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30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Dark Dreams, Dark Politics, August 19, 2008
Quite a few of Auster's novels have a surreal quality. Man in the Dark does too. In this case, it's an almost science fictional scenario - an alternate America where civil war has broken out and the United States has become the Disunited States.
This imagined world exists only in the mind of August Brill, an elderly man (in the real world) lying in bed recovering from an accident that has left him immobile. There's an interesting recursive aspect to the alternate America scenario (which I won't elaborate on here for fear of giving away the plot) that adds a further surreal dimension to the story. Brill's imaginary excursions into this parallel world are interspersed with comparatively mundane real world scenes that begin to paint a picture of his views, his life and his family.
The parallel reality aspect of the story ends about two thirds of the way through the book, which is a shame because I found the whole concept quite fascinating and very entertaining. Most of the rest of the book consists of a discussion between Brill and his granddaughter Katya in which Brill recounts the story of his marriage and Katya grapples with guilt over the death in Iraq of her former boyfriend who was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists.
For me, America's military involvement in Iraq is the major theme of the book. In Brill's alternate reality, the Twin Towers remain standing and America does not go to war in Iraq. Instead, it self-destructs. In the real world, American soldiers die fighting and others (like Katya's boyfriend) die simply because they're Americans in the wrong place at the wrong time. The implication seems to be that America's interventionist foreign policy is an alternative to the complete breakdown of national unity; that war somehow holds the nation together, albeit tenuously. I don't think Auster is advocating the policy, but rather asking whether it's really worth it even if the alternative is confronting some pretty unpleasant realities at home.
Man in the Dark is Auster's most political book to date, but it's not ponderous or sanctimonious. It's fundamentally a story about a man and his family. The politics kind of lurks in the background. It's a book that needs to be read more than once, I think (and it's short enough for that not to be a burden). I enjoyed it a lot. It's provocative and imaginative, as good literature should be.
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28 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Auster's in the Dark, August 25, 2008
First, I've read every non-poetry book Paul Auster's written, and I admire many of his books. However, the last few novels (from Timbuktu through Travels in the Scriptorium) have slipped in quality and depth and originality. Man in the Dark is a slight improvement, in terms of originality, but lacks any real depth, and at times is as cloying and sentimental - and downright cheesy - as a romance novel. A middle-aged novelist with as much experience as Auster should be at the top of his game, should be a fount of profundity, but sadly he hasn't had any fresh ideas since Leviathan. Complaining about the political state of America, however well you mask it in fiction, is not profound, it's what makes the news - print and TV - unwatchable; it's as easy as breathing when you are asleep.
Man in the Dark centers on August Brill, a 72-year-old ex-critic who has a shattered leg, from a car accident, and a shattered life, from, well, living life. He's recovering in the Vermont home of his daughter and granddaugher who themselves are both suffering from emotional downturns. To get through the painful, insomniac nights, Brill imagines a fictional storyline in which the protagonist, Owen Brick (such an Auster name), is torn from his life in Queens to an alternate history of America where the so-called Blue States are at war with the so-called Red states, a war that began after the 2000 election; and in this world the Twin Towers where never attacked. Foolish? Of course. However, this alter-fiction provides most of the intrigue and the best writing in the book (I won't spoil the plot), but it's cut off abruptly, right when it would have gotten very interesting, at a point when a writer like Borges (to whom Auster is much in debt here) would take it to a new level. But during the daylight hours Brill spends his time watching old movies with his granddaughter and getting sentimental about his past, and it's like reading a script from a Hallmark Sunday Night movie ... "Was grandma pretty?", etc. ... You get the picture. And to make it worse these dialogues (Auster's never had this much dialogue in one of his novels) are written in an almost ossified prose.
The novel is, thankfully, short, and I read it in two sittings; and I felt nothing but disappointment when I finished.
I hope the old Paul Auster - the Auster of Moon Palace, the NY3 and the Music of Chance - returns next time; he is sorely missed by this reader.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"I don't like this. Someone's inside my head. Not even my dreams belong to me. My whole life has been stolen.", August 23, 2008
August Brill, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic, now a depressed widower confined to a wheelchair, spends much of each night lying awake, thinking about his life and creating stories to keep himself amused. Living with his divorced daughter Miriam and his granddaughter Katya in Brattleboro, Vermont, August has made no progress at all writing his book, a memoir he hopes to leave to posterity. Instead he watches films with his granddaughter, analyzing how filmmakers use objects as symbols to convey human emotions.
Each person in the novel is "in the dark," searching for identity and the meaning of life and love, but each is also trying to reconcile his/her present life with the accidents of his own history. The death of August's wife, and his own accident, have left him dependent on Miriam. Miriam's abandonment by her husband has left her vulnerable and responsible for the household, and Katya, his granddaughter, is almost paralyzed from the death of her lover, feeling that she did not love him enough. All feel like failures.
This absurdist novel gains excitement--and its main plot--each night when August, sleepless, invents characters living different kinds of lives in an alternative reality--one so close to our own reality that its plausibility becomes frightening. In his stories, August has flashed back to the year 2000, in which the Presidential election led to riots and the demand to abolish the Electoral College. Eventually New York, New England, and nine states in the Midwest, seceded, precipitating the Second Civil War, against President George Bush and the Federals.
The novel opens with Owen Brick, a young man dressed in fatigues, trapped in a deep hole, unable to escape. He has no idea where he is or how he got there, but he cannot avoid his mission to assassinate the creator of the war--August Brill, who also created him. As the novel switches from present reality into the alternative reality and back, the author makes thoughtful observations about writing and its ability to create realities, but on the plot level (which ends after 2/3 of the book), it is also suspenseful, exciting, and a great deal of fun. Sly humor peeks through much of the alternative reality plot line, and the ironic twists on several levels keep the reader entertained. The characters grow as they share their family histories, and as the Second Civil War rages in one reality, the real characters, like Brill and his friends, remember the very real horrors of the Second World War and Iraq. Intense and clever, Auster's novel examines important issues of war, reality, and identity in fewer than two hundred pages. n Mary Whipple
The New York Trilogy (Green Integer)
The Invention of Solitude
The Book of Illusions: A Novel
Travels in the Scriptorium: A Novel
Three Films: Smoke, Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge
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