Auster, a man of diverse creative achievements, defies convenient labels with regard to genre and the divisions between literary fiction and the mainstream popular marketplace. Given his experiences with such multimedia endeavors as National Public Radio's Story Project, it's not surprising that Auster has a flair for dramatic narration when performing his own work. As he gives...
Auster, a man of diverse creative achievements, defies convenient labels with regard to genre and the divisions between literary fiction and the mainstream popular marketplace. Given his experiences with such multimedia endeavors as National Public Radio's Story Project, it's not surprising that Auster has a flair for dramatic narration when performing his own work. As he gives voice to ailing retired book critic August Brill, Auster milks the story-within-a-story structure to full effect. Impatient listeners may wonder exactly where this disparate tale of revisionist history, war, marital disappointments and grief might be headed. But with the nuanced—yet palpable—use of inflection, Auster compels his audience to await the twists and turns. As an invalid with an active imagination and time on his hands, Brill makes his frailties tangible and emotionally compelling without descending into full-blown pathos. A Henry Holt hardcover (Reviews, May 26). (Aug.)
A car accident and the death of his wife have left the retired book critic August Brill a physical and spiritual invalid. Virtually confined to his house with his recently divorced daughter and a twenty-three-year-old grandchild stricken with grief after the murder of her ex-boyfriend, Brill, an insomniac, attempts to stave off thoughts of death by telling himself bedtime stories. His tired mind weaves a tale that combines details of his life with more fantastic flights�such as the story of a man who, waking up in an alternate universe where 9/11 never happened and the 2000 election led to civil war, is sent on a mission to destroy the very person who has imagined him into existence. The narrative juxtapositions and the riddling starkness of Auster�s prose create an absorbing if mildly scattershot effect, breathing life into a meditation on the difference between the stories we want to tell and the stories we end up telling.
One doesn't want to say it, and yet it must be said: Here we go again. Another elegantly slim volume, the perfect size for palming single-handedly while riding the Metro or sipping a double espresso. Another wild fictive device that demolishes the walls separating author, character and reader, leading to that familiar through-the-looking-glass feeling -- the one that blew you away when you first discovered The New York Trilogy, continued to impress you all the way up through Oracle Night, and maybe didn't even begin to wear thin for you until Travels in the Scriptorium. Another story that, in the end, turns out to be about storytelling.
Another Paul Auster novel, that is. The Brooklyn-dwelling, 61-year-old writer still has his fierce champions; but, lately, championing Auster has come to feel more like defending him. Even in the most flattering reviews, critics have begun to express fatigue at the way he continues to rely on the same hall-of-mirrors approach to narrative design in novel after novel after novel. The man is a magician, indisputably, and his magic is still capable of dazzling. But over the course of 23 years, a lot of his readers have figured out the secret to his signature trick, and it's gotten to the point where some of those Austerian tropes have lost their otherworldly luster.
The trick works best when it's in service to a feeling rather than an idea, which is to say when Auster treats his characters like human beings rather than symbols. In Man in the Dark, his latest, the author has struck the right balance: Here is a novel that opens with chilly existentialism -- "I am alone in the dark" -- and winds its way through a surreal Borgesian labyrinth before ending tenderly, and humanely, with a grandfather and granddaughter keeping each other company during a long, sleepless night. As was the case in The Brooklyn Follies (2006), which, like this novel, featured a man in his twilight years recollecting a life that could have gone a little better, Auster is attempting real portraiture, not merely the Escher-print trippiness that has earned him a spot on every freshman English major's dorm-room bookshelf since the late 1980s.
Man in the Dark still manages to be pretty trippy, though. August Brill, a retired book critic who has moved in with his divorced daughter and adult granddaughter, deals with his chronic insomnia one night by making up a story about an ordinary man thrust into a parallel reality, one in which America is embroiled in a civil war brought about by the disputed presidential election of 2000. Brill names his character Owen Brick, and he begins Owen's story by having him wake up in a deep pit wearing a soldier's uniform. After being rescued by another soldier, the befuddled Brick learns that he has an important mission: He is to travel to Vermont and assassinate a man named August Brill, who has recklessly invented this crumbling, war-torn alternative America using nothing but his insomniac's imagination. "There are many worlds, and they all run parallel to one another, worlds and anti-worlds, worlds and shadow-worlds, and each world is dreamed or imagined or written by someone in another world. Each world is the creation of a mind." So Brick is informed before being sent off to kill his creator, our narrator.
Auster, of course, is as much at home in these roiling metafictional waters as Michael Phelps is in a swimming pool. And it's certainly fun to play along, wondering -- with Brick and his author(s) -- how things in this weird multiverse will play out, as Brick edges ever closer to his target. Or is the target moving toward Brick?
Then Auster does something he might not have done in his younger days, back when he stayed up obsessing over story structure rather than musing on those topics that keep older men awake all night. Three-fourths of the way through Man in the Dark, the magician cuts short the act, calls up the house lights and explains the whole trick. Brill is visited in the dark by his grieving granddaughter, who owes her crippling heartbreak to a war that readers will recognize, sourly, as belonging to the real world. The code of Owen Brick is slowly cracked, as we begin to see how the figures, events and emotions in August Brill's life have been converted into the vocabulary of his waking dream.
"Stick to the story," Brill tells himself at the beginning of his sleepless night. "That's the only solution. Stick to the story, and then see what happens if I make it to the end." It wouldn't be an Auster novel without such moments of cheeky narrative reflexivity. But all the paradoxes, coincidences and origami-like plots -- the elements of this author's unique style -- really do add up to something more than trickery. Shortly before dawn, his insomniac concludes: "The real and the imagined are one." Maybe every story, Auster seems to suggest, turns out to be about storytelling, and maybe every storyteller is telling his or her own.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Reactions to Paul Auster’s new novel may very well have come from alternate universes themselves. In one world, Auster is a great American man of letters writing a postmodern response to the events of our time, particularly 9/11, as only he can. In another world, his novel is yet another failed attempt at fictional engagement with the past eight years. There is a universe where Auster has matured from a young writer with a genius for multilayered, self-referential plots to a more sensitive observer of human suffering and the stories we tell to save ourselves. Yet others see a world where Auster is playing exactly the same games he has for years, only with less-developed characters and a half-hearted attempt at social commentary. It may be that readers, like Auster’s characters, will have to invent their own stories in order to make any sense out of Man in the Dark.
Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC
"Probably Auster’s best novel."—Kirkus, starred review
"Astute and mesmerizing."—Booklist, starred review
"This best-selling author with a cult following of literati finally offers one to please both fan bases."—Library Journal, starred review
"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
"In one thread, an ailing 72-year-old named Brill convalesces in Vermont; in the parallel and more eventful thread, a man named Brick wakes up in a dangerous dream—America currently in the middle of a 21st-century civil war. Both plots are propulsive. . . . [Auster is] a master of voice, an avuncular confidence man who can spin dark stories out of air."—Entertainment Weekly
"[Auster’s] magic has never flourished more fully than it does in Man In The Dark. . . . The novel delivers intense reading pleasure from start to finish."—Chauncey Mabe, Orlando Sentinel
"Vivid and arresting. . . . a novel that manages, admirably, to be both apocalyptic and tender. . . . The universe conceived by Auster is a world worth entering. And all that Brill struggles to forget in the pages of Man In The Dark translates into a book that deserves to be well remembered."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Auster is after something entirely different, in this haunting and beautifully crafted work, than speculative fiction. . . . This superb small novel isn’t, despite initial impressions, about war or politics at all. It is about, in the face of guilt and horror, choosing whether to die and how, if that is the choice, to live. It is, at heart, about the stratagems that we, but in particular our best novelists, devise as a means of keeping us going in the face of the ‘pitiless dark’ that will swallow us all."—Popmatters.com
"Man In The Dark . . . crashes onto shore with a great burst. It suddenly adds up, and what it adds up to can leave you sleepless."—The Buffalo News
"[A] fascinating new novel. . . . As Auster reminds us, often the worst wars are those fought in one’s own mind."—MSNBC.com
"Paul Auster’s twisty Man In The Dark concerns an alternate universe where two planes never toppled the World Trade Center. But Bush is still president, and a civil war rages in America. . . . Takes us closer to understanding the emotional wreckage [of 9/11]."—GQ
"The real magician here is Auster. Our new century so far has been as bleak and troubled as Brill’s last years. This little dream of a novel invests it with something newly precious. Hope riffles the pages of this beautiful, heartbreaking book."—Paste
"No writer is working harder than Auster to give America an existential literature to call its own, and Brill has a ruminative and slightly despairing mood that recalls Camus’ antiheros. Yet Man In The Dark isn’t a headlong leap into emptiness . . . Auster treats the theme of isolation straightforwardly, studying the emotional costs of war through Brill’s own vivid memories and his family’s own recent heartbreak. In the process, he arrives at the provocative notion that war stories and love stories aren’t as different as we might like to think."—Washington City Paper
原文摘录
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I don't look at it that way. For me, it's not a moral decision. It's about learning something, about starting a new kind of education. I know how horrible and dangerous it is over there, but that's just why I want to go. The more horrible, the better.
You're not making sense.
All my life, I've wanted to be a writer. You know that, August. I've been showing you my wretched little stories for years, and you've been kind enough to read them and give me your comments. You've encouraged me, and I'm very grateful to you for that, but we both know I'm no good. My stuff is dry and heavy and dull. Crap. Every word I've written so far is crap. I've been out of college for close to two years now, and I spend my days sitting in an office, answering the phone for a literary agent. What kind of life is ... (查看原文)
Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time. (查看原文)
Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens everyday and it will go...Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens everyday and it will go on happening to the end of time.(展开)
0 有用 机动花儿 2014-11-10 08:03:31
喜欢后半部分,Brill和katyar谈话的那段,特别流畅。前半部分由于穿插了那个他构想的故事而显得支离破碎。不知道这个故事的目的是为了什么?
0 有用 筱岚 2011-06-24 10:07:09
Peter Knip送我的书
0 有用 kikikiiii 2019-04-06 23:05:43
poor titus..... 我只记住了这段
1 有用 安西 2011-04-05 22:20:54
The mind has a mind of its own.
0 有用 0000 2016-01-14 18:16:18
Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens everyday and it will go... Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens everyday and it will go on happening to the end of time. (展开)