Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions
The narrator of The Book of Illusions, David Zimmer, has lost his wife and two sons in a plane crash. Alone in his house in Vermont, he drowns his sorrows in alcohol. He has taken a semester off from his teaching job but he doesn’t feel like he could ever go back to class. One night, while zapping, he stumbles upon a silent film featuring comic actor Hector Mann and laughs for the first time since his terrible loss, and this event changes his life…
David Zimmer decides to watch all twelve films featuring Hector Mann. The only copies of these films, which had been lost for a while, were sent anonymously to different film institutes and museums in the United States and in Europe. David decides to study these films thoroughly and finally, to write a book about Hector Mann. He is also intrigued by the complete mystery that is Mann’s life. One day of 1928, as he was beginning to establish himself as an actor, Mann simply disappeared. After a while, everybody assumed he was dead… until David receives a strange letter which contradicts this notion, some time after his book is published.
Like his other novels, The Book of Illusions deals with the fundamental solitude which is man’s (Mann’s) lot, and with problems of identity. What defines a man? What makes him himself? His surroundings, his family, his craft? What happens when he must abandon what defines him, when it is taken away from him? And what if he does not want be himself anymore? Is such a thing possible? Auster tries to answer these questions, and we see that Mann’s story, which is reflected in his movies, is echoed in turn by David Zimmer’s own existence.
Everything ties up in The Book of Illusions, and, except the fate of the characters, nothing in this novel is left to chance. As in Oracle Night for instance, we have different levels of narrations, with stories within the story. I always enjoy the pleasure of Auster’s flowing, easy but precise narrative. The only passage I found myself struggling with is a two-pages translation from the introduction of Chateaubriand’s Memoires d’outre-tombe, but then again, I could never get past the first ten pages of these memoirs when I tried to read them years ago. Chateaubriand’s works become part of the story when Zimmer is asked to make a new translation for a collection of classics, and Chateaubriand’s own concept of memoirs is nicely echoed in Mann’s story, as well as in the narrator’s. There are plenty of subtle links in this novel, and I can’t repeat enough how much I like Paul Auster’s world of fiction, which I discovered pretty recently, a world both familiar and eerie, sad but magic at the same time, and always powerful and enticing…
Rating: 4,5/5
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