Man in the Dark: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: New York, Owen Brick, Virginia Blaine (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From The New Yorker

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.
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker END ASIN:1400064759 ATTRIBUTE_NAME: 6800 SOURCE: From The New Yorker REVIEW: In her third novel, Sittenfeld offers a thinly veiled account (Wisconsin, not Texas) of the life of Laura Bush, in the story of Alice Lindgren, who marries Charlie Blackwell, the ne�er-do-well son of a political dynasty who becomes President. The early chapters, in which Sittenfeld depicts an innocent childhood and adolescence disrupted by tragedy, are the most compelling. As the book progresses to more recent and familiar events, she has difficulty enlivening the ins and outs of electioneering and policymaking. The object of Sittenfeld�s fascination is the seeming incongruity between Alice�s liberal sympathies and her bookish intellect and Charlie�s conservative nature and general insouciance. Neither character is very likable�Alice weak-willed and martyrlike, Charlie unbearably self-centered�but the novel, Sittenfeld�s most fully realized yet, artfully evokes the painful reverberations of the past.
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker END ASIN:1596915609 ATTRIBUTE_NAME: 6800 SOURCE: From The New Yorker REVIEW: This engrossing portrait of Virginia Woolf and the women who looked after her explores how modern ideas of class and gender crucial to Woolf�s writing ran up against her lingering ties to a waning Victorian domestic order. Woolf frequently pondered the �servant question,� but her concern for those she employed was tinged with distaste. �I am sick of the timid spiteful servant mind,� she wrote of Nellie Boxall, her cook for eighteen years. Though Woolf professed a desire for a time when masters and servants might be �fellow beings,� and argued in her work for space and autonomy for women, her life was one of dependence; she did not learn to cook until she was forty-seven. Light deftly �restores the servants to the story,� arguing that Woolf�s relationships with them were �as enduring, intimate and intense as any in her life.�
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New YorkerEND ASIN:0465011225 ATTRIBUTE_NAME: 6800 SOURCE: From The New Yorker REVIEW: Seierstad, the author of �The Bookseller of Kabul,� first visited Chechnya in 1995, shortly after Russian tanks rolled in. Twelve years later, as another war gave way to a dubious, corrupt peace, she returned, at one point hiding her blond hair and dying her eyebrows and lashes to sneak across the border. This is a chronicle of reciprocal destruction: Seierstad talks to Chechen rebels and to victims of Russian torture; to the mother of a terrorist and the mother of a maimed Russian soldier; to a family that lost four sons to the war and to street children who prove too damaged even for the �angel� of the title, who runs a home for war orphans. At times, Seierstad�s persona is intrusive; when the Chechen President praises her looks, she tells us. But she is a humane witness to a dehumanizing conflict, and recent developments in the Caucasus make her testament all the more timely.
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker END

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (August 19, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805088393
• ISBN-13: 978-0805088397
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #310,676 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dark Dreams, Dark Politics, August 19, 2008

By	Mike Fazey (Perth, Western Australia) - See all my reviews

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.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Auster's in the Dark, August 25, 2008

By	Fenster (VA, USA) - See all my reviews

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.

12 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

By	Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

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

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