The Book of Illusions: A Novel FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review
Paul Auster is a superb memoirist (The Invention of Solitude), an original, sometimes enigmatic novelist (The New York Trilogy), and a screenwriter responsible for such idiosyncratic creations as Smoke and Lulu on the Bridge. The Book of Illusions brings together his gift for fluid, evocative prose and his ongoing fascination with the aesthetics of film to produce a dark, moving meditation on the power -- and fragility -- of art.
College professor David Zimmer succumbs to an extended, near-suicidal depression when his wife and sons die in a plane crash. While mindlessly channel-surfing one drunken evening, he stumbles across a clip from a silent comedy starring Hector Mann, a mysterious figure who disappeared in 1929. Intrigued -- then ultimately obsessed -- by Mann, Zimmer devotes himself to a rigorous examination of Mann's 12 films and eventually publishes a critical study on them. When the book comes out, a stranger contacts Zimmer, informing him that Mann is very much alive and inviting him to the filmmaker's private hideaway in New Mexico. What follows is a complex, constantly surprising story -- a narrative of Zimmer's cross-country journey and a series of revelations about the guilty secret that warped Mann's life, changing him from an ambitious artist to a reclusive genius living in a self-contained world.
Packed with narrative pleasures -- most notably the detailed analyses of Mann's films, descriptions so precise and thoroughly real it's difficult to believe the films don't actually exist -- The Book of Illusions is an intelligent, elegantly written novel that displays Auster's prodigious talent for creating dark atmosphere and exposing the mysterious connections between art and life. Bill Sheehan
FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Six months after losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a clip from a lost film by the silent comedian Hector Mann. Zimmer's interest is piqued, and soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to study the works of this mysterious figure, who vanished from sight in 1929." "Who was Hector Mann? An Argentinian-born comic genius, with a signature white suit and fluttering black mustache, a master of "backpedals and dodges...sudden torques and lunging pavanes...double takes and hop-steps and rhumba swivels." Presumed dead for sixty years, he had flashed briefly across American movie screens, tantalizing the public with the promise of a brilliant future, and then, just as the silent era came to an end, he walked out of his house one January morning and was never heard from again." Zimmer's research leads him to write the first full-length study of Hector's films. When the book is published the following year, a letter turns up in Zimmer's mailbox bearing a return address from a small town in New Mexico - supposedly written by Hector's wife: "Hector has read your book and would like to meet you. Are you interested in paying us a visit?" Is the letter a hoax, or is Hector Mann still alive? Torn between doubt and belief, Zimmer hesitates, until one night a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever.
FROM THE CRITICS
Jonathan Yardley - The Washington Post Book World
One of our most inventive and least predictable authors.
Richard Locke - The Wall Street Journal
A literary original who is perfecting a genre of his own.
The New Yorker
Auster, a master of narrative sleight-of-hand and cerebral formalism, has now turned to the theme of disappearance. David Zimmer, a professor of comparative literature, loses his wife and two children in a plane crash; he is considering suicide when he sees a silent-film clip that makes him laugh. He learns that the film's director, Hector Mann, inexplicably went missing in 1929, and when Zimmer writes an academic study of Mann's lost work he is drawn into a pleasingly noirish sequence of events (involving shots of tequila, a pearl-handled gun, and an attractive woman with a distinctive birthmark) that lead him to the dying director, in New Mexico. By the book's end, Mann's disappearance has become a springboard for Zimmer's deepest questions about the burden of art. Most movingly, though, Auster's novel shows how swiftly the guy ropes of identity can be cut by a simple sentence: "A plane falls from the sky, and all the passengers are killed."
Book Magazine - Paul Evans
David Zimmer is shattered. On the eve of his tenth wedding anniversary, his wife and two young sons are killed in a plane crash, plunging him into despair. "I remember very little of what happened to me that summer," he recounts. "For several months, I lived in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity, rarely stirring from the house, rarely bothering to eat or shave or change my clothes.... whenever any of my friends came around, I always invited them in, but their tearful embraces and long, embarrassed silences didn't help. It was better to be left alone, I found, better to gut out the days in the darkness of my own head." One night, however, while anesthetizing his hurt with television, he startles himself with a foreign sound—his own laugh. The laughter is provoked by Hector Mann, an obscure silent movie comedian whose last film was released in 1928. David resolves to seek out every film Hector made—somehow they might save his life. From this gripping beginning emerges The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster's tenth novel and certainly his best. An indefatigable worker, Auster has written much: poems, memoirs, nonfiction, translations of French poetry and prose. He wrote screenplays for the ultrahip indie films Smoke and Blue in the Face, starring Harvey Keitel, and himself directed the baffling, arty Lulu on the Bridge (also starring Keitel). Auster made his name in the mid-'80s with the New York Trilogy, three lean novels that conflated film noir and the work of Franz Kafka. The style was skeletal and literary, the themes almost textbook postmodern—dislocation, confusion, identity—and the books, which were critically hailed, soldmoderately. What distinguished them, however, from most experimental fare was Auster's gift for narrative. It's a skill he has only sharpened over the years; Timbuktu, his most recent novel, was as flamboyantly unorthodox as his early work (its hero was a dog) and scored as a bestseller. The Book of Illusions doesn't shy away from big ideas or literary references. There are allusions aplenty to Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of Auster's favorite writers, and protagonist David is a comparative literature professor at work on a translation of aphoristic nineteenth-century memoirist Chateaubriand. But story here is at the steering wheel, and the novel surges ahead. That narrative charge and some of Auster's best prose, along with vivid characterization, give the book the drive and dazzle reminiscent of the classic hardboiled yarns of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Hector Mann may be Auster's finest creation. It's hard in fiction to portray artistic genius—the giant exception is Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus—but Auster deftly summarizes the clown's brilliance: "Every now and then, Hector's mustache would twitch in consternation, as if to punctuate the proceedings with a faint groan or mumbled aside. It wasn't slapstick and anarchy so much as character and pace, a smoothly orchestrated mixture of objects, bodies, and minds." And, thrillingly, Hector's a mystery man. After his last movie, he'd simply—poof!—vanished. Zimmer's quest, then, and the novel's intricate plot, evolves into a search for Hector himself as well as his movies, and Zimmer discovers amazing stuff. Hector's past unreels as a saga of disguise (his given name, Chaim Mandelbaum, is only one of his aliases), conflict (his studio boss is a rip-off artist), romantic intrigue (Hector is torn between two lovers, the sweet Brigid and the sultry Frieda) and murder. There's also the salvific power of love and the strange fascination of Hector's self-flagellating efforts to redeem himself from his past sins. The compulsive moviemaker makes a vow: If he can't stop himself from creating new films, he'll at least promise himself never to show them in public. For David, who himself had written an academic study on "Rimbaud, Dashiell Hammett, Laura Riding, J.D. Salinger, and others—poets and novelists of uncommon brilliance who, for one reason or another, had stopped," this self-abnegation is tantalizing. The Book of Illusions, like much of Auster's fiction, offers a tale within a tale—David's story of loss, love and renewal is at least as significant as Hector's. The narratives intersect elaborately, and as David travels farther into Hector's darkness, his own shadows deepen—for the first time in his life, a gun is pointed at him; he hops planes to weird destinations; he falls in love again; he endures a loved one's suicide. Jammed with incident, coincidence, plot twists and surprises, the novel is a gleaming storytelling machine. It's also—and here's the postmodern touch—all about "texts." David not only pursues Hector but writes his biography; Hector keeps a journal; and Hector's movies are the "texts" that provide David both hope and motivation. Auster, himself a filmmaker, is especially good at critiquing and celebrating silent film artists: "They had invented a syntax of the eye, a grammar of pure kinesis, and except for the costumes and the cars and the quaint furniture in the background, none of it could possibly grow old," he writes. "It was thought translated into action, human will expressing itself through the human body, and therefore it was for all time. Most silent comedies hardly even bothered to tell stories. They were like poems, like the renderings of dreams, like some intricate choreography of the spirit, and because they were dead, they probably spoke more deeply to us now than they had to the audiences of their time. We watched them across a great chasm of forgetfulness, and the very things that separated them from us were in fact what made them so arresting." Auster's critical acuity, his yen for the philosophical and his love of language are all in extravagant display with The Book of Illusions. It's the sheer delight of Auster's joy in narrative that wins us over.
Publishers Weekly
David Zimmer, an English professor in Vermont, is trying to rebuild his life-after his family perishes in an airplane crash-by researching the work of Hector Mann, a minor figure from the era of silent movies, in this enigmatic, elliptical 10th novel, one of Auster's best. As in much of the writer's fiction, the narrative revolves around coincidence, fate and odd resonances. Mann's world, like Zimmer's, collapses in a single instant, and Mann, like Zimmer, embarks on self-imposed exile as a way to deal with his grief and do penance. Mann disappeared at the height of his career in 1929, but when Zimmer's book about him is published in the 1980s, it elicits a mysterious invitation: would Zimmer like to meet Mann, who is alive and has been working in secret as actor/director Hector Spelling? The skeptical scholar is lured from Vermont by Alma Grund, who grew up around Mann and is writing his biography. As Grund and Zimmer fall in love, she fills in the decades-long gap in Mann's life-a strange American odyssey that culminated on a ranch in New Mexico where he made movies he refused to screen for anyone. As in previous novels, Auster here makes the unbelievable completely credible, and his overall themes are very much of a piece with those of earlier works: the "mutinous unpredictability of matter" and the way storytellers shape and organize unpredictability. A darker and more somber mood shadows this book; Mann and Zimmer both are tragic figures-even melodramatic-and their stories are compelling. Auster is a novelist of ideas who hasn't forgotten that his first duty is to tell a good story. (Sept.) Forecast: Auster devotees will fall upon his latest with glee, recognizing it as a worthy successor to his classic New York Trilogy. The novel should do very well in the short run-it is a BOMC and QPB selection, and foreign rights have been sold in 16 countries-but its true success may be as a staple of Auster's backlist. Author tour. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
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WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
Paul Auster has been an unswerving voice no matter what form he chooses, no matter what tale he imagines. . .
— Michael Ondaatje
Through all its dark and delightful twists and turns. . . This artful and elegant novel may be Auster's best ever.
— Peter Carey
An enthralling new summit in Paul Auster's art.
— Jonathan Lethem
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