Oracle Night (Signed)

Auster, Paul

ISBN 10: 0571216986 / ISBN 13: 9780571216987

Published by Faber and Faber, 2004

About this Item

First UK edition, First printing. Signed by the author, without inscription. Very Good book, in a near fine DW; some indentations to rear boards otherwise a fine copy. "This book is an intriguing blend of eerie suspense and touching commentary on falling in love.".

Seller Inventory # 00848

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Oracle Night (Signed)
• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571216986
• ISBN 13: 9780571216987
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Weight: 15 ounces
• Signed: Signed

About this title

Synopsis

Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, novelist Sidney Orr enters a Brooklyn stationery shop and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18th, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, within a world of eerie premonitions.

Review

In Oracle Night, Paul Auster returns to one of his favorite themes: writing about writers and the act of writing. Recovering from a severe illness that has left him weak and prone to nosebleeds, struggling novelist Sidney Orr takes the suggestion of his mentor, the acclaimed novelist John Trause, and begins a story about a man who, upon considering a near-death experience as an omen (or excuse), walks out on his wife and begins a new life. Nick Bowen, Orr's protagonist, moves to Kansas City and finds work with a man engaged in creating a sort of catalogue of all known persons from a warehouse filled with phonebooks. Dressed in Goodwill clothing, Nick finds it "fitting to don the wardrobe of a man who has likewise ceased to exist--as if that double negation made the erasure of his past more thorough, more permanent." Grace, however, acts strangely soon after Sidney begins the "novel-within-a-novel" in a mysterious blue notebook.

Auster uses footnotes to provide interesting backstory and develops Sidney's insecurities regarding love and fidelity, but when Sidney hits a patchy spot and writes Bowen into a corner, he (and Auster) shrugs and drops the story. The mystery that seemingly unrelated coincidences may have a causal connection is left unresolved, and Trause's delinquent son shows up to facilitate a hollow, climactic ending. Auster is a gifted writer, to be sure, but once trapped by the inner story, Oracle Night loses steam. --Michael Ferch