to be one of the original edition, in a blue jacket-cover, with page-edges made to resemble those of a book of sermons by some Victorian divine.

Great suspense spoiled by rushed ending
Although I've owned a copy of "The New York Trilogy" for a while now, I'd not as yet got around to reading it and so I was interested to note the comment from Herald on the front cover of "Oracle Night" - 'If you have never read Auster before...this is the place to start'.

This book is an intriguing blend of eerie suspense and touching commentary on falling in love. The notebook plays a role in the narrative that is not as macabre as for example, inanimate objects can be in the fiction of Stephen King, yet it still retains an unsettling significance in the lives of the main protagonist.

Auster's use of interweaving storylines is enacted superbly and ensure that "Oracle Night" is a compulsive read. Furthermore, his insights into the creative process of writing fiction are intriguing, particularly when Sidney hits a dead end in the story of Nick - perhaps this is an early warning of the somewhat disappointing ending, in which the notebook and the character of Chang cede importance and indeed may be regarded as red herrings and the storyline is wrapped up within a mere few pages. As another reviewer opined, it smacks of a lack of time or perhaps artistic frustration.

Nevertheless, the book is a captivating read that immerses the reader in a hazy few days of confusion and activity, and is well worth a read.