Oracle Night (1982)

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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. A novel that expands to fill volumes in the reader’s mind, Oracle Night is a beautifully constructed meditation on time, love, storytelling, and the imagination by "one of the great writers of our time" (San Francisco Chronicle). Paul Auster's recent novels, The Book of Illusions and Timbuktu, were national bestsellers, as was I Thought My Father Was God, the NPR National Story Project anthology, which he edited. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationary 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 the blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality. Why does his wife suddenly break down in tears in the backseat of a taxi just hours after Sidney begins writing in the notebook? Why does M. R. Chang, the owner of the stationary shop, precipitously shut down his business the next day? What are the connections between a 1938 Warsaw telephone directory and a lost novel in which the hero can predict the future? At what point does animosity explode into violence? To what degree is forgiveness the ultimate expression of love? Paul Auster's mesmerizing eleventh 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. At once a meditation on the nature of time and a journey through the labyrinth of one man's imagination, 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. "Compulsively readable yet wonderfully complex."—Eric Grunwald, The Boston Globe"Every bit as sad and spooky as [Auster's] New York Trilogy—and perhaps more intricate . . . [This book] plumbs persistent Austerian themes: identity, reinvention, betrayal, disappearance, chance, and the possibility that a supernatural heart quivers beneath the everyday surface of life . . . As in the New York Trilogy, he subverts our expectations of what a mystery story should be, and the reading experience is far richer for it."—Philip Connors, Newsday"Over the course of many books, Auster has burnished . . . ambivalence to a sheen by crossing metatextual strategies with the conventions of the noir thriller—Chandler meets Borges . . . Oracle Night is situated squarely on the Austerian matrix of narrative and reality—i.e., in a writer's notebook . . . [The novel] reads, indeed, like a dream or gloss on all the Auster novels that have come before, with its disorientation, its interlocking webs of seekers and sought, its blur of the invented and the artifact . . . Auster generously tips his hand here. He suggests that the terror of not being heard lies at the heart of writing, and that the artistic impulse generally might be summed up as: Somebody say something; 1 a.m., 2 a.m.—just keep talking. That a man who has produced more than 25 books is willing to convey the visceral ping of that terror is evidence not only of his talent but of his grace."—Stacey D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review"A writer recovering from a mysterious life-threatening illness begins to write in a notebook that has, it seems, the supernatural power to draw him into the very story he is writing. And the story, as it happens, is a reworking of Dashiell Hamm