Oracle Night [Hardcover]

Paul Auster (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 6, 2004

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

One morning in September 1982, a struggling novelist recovering from a near-fatal illness purchases, on impulse, a blue notebook from a new store in his Brooklyn neighborhood. So begins Auster's artful, ingenious 12th novel, which is both a darkly suspenseful domestic drama and a moving meditation on chance and loss. Reflecting on a past conversation and armed with his new notebook, Sidney Orr is compelled to write about a man who walks away from his comfortable, staid life after a brush with death a contemporary retelling of the Flitcraft episode in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. Orr's description of his fictional project takes over for a while, but through a framing narrative and a series of long, occasionally digressive footnotes, he teasingly reveals himself, his lovely wife, Grace, and their mutual friend, the famous novelist John Trause. While Orr's hero finds himself locked in a bomb shelter, Grace begins behaving strangely, the stationery shop is shuttered, John's drug-addicted son looms menacingly in the background and the blue notebook exerts a troubling power. The plot of this bizarrely fascinating novel strains credibility, but Auster's unique genius is to make the absurd coherent; his stories have a dreamlike, hallucinatory logic. The title comes from the name of the novel that appears within the story Orr is writing, and hints at the book's theme: that fiction might be at some level prophetic, not merely reflecting reality but shaping it. There is tension, however, between power and impotence: as Orr puts it, "Randomness stalks us every day of our lives, and those lives can be taken from us at any moment for no reason at all."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (April 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571216986
• ISBN-13: 978-0571216987
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (96 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,952,545 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Travels in the Scriptorium, The Brooklyn Follies, and Oracle Night. I Thought My Father Was God, the NPR National Story Project anthology, which he edited, was also a national bestseller. His work has been translated into thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Illusionist Does It Again, December 26, 2003

By 

Louis N. Gruber "Author of Jay" (Lexington, SC United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Oracle Night: A Novel (Auster, Paul) (Hardcover)

Sidney Orr is just recovering from a near fatal illness, and is thinking about starting back to writing. He stumbles into a little stationery shop owned by a mysterious Chinese, and purchases a unique last-of-its-kind notebook from Portugal. With just such seemingly unrelated details, author Paul Auster lures you into his alternate reality, a world of haunting questions and mysteries.

Is there anything more to life than chance? Does anything have meaning? What is the nature of time? And most importantly, can fantasy become reality? Does the writer with his fantastic creations actually bring about future events?

Author Auster, who wrote The Book of Illusions, is a master at creating what a psychiatrist would call "dissociation"--the splitting of consciousness. With apparent ease he has the reader following three stories at once--story within story within story--and slipping into something like a trance. He fixates the reader's attention with Chinese stationers and secretive spouses and leads the reader off track with rambling footnotes that go on for several pages. He is extremely skilled at this.

I can't tell you much about the plot--you will just have to read it yourself--but I can tell you that you will be--well--entranced. I highly recommend this one! Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing; but ultimately disappointing, January 4, 2004

By 

R. Spitzer (Pasadena, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Oracle Night: A Novel (Auster, Paul) (Hardcover)

This book caught my attention quickly, and kept me puzzled and, at times, almost, spellbound. There were layers upon layers of coincidence and happenstance, and I felt that ultimately, surely, this would all come together through skillful writerly sleight-of-hand. Such was not, however, the outcome. Countless hints and feints just fade away, never explained, never resolved. The "resolution" was too quick and incomplete; almost a quickie deus-ex-machina formulation, leaving far too many issues hanging, unexplained, irritating, bothering, and making me wonder whether I hadn't wasted my time on this book.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars To live in a blur of accelerated motion, February 1, 2004

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Oracle Night: A Novel (Auster, Paul) (Hardcover)

I found it hard to categorize this novel. Oracle Night is certainly a beautifully written piece of work, but is it a thriller, a sinister account of the life of a struggling writer, a symbolic treatise on the nature of cause and effect, or a study of a relationship in transition? Maybe it is all of these or any one of them. The novel certainly works well, as a novel within a novel, and the narrative is full of mysterious portents, omens and signs. Symbolism is paramount as Sidney Orr; the main protagonist wonders the streets of Manhattan ruminating on his life, his marriage to his wife Grace, his health, and his talent as a writer.

A mysterious notebook bought at a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn forms the symbolic core of the novel, as Sidney, recovering from a near fatal illness purchases the book, and for the next nine days lives almost under its spell. Eerie premonitions and a series of bewildering and mystifying events surround him, as he maniacally begins a novel about the life of Nick Bowen, who has inexplicably deserted his wife Eva, and is trying to start a new life for himself in Kansas City. As the story progresses, Sidney is forced to confront certain circumstances in his own life that demand an explanation.

Is Sidney like Nick and "in search of indifference, a tranquil affirmation of things-as-they-are" or is he like Eva, "at war with those things, a victim of circumstances" his mind " a storm field of conflicting emotions: panic, and fear, sorrow, anger and despair." As the novel progresses, Nick's journey of self-discovery culminates in the revealing of secrets, and the realization that there is more to his relationship with his wife Grace and with the enigmatic author John Trause than meets the eye. Auster beautifully and cogently weaves so many different themes into the narrative: The connection between imagination and reality, the cause and effect "between the words in a poem and the events in our lives", the nature of time, and the manifestation of bad luck in its "most cruel and perverse form." The acceptance of the power of random, and purely accidental forces that mold our destinies is at the thematic heart of this novel. Oracle Night is an original and quite innovative work of fiction.

Michael