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Oracle Night
Escrito por Paul Auster
Narrado por Paul Auster
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Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.
Why does his wife suddenly break down in tears in the backseat of a taxi just hours after Sidney begins writing in the notebook? Why does M.R. Chang, the owner of the stationery shop, precipitously shut down his business the next day? What are the connections between a 1938 Warsaw telephone directory and a lost novel in which the hero can predict the future? At what point does animosity explode into violence? To what degree is forgiveness the ultimate expression of love?
Paul Auster's mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book -- only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. At once a meditation on the nature of time and a journey through the labyrinth of one man's imagination, Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster's reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today.
Acciones del libro
Comenzar a escucharInformación sobre el libro
Oracle Night
Escrito por Paul Auster
Narrado por Paul Auster
Descripción
Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.
Why does his wife suddenly break down in tears in the backseat of a taxi just hours after Sidney begins writing in the notebook? Why does M.R. Chang, the owner of the stationery shop, precipitously shut down his business the next day? What are the connections between a 1938 Warsaw telephone directory and a lost novel in which the hero can predict the future? At what point does animosity explode into violence? To what degree is forgiveness the ultimate expression of love?
Paul Auster's mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book -- only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. At once a meditation on the nature of time and a journey through the labyrinth of one man's imagination, Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster's reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today.
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I really like the story in a story in a story concept, but I really disliked the extended footnotes. Not his greatest, but it doesn't make it a bad effort.
Rating: 4Love Paul Auster.
Rating: 42003. This book started out amazing. It breathes New York City. It has a main character, a writer, named Sidney Orr, age 34, whom I really like. It tells Sidney's story over a few days in 1982, when his life is particularly crazy. It also tells several stories he's writing, one of which I found extremely compelling and wanted to get back to, but he never finishes that part. The story reaches a dead end. Some of the other stories were told such a way that it was like a writer was telling you about what he was writing instead of actually writing it. This was cool, in small doses, but was carried too far, and lost my interest. The original story about Sidney is also quite compelling, but I was disappointed in how it ended. The book as a whole seemed to be saying something profound about life in general using writing as a metaphor for life. Life is random. Life altering things happen when you least expect them, you can't control them and they don't mean anything, they just happen. And they don't tie up neatly like a Hollywood Movie, or even most novels. So it doesn't tie up neatly either, and it was unsettling, and ultimately unsatisfying too. I don't want to read a long rambling book about randomness and lack of cohesion in the world, even if it's very well written. So while it definitely has some brilliant moments and good prose, I didn't love it.
Rating: 4One of his best!
Rating: 5If you're patient as Noah during the, let's face it, banal and at times downright tedious buildup (before all the loops become apparent), Auster eventually delivers a fantastically rewarding and creative plot with all his complex, layered reverberations between (story world) 'fact' and (story world) 'fiction'. An A for plot and originality, a B average for stylistics/rhetoric/narrative prosody, a B- for anticipation sculpting/reader pathos baiting, particularly in the first half. To his credit, it is one of the very few works of literary fiction whose second half is the clear superior to its first. My advice to the author would be: work harder to enrich the (story world) fictive strains, so that they serve a greater role than that of motif generation, as adroit as you are at that task. Make the fictive myse-en-abyme more of a dramatic center where "we care what happens" there and not just in the effects these strains have on the central, "real world" drama.
Rating: 4A complicated novel about an author who's writing a book about an author who's reading a book about another author (etc...) and in the process finds himself digging unexpected stuff about his own life out of his subconscious. But there's also a Magic Notebook and a Mysterious Chinaman (do they really still have those?) and it all somehow boils down to a fistfight between two men about a woman. Very stylish, but I'm not sure what it did for me, if anything.
Rating: 3I consider Paul Auster to be my most worthwhile discovery of 2005. I picked this one up randomly, because the cover seemed mysterious. And with a title like "Oracle Night", I was willing to try it. And it was every bit worth it. He relies on footnotes in this book, but he rarely abuses it. I didn't get to read any of his other books that year. Seattle Public Library had one other title, and I didn't get a chance to read it (I owe SPL money for it, actually).
Rating: 4Paul Auster really disappointed me with Timbuktu, and I wasn't especially willing to give him a second chance. But then I saw the cover of this book and knew I had lost all choice in the matter. Paul Auster and I, you see, both love office supplies. Or at least the protaganist in Oracle Night does. When he described finding the perfect notebook and the need to write something meaningful to begin it, I knew immediately and exactly what he meant.
Rating: 5On top of our office supply affinity, this book encompasses several parallel plot lines within a single work. It's a detective story, a love story, a whatever-you-want-it-to-be story. How lucky - that's my favorite kind!
This blew my mind. One of the most lucid arguments I've ever read on 'what is a novel', argued in the form of a novel. Not to be missed!
Rating: 5The story was confusing,the end upset me,and i feel depressed after finishing it....may be it wasn't the right time for me to read it...
the part about his mysterious blue notebook,and how it give Sidney Auster's protagonist,some kind of power over his writing.... and it's effective impact in changing the direction of the story from time to time, was the only interesting thing .....
"Those notebooks are very friendly, but they can also be cruel, and you have to watch out you don't get lost in them," warns Trause.
Rating: 1the part about his mysterious blue notebook,and how it give Sidney Auster's protagonist,some kind of power over his writing.... and it's effective impact in changing the direction of the story from time to time, was the only interesting thing .....
"Those notebooks are very friendly, but they can also be cruel, and you have to watch out you don't get lost in them," warns Trause.
The plot was intriguing, the characters sympathetic, the writing style fine, and yet I still came away from this one indifferent. I'll try another of his books--this may have been a bad starting point--but on the whole, meh.
Rating: 3Oracle Night tells the story of a New York writer, who has been very ill. We see him start to write again, and get pieces of the things he's writing. We wander with him through New York and meet his wife and best friend. The plot is a bit jumbled, but the writing is quite good. I kept reading, but when I finished the book, it didn't feel like it. The ending wasn't really an ending and I didn't feel like I read one story. If you don't mind a lack of plot and like Auster's style, read this book, but I can't really recommend it otherwise.
Rating: 3This is a novelist's novel, a book that revolves around the mechanics of writing. While the central concept interested me and Auster's style and technique amazed me the eventual resolution of the story left me cold, especially as I saw it coming.
Rating: 3This is a dense story, with many ramifications, stories nested within the story and metaphysical coincidences. Thanks to Auster's precise writing and impeccable storytelling, the reader never feels lost in the multiple plots. Reading Oracle Night is quite like wandering the rooms of a museum: they are arranged in a precise, chronological order, yet multiple doors allow visitors to momentarily get back in time or immerge in a different genre before returning to the main exhibit. This meandering must be how a writer feels when he is obsessed with a story, and Auster manages to bring this feeling to his readers in a remarkable way.
Rating: 4Sidney Orr, an author recuperating from an unspecified illness, buys a blue notebook from a local stationery store. The book catapults him on an orgy of writing and Auster, in typical style, loops stories within stories, to produce a confusing matrix of narratives. Fiction and reality, of course, are intermingled and cross-referenced. Random events tear the plot away from the credible into the surreal. One character gets inadvertently and nightmarishly trapped in an underground bomb shelter. This is all excellent Austeresque stuff, but if you like straightforward narrative and unambiguous resolutions this will not be your thing,
Rating: 5This a story about a writer who is recovering from a traumatic injury. As his passion to write returns (in a mystical notebook purchased from a very strange character) he finds that he has a different perspective on his life which centers on his marriage and career. He explores this with his writing and discovers secrets that he has previously ignored.I found this book hard to read with a second story being told in the footnotes. Never the less the book was engaging until the end when it seemed the author just decided it was time to finish it and did so hastily. There was opportunity to tie the two story lines together which I believe would have been much more interesting.
Rating: 2Auster’s novels are bizarre and yet they suck you in. This one is no exception. It catches a feeling about life that is profound: something about its insecurity and the way we stumble about, in a trial-and-error way. The novel provides all kinds of clues to muse about these themes and to connect the loose ends in the story (without really solving the puzzle). I found it very easy to slip into Sidney Orr's life: get to know his job, marriage, friends, his feelings, his suspicions and calculations. Apart from Sidney's inner life, the novel presents several strange (and dark) events, surprising yet convincing.
Rating: 4Oracle Night was my second read by Paul Auster and one that I selected for two reasons - 1. I found Travels in the Scriptorum to be unique, intriguing, and thoroughly enjoyable. 2. It was on the cheapie rack at B&N. The second point shouldn't belittle the book in any way. It is a solid outing for Mr. Auster, just not as solid as Travels.As I believe I've mentioned in past reviews, my reading is cyclical. The book I'm reading during the slow down period always seems to be short shrifted to some extent. Such was the way of Oracle Night. I enjoyed the book but found that reading it in 5 - 10 page increments each day didn't help me engage with it or the characters as much as I'd have liked. Keep that in mind as you read my review.All that said, I'd recommend you pick it up, read it, and give it the attention it deserves. It is a good book.**SPOILER ALERT (Highlight)**The story is about Sidney Orr an author who is in recovery from a recent battle with a near-fatal illness. Sidney is trying to get back into the swing of writing (and life in general) as strange things begin to happen along the way. His wife begins to say strange things like "just love me and everything will be OK" along with exhibitions of unusual behavior. He buys a Portuguese notebook to begin writing and becomes obsessive about the notebook itself and it's powers to draw out the story. One of his (and his wife's) best friends has a son who goes into rehab and Sidney is the one tasked with reaching out to him. The store owner who sold Sidney the notebook turns out to be a shady character who is interested in opening a bordello (which Sidney visits reluctantly). And so on...As with Travels, Auster has the story within a story which I found didn't work as well in this case. The sub-story was interesting but I found it to be more of a distraction. Since the story in Travels played into the main character's life, I kept expecting he sub-story ("Oracle Night") to be intertwined with Sidney's life. While there were loose connections, it was not to the extent it was in Travels. Maybe that comparison's unfair.*****END SPOILERS*****Find the book and read it. You'll likely enjoy it.
Rating: 4A shorter, less substantial book by Auster, but a good one nonetheless. I quite like the intertextuality he presents - the narrator is a writer, and is writing a book himself. I've read other attempts at this kind of thing that can fall quite heavily on their arses, so it's refreshing to read one that handles the effect so competently.
Rating: 3The writing was quite good ... really drew me in and created a very foreboding atmosphere ... but the sum of the parts was less than the whole here ... that is, the various elements of the plot were great on their own, but didn't really pull together at the end.
Rating: 4Typical Auster : nothing is what it seems; regular people get lost in a mystery of coincidences
Rating: 4