Rating: 
Summary: Forget Your Illusions
Review: The only illusion with "The Book of Illusions" is that it's a good book. The author's unfortunate decision to tell this story from the perspective of David Zimmer (novelist/professor/translator) and eleven years after the events of the book transpired put distance between the reader and the only interesting character, silent film comedian Hector Mann who disappeared after his fiancee accidentally killed the woman carrying his child. On a secluded ranch, Hector produced a series of movies no one has ever seen and 24 hours after his death will be destroyed.The other characters of the book do almost nothing except worship Hector Mann. The only interesting thing about Zimmer is that his family died in a plane crash, which is what drives him to learn about Hector in the first place. The other main character, the daughter of Hector's old partner, Alma's only interesting feature is the birthmark on her face. For some reason I never understood, Zimmer and Alma fall madly in love and visit Hector in his last day. Long story short, the book focuses on a lot of issues about loss and redemption. As I mentioned earlier, none of the characters besides Hector are very compelling. While I'm sorry for Zimmer's loss (even though I never see him interact with his wife and kids to KNOW how much he loves them), I don't want to read page after page of him moping around, grieving. I also don't want to read extended descriptions of movies. And so you see the major problem with this novel, it spends too much time focusing on a narrator who isn't interesting and overlong summaries of movies and their symbolic elements. What Auster needed to do instead is focus this book on its only decent character. If he'd written the book from Hector's perspective in realtime, instead of so far in the present, it would be focused it in a more powerful way as Hector struggles with his problems and the moral would still be the same as he makes the decision to have his work destroyed upon his death and tell no one of it. In other words, it would make the Book of Illusions interesting to readers, which is the point of writing a book. Unlike most other reviewers, I don't recommend this book at all. I am glad I read it, if only to illustrate how a writer's bad choices can destroy their work. I would suggest you skip this book of illusions and read a real novel instead.
Rating: 
Summary: POSTMODERN METAFICTIONAL MOVIE POPCORN
Review: "The world was full of holes, tiny apertures of meaninglessness, microscopic rifts that the mind could walk through, and once you were on the other side of one of those holes, you were free of yourself, free of your life, free of your death, free of everything that belonged to you." These are author Paul Auster's words in the mind of protagonist/narrator David Zimmer in Auster's new novel, THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS. These ideas occur to Zimmer while having a revolver aimed at his chest by a woman who, in her own uniquely persuasive manner, has come to liberate him from his Vermont home and an absurdly tragic life and send them both off to the New Mexican desert on a very strange mission. Her name is Alma Grund, daughter of an obscure silent movie cameraman; she has a fist-sized birthmark on the left side of her face, and she promises to introduce Zimmer to a silent film star named Hector Mann who mysteriously fell off the map many years before and whose films Zimmer has written a book about, as well as show him a number of private films Mann made at his ranch, meaning never to show them and willing them to be destroyed upon his death. Paradox being, of course, if a movie is never shown, is it still a movie? If not, then what? Auster's answer: it's an illusion. Everything is illusory in any case; all of existence is a frustrating mirage in which any truly substantive communication between people is absolutely hopeless. In the final analysis, ILLUSIONS comes across as a particularly clever work of postmodernism, suffering perhaps from a bit of bulge around the middle, a few too many redundancies, and metafictional coincidences. One element I found particularly annoying was the author's cavalier attitude toward his character's finances. Any time the question of funds is raised, Auster invents a quick means to make them wealthy enough not to worry over something so pedestrian and potentially polluting to his plot. Perhaps this was a ploy intended to strike a contrast between real suffering and the illusion of money, but I found it a dull solution for what is, ultimately, at the hollow heart of the vast majority of humankind's daily grind. This is an easier book to fall into than get out of. Auster asks us to ponder something usually rather done on a subconscious level: what of ourselves survives when we are finally gone? And who or what are the caretakers of that memory? There is a powerful, moving ending here, one that resonated in me long after the final sentence.
Rating:
Summary: Deceptions
Review: Paul Auster--writer, director, and one-time actor (look for his cameo in The Music of Chance)--has written another masterpiece with The Book of Illusions. For years, Auster has been plying audiences with the tricks of the postmodern trade: metafiction, hypertextual references, self-referentiality. Instead of encouraging the reader to lose him/herself in the text, his novels never let you forget that you are reading a work of fiction. In the hands of a lesser writer, this would make for a miserable reading experience, but Auster uses postmodernism as a tool to find deeper meaning, not merely as the literary equivalent of pyrotechnics. It is hard to say much about The Book of Illusions without revealing too much, but on the surface the book is about a college professor who has lost his entire family to a plane crash, and in order to escape his thoughts of suicide he immerses himself in an in-depth study of Hector Mann, an old silent-film comedian who has not been seen or heard from in well over half a century. But when he turns the fruits of his depression into a book about Mann's films and gets an invitation to meet this virtuoso of the silver screen, he realizes that things--and people--are not always what they appear to be. This engrossing story is brimming with wit, and leaves you with the feeling that you've read something more like a testimony than a novel. What Auster has done here is to create what all novelists strive for: a story that is extremely specific but never obscure, universal in theme but never cliche. If you liked The Book of Illusions, try Auster's City of Glass.
Rating: 
Summary: Hours well spent listening!
Review: I found the telling of this story as read by the author to be spell binding. The subject of silent movies has never caught my attention so the detail Mr. Auster goes into regarding the physical and bodily 'language' needed in a silent movie was very instructive and rational. The details and feeling he puts into words takes you right into the lives of his characters; You feel their pain; their happiness;you cheer for them. You can visualize their life. You live with Herman while Mr. Auster tells you about his life. You reach both highs and lows with David. Wonderful book to listen to. I was sorry when it was through.
Rating:
Summary: Magical
Review: For Auster devotees, plenty will be familiar here: a tantalizing unsolved mystery; a literary-intellectual protagonist with ruptured relationships and sudden access to money; and, less pleasingly, the occasional too-convenient plugging of plot holes. In its style of execution - novel as testimony - "The Book of Illusions" echoes Auster's "Leviathan", and it's no surprise that it deals with many of the same themes: the power of art; the limits of language; the value of what he leave behind; the importance of taking something forward; creativity as atonement; the power of accident and coincidence; the interconnectedness of lives. But here, Auster throws philosophical nominalism into the mix, and a surprisingly profound appreciation of film, to deliver a novel with all the Auster trademarks and quite a bit more chilling depth. Some reviewers complain that Auster keeps writing the same book. That charge could be leveled at any number of writers, but with Auster it misses the point. Writers often have big themes they want to explore, recurring issues they like to grapple with, and a talent for a particular kind of story. If, as in Auster's case, those themes, issues and story types happen to be brilliant and engaging, then where's the problem? Auster could go on writing the same book forever and it would be perfectly fine by me. I hope he does. And even if he doesn't, I know I'll be re-reading this one. I get the sense that "The Book of Illusions" is a book to be returned to, rediscovered and enjoyed all over again. The novel proceeds by a kind of patterned symbolism: aspects of the lives and works of Zimmer, Chateaubriand and Mann recur and intersect, and we can read "out" from these instances, making sense of what comes before them as much as what comes after. Their lives aren't linear biographies; they fold, double-back, intersect and amplify each other. This technique is more poetic than prosaic: in poetry, repetitions of sounds and images open up new strata of meaning beneath the surface. So it is with Auster, and especially in this novel. I expect that, on the second and third readings, echoes and intersections previously unnoticed will suddenly appear. It makes "The Book of Illusions" a rare find: one not only immediately engaging, but also endlessly enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: illusion and reality
Review: Auster is an extraordinary writer -- his prose spare and elegant, his focus the shifting shadows between reality and illusion. Never was a book more appropriately titled. The protagonist, academic David Zimmer, has suffered the nearly unimaginable, but quite credible tragedy of losing his family in an air crash. His response is to drink, to shut himself away, and, when briefly re-introduced to his former life, to be appallingly obnoxious. His chosen therapy is to write a book about a forgotten (and as it turns out, disappeared) silent film star. The publication of this study produces the remarkable news that his subject is still alive. The story of his subject Hector's life post-Hollywood mirrors the escape Zimmer himself is trying to make from the awful reality of his own tragedy. The parallels between Zimmer as author and Hector as subject are striking. The resolution of this marvellous novel is both sad and shocking, and yet, as with all Auster's work, there is a note of hope at the end, coupled with the sense that what is real, and what is not, is divided by the thinnest possible line. If this book were judged only on its evocation of the end of the silent movie period, it would be a complete success. Containing, as it does, many layers of complexity built around what we know to be real, imagine to be real, and imagine to be imagined, seen against the backdrop of unforgettable characters whose own reality is compelling, this is an extraodinary novel by a writer at the height of his powers. Read it more than once -- it will repay you many times over.
Rating:
Summary: A sad book regardless of the last sentence
Review: I just want to add a 5 star rating to this book. Even though it is a sad book in so many ways, I still couldn't put it down over Christmas when I generally would prefer to read something lighter. This definitely goes on my read-again list.
Rating:
Summary: The Auteur Theory
Review: David Zimmer is a man adrift. He has tragically lost his wife and two sons in a plane crash and is wallowing in self-pity and grief when one night he sees a silent movie starring Hector Mann and the course of his life changes dramatically.
Zimmer is a writer and professor of Literature and like most with that background looks down on films: "I like them in the way that everyone else did-as diversions, as animated wallpaper, as fluff. No matter how beautiful or hypnotic the images sometimes were, they never satisfied me as powerfully as words did." Suffice it to say that Zimmer has a change of heart once he gets immersed in the life and work of the presumed deceased Hector Mann: his films and his disappearance in 1927 under mysterious circumstances. In fact, Zimmer, with nothing to do and with a very large Life insurance settlement in his pocket seeks out Mann's films from film societies around the world and writes a monograph called "The Films of Hector Mann." Then the letter from New Mexico arrives asking Zimmer if he would like to meet Hector Mann.
The bulk of "The Book of Illusions" is taken up with a recounting of the life of Hector Mann that is only sporadically interesting. The fascinating part of this novel is Zimmer's realization while watching Mann's films, as well as those of other silent film comedians, that film can indeed be a viable art form: "...their work was as fresh and invigorating as it had been when it was first shown. That was because they had understood the language they were speaking. They had invented a syntax of the eye, a grammar of pure kinesis...it was thought translated into action, human will expressing itself through the human body, and therefore it was for all time." A writer responding to a medium in which words are not as important as action...interesting.
Zimmer on Mann's film "Mr. Nobody": "It is a meditation on his own disappearance, and for all its ambiguity and furtive suggestiveness, for all the moral questions it asks and then refuses to answer, it is essentially a film about the anguish of selfhood."
The writing in these passages about Mann's films and Zimmer's awakening to the realization that film can be art is intelligent and gorgeous.
"The Book Of Illusions" is glorious when Auster is writing about film and much less so when he attends to the machinations of the plot except, for example for a scene that he describes in this way: "I was half a step in front of my own body, and when the thing happened just as I thought it would, I felt as if my skin had become transparent. I wasn't occupying space anymore so much as melting into it. What was around me, and I had only to look inside myself in order to see the world."
Rating:
Summary: Sooo Good
Review: I have fun with this book. Whenever I am in a Book Store, I bring a copy, all the copies, to the featured book section, right in front of the store so that is the first book people will see. I have been reading Auster novels since the first grade, ok that is a lie, but I read at a first grade pace, and I find Auster's work most challenging. He is fun, intriguing, and a great story teller. Mr. Vertigo is great, different from all his other in the fact that it can't happen, while these other novels seem to be on the border of biographical. But Mr. Vertigo is really fun, the first Auster novel I read, and made me a great fan. The Book of Illusions has been long-awaited, and it does not disappoint. The only question left is, will he put out another book as quickly as he put out books in the early nineties? I guess Paul Auster is a modern day Samuel Beckett? Who else would you attribute him to? He's such a great author that deserves more press and popularity. His books are literary works for all time...
Rating:
Summary: An engrossing novel, rich in philosophical meditations
Review: Paul Auster is a fine storyteller. If the reader is unfamiliar with his other books, that does not hinder the appreciation, commitment and involvement to be found between the covers of this highly cinematic tale. The story is well outlined by the other reviewers - a writer on the skids and in the depths of alcoholic depression after the accidental deaths of his family accidentally sees a silent film by an unknown actor and picks up his broken life exploring the myriad incongruities of his subject's art and life, accidentally following a detective mystery drama to the site of the actor's death bed only to discover resurrection from his own fallen life and then accidentally loses again. A flimsy outline this, but to give much more detail robs the uninitiated from a story so well constructed and researched and written that it is one of the better novels of this fine author's career. The philosophical questions are never hammered: they arise as naturally as evolution. What are we as individuals? What determines the past - our memory, reportage by third parties, glib gossip, acrid secrets? How planned is our universe - is there a force that places tragedy in our paths as a positive trigger to alter our existence, or is everything that happens to us accidental, or is it choreographed by those people who love/hate us? Can we truly recall our childhood or is it forever lost to adult-vantage restructuring, the only evidence we have being fading photographs that more often than not were artifically staged in the first place? Wisely, Auster does not provide answers to these questions: his immensely interesting and engrossing story just raises them tangentially. There is a clue in the theme of the book - the Silent Movie, a form of expression solely dependent on the visual without any of the other senses involved. Is 'What we see what we get' the key to self exploration, or is that all just Illusion. This is a splendid novel on all levels, written by a pro!
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