Rating: 
Summary: Horrible Night
Review: re: A Reader from New York: you took the words right out of my mouth.With the exception of Invention of Solitude, his early poetry, and the New York Trilogy, I've tended to read Auster fairly uncritically, preferring to delight in the purely visceral satisfaction of his narratives. I finished Oracle Night in one sitting, after which my wife read it almost as fast. We've since spent several hours over the course of the last few days trying to agree on how bad this book really is. The novel is all action and no content; the "philosophical" statements (i.e. "words have power") are tossed around willy-nilly without having been earned; the characters are laughably without substance and stereotyped to an embarrasing degree; Auster's traditionally austere prose has become virtually sterile; and that dialogue: o it makes me cringe! As for Auster being remembered as "one of the great novelists of our time", any novel by Harry Mathews (an American writer who deserves more attention) makes this book read like a high school creative writing excercise.
Rating: 
Summary: An Intricate and Well-Crafted Story --- A Memorable Read
Review: Read the first sentence of ORACLE NIGHT and you'll be caught in the vortex of this intricate, well-crafted story. The plot seems simple enough at first. A man recovering from an undefined illness takes a walk around his neighborhood to gather his thoughts and get his bearings. He stops at a new stationery store, introduces himself to the strange but friendly owner, and buys a crisp blue notebook made in Portugal. He returns home to get ready for dinner with his wife, whom he adores, and her old-time family friend, another writer who --- it is rumored --- is finishing yet another book. Upon closer inspection readers realize that the main character, Sidney Orr, is grasping at a writing career he fears may be slipping away from him. The blue notebook inspires fevered writing sessions that lead him to question whether fiction predicts or limits his future, and reveals a darker version to the sunnier reality that he conveys or believes to be true. With every sentence and each turned page, readers gather new scraps of information about Sidney and his life. Yet ORACLE NIGHT is a story within a story, a piece of multifaceted fiction revealed as Sidney scribbles in his blue book from Portugal. And what he discovers as he writes is that the secrets of daily life can be worse than the scariest fiction and what may appear to be a dead end. ORACLE NIGHT is a tightly spun tale, a compilation of several stories or portraits of people who struggle to live the lives they think they've always wanted, and ultimately discover that it may be okay to change course somewhere in the middle. Somewhere in the middle is where we join these characters who live in New York within the intertwined circles of the publishing world and struggle with the question of who they are, will be and ultimately should be. Paul Auster, well-known author of THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS and TIMBUKTU, will not disappoint readers who have looked forward to his new work; this 243-page novel is a fast but memorable read. The structure alone is a testament to the author's craft. Using footnotes to introduce elements of character background and progress reports on the fiction that Sidney is working on, Auster throws readers off course, making them struggle to maintain a hold on the story at hand without getting lost in past events. Or is it his way of reintroducing the theme --- or question --- of whether fiction predicts or limits the future? Because of this structure and the way the story begins, readers may feel as if they have interrupted a story somewhere in the middle, but they will be too interested in what happens next to worry about what they have missed. --- Reviewed by Heather Grimshaw
Rating: 
Summary: Compulsive and original
Review: Sidney Orr is a novelist living in New York. At the beginning of "Oracle Night", he is still recovering from a serious illness. The Novel is set in 1982 and the reader follows the novelist's life for nine eventful days. The plot starts when Sidney discovers a blue notebook at the Paper Palace, a stationary shop in Brooklyn. Soon Sidney falls under the spell of the empty notebook and he starts using it to write the beginning of his new novel. He at once finds himself trapped in a world of premonitions and events which threaten his marriage and undermine his faith in reality. Paul Auster skilfully mingles the realms of everyday life with the imaginary world the Sidney is trying to create in the blue notebook. A compulsive and original novel. On this audiobook, you can hear the writer reading his own novel, which is a nice complement to the novel itself.
Rating:
Summary: The Illusionist Does It Again
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: About premonitions and reality
Review: Sidney Orr, a writer recovering from an illness everyone thought he wouldn't recover from, walks out of a stationery shop with a blue Portuguese notebook. As he starts writing a story in this book about a man who has had a near death experience and sees in that a sign to start a new life, strange events occur around him. The owner of the store closes his business overnight and his wife breaks down in tears at which point he fears his marriage might be over.
Slowly but surely, Auster weaves a wonderful tale in this novel, where the lives of all these characters become more realistic as the story develops. Orr will spend time with M. R, Chang, the stationery store owner and will also piece together a part of his wife's past that she never spoke of.
This is a fascinating story, superbly told by Paul Auster.
Rating:
Summary: Title?
Review: Someone says that the book is filled with unfinished stories, and while I agree, I think I can force an explanation for that. I'm not really big on finding-the-hidden-symbols-in-the-book-and-if-there-isn't-any-let's-just-make-up-some, but I remember there's this part where the author in the story makes up a story of what happens between his wife and his mentor, and while the truth is never stated right out, his imagination is assumed to be the right explanation. I think what Auster means by leaving things unexplained is for us to use our imagination like the author in the story does and make up stories to fill in the gaps!
Just a guess.
Rating:
Summary: When good writers go bad
Review: There are only a few possible explanations for the existence of Paul Auster's "Oracle Night":
1. Auster signed a multi-book deal and had one due.
2. Auster had two stories (neither with an ending) too short to be published as a single book.
3. Auster wanted to see if he could pass anything off as literature. Whatever the reason, this book is what happens when good writers go bad. Auster's man character in this book, writer Sidney Orr, went bad once already. He is recovering from a mystery illness that nearly left him pushing up daisies. Away from his pen for a year, he ventures down to The Olde Curiousity Shoppe...excuse me, The Paper Palace, owned by the stereotypically inscrutable Mr. M.R. Chang, and picks up a mysterious, blue notebook made in Portugal (don't question the location--you won't find an answer.) This curious notebook subsequently allows our hero to break through his writers block. The gripping tale that flows out of Sidney's rediscovered chops is the story of a man who must reexamine his life after a near-smooshing by a wayward concrete gargoyle that flies its roost from a building he's walking under. This character decides to abandon his wife and randomly catch a flight to Kansas City. Eventually moneyless, he hooks up with the taxi driver who picked him up and finds himself overseeing a bizarre, underground museum of phone books the taxi driver has tended unseen for years. Even worse for this escapee from his own life, he winds up trapped in a bomb shelter inside the museum with no one to rescue him. Now this is an interesting story so far, but at this point Auster completely folds and abandons the whole story-within-the-story, introducing a pivotal new character into Sidney's life and a whole 'nother plotline. But this abandonment of the tale unfolding in his mystery notebook and the switch into a new series of events in his life--a highly improbable set that is unfortunately devoid of interest--leads to one of the most unsatisfying endings of any book I've ever read. Meant to be a meditation on synchronicity, "Oracle Night" instead becomes the mere musings of a talented author who didn't have anything new to say. It's so inconsequential in its moral, the entire book could have been the word "whoa" and it would have had more to say about the human condition than what Auster wrote. The supposed "deep" message can only be deemed so by junior high English students. Remedial junior high English students. The current condition of fiction today is desperate. A random pick of any recent novel will more often than not yield page bloat, lightweight characterizations, morally bankrupt morals, pointless plotlines, and a flat finale. Paul Auster becomes yet another decent author to phone one in to his editor. I don't give out five-star and one-star ratings lightly, but "Oracle Night" is so utterly devoid of any reason for existing that I've got to go with the lone star or face many sleepless nights because of guilt for leading others astray. Skip this one entirely and thank me later.
Rating: 
Summary: Intriguing; but ultimately disappointing
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Reads like a Russian doll
Review: This is my first Auster book, and I loved it. It reads like a novel within a novel within a screenplay, etc., etc. The turducken-like effect works, though! I could not stop reading it. Also, it verged on the genre known as magical realism. I think that Auster is approaching or has entered the realm of Jose Saramago, a truly rarified arena. Wow, an American writing literature in 2003 - who knew?
Rating:
Summary: Inspiring and mesmerizing
Review: This little book gave me that rare experience of being absolutely unable to stop reading the thing! I had read, and so thoroughly enjoyed, The Music of Chance some years ago, that upon fininshing, I immediately went back to the beginning and read it again. I don't know why it's taken me so long to read another Auster, but I was certainly not disappointed. I loved M.R. Chang, Ed Victory, and Sidney Orr - even the horrible Jacob is intriguing, almost sympathetic in his way, before the awful and unexpected denouement. I didn't feel the ending was abrupt, as some reviewers have - maybe it's the kind of book that's too good to have to stop reading, or writing. Curse you, Paul Auster! Now I have to read all your other books.
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