Rating: Summary: Well Written Review: This is a good piece of drama/mystery. The way that Auster made up and described old silent films was quite entertaining, it's almost like reading several short stories. It made me want to go out and watch some silent flicks.In a nutshell this is about a man who writes a book about an Argentine actor in the silent era, who one day just disappeared without a trace. Then he recieves a letter one day saying that this actor is alive and wants to meet him. I won't say anything else, except that this was very well written, and was hard for me to put down.
Rating: Summary: Powered by an author's unusually talented reading voice Review: The author narrates his own unabridged novel Book Of Illusions, which tells of a man who turns to alcohol after losing his family in a plane crash - until he sees a clip from a lost film by a comedian which changes his life. Embarking on a search for a vanished man, David's research turns up some doubtful evidence in this moving story, powered by an author's unusually talented reading voice.
Rating: Summary: An illusion you'd like to see again Review: "If someone makes a movie and no one sees it, does the movie exist or not?" This is one of the tantalizing paradoxes which underlie The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster's tenth novel. Auster is consumed with delineating the myriad mirages which the world is made of, the mysteries which consume us and the personal realities which no one else can comprehend. The narrator of Illusions, David Zimmer, is a man in the throes of grief over the accidental deaths of his wife and sons. While channel surfing one day, he happens upon a film clip of silent film comedian Hector Mann, who had disappeared in 1929 and is considered long-dead. He begins to search out the forgotten films of Mann, eventually publishing a book on the subject, and is floored when he receives a letter inviting him to visit with Mann, who is now a recluse directing films for his own satisfaction. In past efforts, Auster has veered stylistically from the post-modern mysteries of his New York Trilogy to the Saul Bellow-like personal explorations of Moon Palace and Leviathan. Here, Auster balances his two passions, intertwining a warmly graceful tale of personal loss and redemption with his obsession with stories within stories, coincidences, mirrors, mazes, and masks. As Zimmer tells it, it is "a book of fragments, a compilation of sorrows and half-remembered dreams." Auster manages an impressive feat within his pages; he creates a written world of celluloid illusions so wonderful, so precise, that one wishes Mann's filmography was not only a myth of Auster's imagination. Zimmer's discourses on Mann's use of facial expressions, slapstick, and melancholy within the silent film framework prove Auster could have a second career as film historian if he so wished. The illusion of film is not Auster's only quest; it is the illusions that make up the solid universe which ultimately fascinate him. Understanding that the novel itself is an illusion, Auster opts for a stylistic artifice along the lines of his entirely style-driven City of Glass, deliberately luring the reader in with his involving tale, then disassociating the reader with clever statements that draw attention to themselves (for example, a sexual encounter is described as a "spectacle of verbs"). Auster's post-modern sensitivities can alienate the reader to frustration at points; the coincidences in the narrative pile up at a frightening pace. He is aware of this conundrum, explaining that "the truth was that most things made no sense . . . the laws of physics stipulated that every person in the world occupied a certain amount of space - which meant that everyone was necessarily somewhere." It's a neat piece of writing, but it comes across as a cheat, a deus ex machina to hang plot contrivances upon. However, the ultimate effect of The Book of Illusions is an elegant despondency that never outstays its welcome. Auster fashions a world of loss, of grief, of mourning, rebirth, and betrayal. If, in the end, it is all an illusion, then it is a masterful one.
Rating: Summary: Absurd But Compelling! Review: Once you open this book you will be hooked. The outlines of the plot have been given by other reviewers. The novel is actually a collection of short stories nested within other stories, stories of loss, betrayal, unforgiveable actions, atonement, and grasping for redemption. Many of the stories are unbelievable, shocking, even repulsive, yet somehow the author weaves them together so skillfully, so artfully, that you will want to keep on reading. The unifying theme, played out through the mythic narrator, author David Zimmer, and the mythic cinematographer Hector Mann, is this: What do we leave behind? Do we leave anything behind? Or is it all illusion? The real author, Paul Auster, is a master of illusion, who can weave illusion and reality together seamlessly. Somehow it all becomes believable. I enjoyed the book and found it hard to put down, although it did drag some near the end. The description of Mann's never-to-be-screened film--a story within a story within a story--goes on too long. But these are minor points. A fascinating and beautifully done work. I recommend it.
Rating: Summary: More than meets the eye Review: An unexpected thing happened while reading this book at an airport. An acquaintance remarked: "Are you learning how to do magic tricks?" The title, as good a place to start as any, in fact carries lots of import in this novel, Paul Auster's eighth. Illusions perhaps alludes to the illusion one has about one's effect on others and the importance of one's work and, in the end, the illusion of life as a whole. Even the word Book could refer to the book that the main persona has written about the work of a mysterious silent filmmaker who vanished, or the book that his eventual love interest writes about the filmmaker's life, or even the journal that the filmmaker keeps. All in all, The Book of Illusions can provoke a lot of thought if one so chooses. If not, just take it as a skilfully crafted, sympathetically observed, entertaining read. Auster, thank goodness, has moved on from his little exercise in composition that is his previous novel, Timbuktu. Charming and heartfelt as it is, Timbuktu is just too simple, way below what the author is capable of in terms of understanding and conveying the complexities of human frailty, relation and emotion. This novel is richly layered and somewhat challenging. There are stories within stories and several techniques used to induce the reader into getting involved in the proceedings and believing they are happening to real people. There is no conventional protagonist and antagonist - everyone is capable of being both. The one who writes in the first person is Prof David Zimmer (probably named after Auster's son Daniel, and Z as opposed to A for Auster; if you've read his other books, you know the author loves little nods like these). Like John Irving's stories, many people drop like flies in this novel too. Zimmer's wife and two sons die in a plane crash, leaving him with a fear of flying and a debilitating depression cum death wish. One day, he chances upon silent filmmaker Hector Mann's comedy on television which makes Zimmer laugh for the first time in many months. He decides to study and write about Mann's work - for a reason to get up in the morning. How he finds all of the filmmaker's prints is another pivotal plot point. However, this Mann is a strange fish who left his house one day and is not heard of again for 50 years, and presumed dead by most. One day, Zimmer receives a letter from Mann's purported wife, Frieda, asking him to visit the filmmaker in New Mexico. He thinks it's a hoax. Then a woman, Alma, shows up at his house asking him to go to Mann at once as he's at death's door. There is more that happens after he meets Mann and Frieda, deeply involving Alma who has become lovers with Zimmer. In between we learn of what has happened to the filmmaker in those 50 years as Alma is writing a book about his life. We are also treated to engaging descriptions of a few of his comedies and a feature film he made in New Mexico which is one of the many produced only to be destroyed right after Mann's death as a form of penance for a sin we will not go into here. Okay, if you must know, just before his disappearance, he had inadvertently, gravely wronged someone dear to him and has been punishing himself for it ever since. Zimmer, in the first half of the book, also takes us through his research which includes clippings and articles about Mann while he was hot in Hollywood. This is one of the tricks authors employ nowadays for the cause of plausibility. Hector Mann as an Austerian creation is as flawed and passionate and self-loathing as any of his other "players" such as in Leviathan and Moon Palace. Their acute sense of decency and fair play is stretched to the limit by their wrong moves and bad assumptions. Auster seems never afraid to let his persona lapse into the most childish reaction, fall into the deepest despair and do the most wrong thing possible. Also, because of the plot, Auster has allowed himself to go into the description of more sexual activity than in his other novels. Furthermore, the author has not forsaken his penchant for melodrama, most evident in The Moon Palace, but in The Book of Illusions, it is admirably controlled and well intentioned. If we must further compare this with his previous novels, one can observe that it has less of the moralising tendencies of Mr Vertigo and the out-and-out fatalistic despair of The Music of Chance. A hardworking reader might want to look out for two things: the motif of a gift and whether there is a good ending or merely a termination of the story as in The New York Trilogy. The gift motif does occur several times but the things that befall the "gifts" are heart-rending and, yes, there is a proper ending which is not totally unexpected. For all its earnestness, The Book of Illusions is not above a few jibes here and there. With the World Trade Center tragedy, in overreaction, some say the Irony Age may be over. However, with Auster's naming of a cheap hotel where whores ply their trade and where Mann makes a deal to become an anonymous porn actor, one can be sure that the cheeky habit of taking a swipe at establishment is still very much alive. Ah, the name of the hotel, you ask? Auster called it, of all things, the White House Hotel. (as published in The Star, Malaysia on Oct 18, 2002)
Rating: Summary: Stunning Review: Auster is literary author who knows the full importance of a compelling story. That made this a thought provoking novel that was impossible to put down. His sentances are nuanced and his characters come alive. While I was in the thick of reading this book, I was never conscious of his virtuosity but when I stopped to reread a graph... I was stunned.
Rating: Summary: A complex study of loss that is lively and funny at times Review: Hector Mann directed and starred in a handful of silent comedies in the 1920s. He was just beginning to realize his potential as a filmmaker when bad studio management and the introduction of sound --- deadly for a man with a heavy Spanish accent --- ended his career. Shortly thereafter, he disappeared without a trace. Because he was not quite famous, no one, it seems, looked very hard for him. His now obscure films appeal to David Zimmer, a Vermont professor who is slowly and painfully coping with the death of his wife and sons in a plane crash. He throws himself into the few films of Mann's surviving oeuvre and writes the sole definitive work on the films of Hector Mann. The book comes to the attention of Hector Mann's wife, Frieda, and she invites Professor Zimmer to meet the mysterious filmmaker, who is currently dying in New Mexico. Zimmer is suspicious of the offer and refuses to go until he meets Alma, a close connection of the Manns who grew up on the ranch where they shut themselves off from the world. Alma convinces him that not only is Hector Mann alive, but he never stopped making movies. Although the Manns believe that David Zimmer ought to see these films, Hector has ordered that his lifework should be burned within 24 hours of his death, and his time is growing short. One of the many charms of THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS is the stories within the story. These digressions are full of grace and relevance, whether anecdotes or film plots. Alma tells David what happened to Hector, and his life story is full of surprises, turnabouts, and tragedy. It only makes David even more curious to see the films that sprung from such a man, and he conquers his fear of flying to make the trip to New Mexico, unaware that his presence during Hector Mann's last days will act as a catalyst for further misfortune and loss. THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS is a complex study of loss, with nearly every character wrestling with grief in some fashion. Movie characters don't exist; the dead used to exist, but no longer. Both David Zimmer and Hector Mann find solace in the movies, comfortable in the philosophically parallel planes of the fictional and the dead. One would expect that a book so immersed in pain and self-blame to be very depressing, but it is not. It is lively, fast-paced, and often funny, a celebration of bright images before the screen goes dark. --- Reviewed by Colleen Quinn
Rating: Summary: Use your illusions Review: So let's face it: Paul Auster's books are usually either very good or very bad, and readers either get him or they don't. The Book of Illusions is a winner, one of his darkest novels yet and very typical of his style. It reminded me most of Leviathan (which still I consider his best), and despite its pervasive darkness, it never approaches the oppressive agony of the almost unreadable In the Country of Last Things. As he often does, Auster returns in this story to several motifs common to much of his fiction. Many key Auster characters are clearly intended as variations of himself -- sometimes he will give them his name -- and The Book of Illusions introduces another aspect of the author in its narrator, "David Zimmer." Like the narrator of Leviathan, Zimmer is a wordsmith intellectual whose fascination with a highly creative individual with a suspect past and a mysterious disappearance triggers the unraveling of the story. To preserve his fragile sanity, Zimmer scrutinizes the work and life of Hector Mann, a 1920s filmmaker whose twelve silent comedies strike Zimmer as perfectly crafted examples of the form. Meanwhile, he undertakes the monumental project of translating from French to English an epic 18th century autobiography 2,000 pages long (Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand's Memoires d'Outre-tombe). Zimmer sees his own hopelessness mirrored in the autobiographer's conception of his task as issuing dispatches as a dead man from beyond the tomb. The translation, in its enormity and relentlessness, manifests other familiar Auster themes. I thought back to The Music of Chance, where the prisoners Nashe and Pozzi are charged with carefully constructing a two-thousand-foot wall from the stones of a disassembled castle. The drudgery of the labor was precisely what enabled Nashe to approach the task with his characteristic stoicism and see in it the prospect of liberation from the wheels of fate. Zimmer appears to approach his translation in the same way. Its schematic similarity to the wall-building crystallizes various questions on the nature of language, including some Auster ruminated on most thoroughly in City of Glass, his novella about the Tower of Babel. Is a translation like the wall -- a new creation built from the components of a master work -- or does it aim to reconstruct the original as closely as possible within the constraints imposed by the differences in their elemental parts? I think most readers will find their understanding of past Auster novels enriched by this book. Others might find his recycling of past motifs, especially the potency of random chance, tiresome. But I think everyone will be struck by its most haunting moments and will remain in suspense until the story's climactic end. Whether Chateaubriand, Mann, or neither can shepherd Zimmer out of his nihilism and despair is the question that will keep readers interested as the plot bounces back and forth into present and past.
Rating: Summary: Vivid, expertly written, compelling, for the mind's eye Review: After reading a few of the other reviews, I feel somewhat inadequate to render my opinion. I know I won't come close to delving into the deeper meanings and darker shades of Paul Auster's book -- which is odd for me because I usually analyze things to death. But I'd like to describe what the book -- at face value -- meant to me. To start with, with The Book of Illusions I turned off my mind and just enjoyed what I can only describe as a novel with more detail, believability, and fictional reality than I have ever read. "Fictional reality" is probably a good term for it, too. Fictional reality is the currency with which this exceptional book conducts its business -- and in a manner so believable I began to question if this was fiction at all. (Shades of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil!) Did Hector Mann ever really exist? No, he didn't. But you wouldn't know that by reading Paul Auster's book. Auster paints such a vivid picture of the silent-era movie star and his life that I often wondered to myself if the entire book was based partly on fact, and merely cleverly veiled. (Just to make sure, I checked the Internet Movie Database under the name "Hector Mann." No precise listing came up under any cateogry.) I have never seen such rich detail about a fictional person's life! It's astounding to me that the films the book's main character, David Zimmer, describes in painstaking detail never really existed. Dialog, facial expressions, plots, the names of other actors, the names of directors and producers, and the descriptions of the era in which the films were released (the late '20s) are all there in black and white. (No pun intended.) Yet the films were really only "seen" by one person -- author Paul Auster! What that tells me is Paul Auster has an imagination to rival any sci-fi/fantasy author one could name. He saw in his mind movies that didn't exist, and then had the talent to capture what he saw on paper for us to read. Other reviewers have already detailed the plot. So I won't go into that. I'll just say it's a fairly simple one, really. Nothing earthshattering there. No new ground broken. But Auster takes what could have been the latest Nicholas Sparks novel (and I have nothing against Nicholas Sparks; The Notebook moved me deeply...even changed my life) and infuses it with uncommon three dimensionality. I couldn't put this book down. And I'm not likely to ever forget it. If you like intelligent, compelling novels that (a) don't require a lot of thought to enjoy, or -- paradoxically -- (b) require a lot of though to enjoy, The Book of Illusions will fill the bill nicely.
Rating: Summary: The Book of the Dead Review: Professor Zimmer is a dead man. After loosing his better part (wife and two sons), self-pity, loneliness and drinking are devouring what is left, leading toward the inevitable end. One night he accidentally watches a documentary about silent comedians, and one of them, Hector Mann makes him laugh. To keep himself alive, he jumps at the second chance and starts obsessively studying the work of the mysterious figure who, in 1929, at the beginning of a promising career, one day just disappeared and has not been seen for over fifty years. Everyone who is a little familiar with Auster can spot the distinct characteristics of his style: solitude, chance, and disappearance. After the odd world of Timbuktu, here we have a novel, which is, if you like, Auster to the bone, with his old ideas and tricks accompanied with some new elements, and as for what all this adds up let us see further. For Zimmer this is just a project, and having written a book about Mann's films, he is ready to put it behind, when he gets a letter, inviting him to New Mexico where Hector Mann is allegedly alive. And imbedded in Zimmer's story thus unfolds Mann's older story, whose promising career was shattered when his fiancée accidentally shots his former lover. Mann, to protect his fiancée, buries the body, and escapes. After that, he dedicates his life to atonement, under false identity takes self-tormenting and humiliating jobs, including an employment by his former lover's father. This is crime and punishment in a twisted form, since Hector takes the blame for his fiancée, and thus plunges into the loop of self-humiliation, and learns that he has many identities and many lives, but the question is whether one can escape from himself. Zimmer gets to know Hector's story from Alma, daughter of one of Mann's colleges, who comes to take Zimmer with her back to New Mexico. She is living there on the ranch and is the chronicler: she is writing Mann's memoirs for seven years now, and after reading Zimmer's book about himself, Mann is agreed to invite Zimmer to the ranch and show him his movies, thus to have one legitimate witness to his secret art, his movies-which in one day after his death will be burned by his wife. The meeting between Zimmer and Alma is an act of fate: two lonely and distrustful people who are soul mates and who are not like others: Zimmer's bears his stigmata inside because of his family, while Alma's on the outside, on her face, the left side of which has a big birthmark. They fly together to New Mexico, and Zimmer plunges headlong into a dream-world where nothing as it seems, and where seeing is not believing, anyway. This is the world of living dead, of people who bury themselves alive to escape from the world, and this is their book, The Book of the Dead. In his tenth novel one can find every tool that Auster has used before: first person writer-narrator whose life is shaped by fatal coincidences and chances; Chateaubriand's memoirs as a subtext, since The Book of Illusions is a "memoir", just as Alma's book about Hector--these textual mirrors remind us of Leviathan. Yet, there is more in this: a careful reader detects lots of allusions to the Austerian World; e.g. Zimmer himself comes straight from Moon Palace; his family dies in an airplane crash just like Quinn's in New York Trilogy, not to mention the numerous identities of Quinn's and Mann's; and Zimmer almost hits a dog, etc. It is, basically, a recapitulation of Auster's art, an inventory or a "real" memoir. As for change of tone, there is a drastic shift between the nameless, jovial narrator of Timbuktu and the disillusioned Zimmer of The Book of Illusions; after In the Country of Last Things this probably is Auster's second gloomiest book. And if Timbuktu was about the speculation of an afterlife, then here is the memoir of a man who is already there. The book focuses on death, or rather, the living dead: how one can be "dead" in his life, and how he can live, though he is dead. Zimmer at the end confides us that this book is published after his death; he translates Chateaubriand's book (which was written for 35 years, but in the voice of a dead man), and this book lies in Mann's study, thus suggestive of his intentions with his biography; Alma brings back Zimmer from emotional death; Hector is recalled to life when writes Zimmer. With elegance and skilfulness, Auster connects haphazard events and fates, as life does, and he has done so far, but this time even more subtle way: the different time-layers and character-lives entwine, repeat and mirror each other, creating a shimmering surface. One thing though cannot be accidental: the movie that is not just a topic, but a tool as well; there are two movies "projected" in the text, which one may find disconcerting at first. Zimmer narrates in past tense, yet the two films we "watch" are in present, and since they are quite lengthy, they give another twist and level to the already zigzagging narration. To follow Auster's usual book-in-the-book technique is already rather demanding, but there at least the medium is one and the same; here somehow the textuality and visuality are hybridized, and the result is something airy--maybe the illusion itself. Another new trait in Auster's fiction, however, is definitely positive: thanks for script writing, his dialogues and two-character scenes are much stronger and powerful, they are among the best parts of the book. It is, altogether, a wise book, artful and elegant, the novel of a mature author, with enthralling plot, memorable characters and, more importantly, a strong emotional charge. Some of the scenes will inevitably move the reader, and the philosophic questions raised will give a lot to ponder about. You must not miss it.
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