Review by New York Times Review
PAUL AUSTER is not so much a writer's writer as a writer for people who long to be writers. His novels have a habit of unpacking themselves as they go, showing their workings with the gentle condescension of a creative writing tutor addressing a roomful of hopeful amateurs. His frankness about technique is complemented by the modesty of his sets. All you need is a bed, a chair, a notebook, a room - or perhaps Manhattan or Brooklyn, if you prefer some slightly bigger rooms - and you're there, a modern postmodernist, like Beckett and Kafka, only cooler. "Travels in the Scriptorium" even sounds like the title of a workshop, and the writing-school ambience takes a while to disperse. On Page 1 a man sits on a strange bed in a strange room. He has no idea where he is. He has amnesia. (Your reviewer confesses to sneaking a look at the end at this point, checking for the sentence "It had all been a dream.") "Who is he? What is he doing here? When did he arrive and how long will he remain?" the narrator asks, closing his inquiry (Four Questions Every Screenwriter Should Answer!) with an unpromising hook. "With any luck, time will tell us all." With any luck, Auster will tell us all. He doesn't, of course. This is the democratic classroom of postmodernism: teacher gives the hints, students construct the sense. "For the moment, our only task is to study the pictures as attentively as we can and refrain from drawing any premature conclusions," the unnamed narrator informs us somewhat priggishly. It is, in fact, difficult to draw any conclusions at all, but a study of the text will enable the reader to find out this much. The man on the bed is known as Mr. Blank. He is dressed in a pair of pajamas. The first thing he notices is that all the objects in his room are identified by labels: TABLE, on the table; LAMP, on the lamp, and so forth, in a manner that is either deeply mystifying, or deeply cute, depending on one's interpretation of course. There is a desk or a DESK nearby, with a stack of photographs and some pages of a manuscript. There is a window, but the shade is drawn. Importantly, Mr. Blank feels too anxious and weak to investigate the DOOR. What happens next will make sense only to the keener reader: like T. S. Eliot, Auster expects some homework. First the telephone rings ("a black rotary model from the late '40s or early '50s of the past century" - Auster is not a Motorola kind of man) and a person identifying himself as "James P. Flood" has a mysterious conversation with Mr. Blank. Mr. Blank hangs up. A mysterious woman named Anna Blume arrives and gives Mr. Blank a sponge bath (arousing a minor character, "Mr. Bigshot," some relation, perhaps, of a similar personality called "Mr. Johnson" in "Oracle Night"). Ms. Blume leaves after feeding Mr. Blank breakfast and kindly performing a masturbatory act on Mr. Bigshot. "The fact is, Mr. Blank, without you I wouldn't be anyone," she says, suggestively. Mr. Blank reads some of the manuscript on the desk. It's a mysterious science-fiction tale. A man named Samuel Farr mysteriously drops by. Another mysterious woman arrives and shows Mr. Blank her breasts before serving him lunch. Despite there being more coming and going than a parlor farce, Mr. Blank still cannot seem to make it to the door, which unaccountable fact his author tries to cover for by hamming up Mr. Blank's confused state. Mr. Blank is "astonished" to discover his desk chair has wheels, and experiences "immense astonishment" on finding his room has an en-suite bathroom, so is clearly in no state to cope with any kind of excursion. As the title of Auster's 1986 novel has it, this may as well be "The Locked Room." Auster fans will similarly recognize that all the visitors are characters from Auster's previous novels. It's neatly done, and very claustrophobic. The novel presents us with a closed room in a closed world, ruled by the creed outlined by the writer, Quinn, in "City of Glass": "What interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories." It should be said that Auster is also interested in what stories are written on. He has always been a stationery fetishist: Sidney Orr is practically debauched by an attractive Portuguese notebook in "Oracle Night"; Quinn, too, is always on the lookout for good spiral notebooks. Mr. Blank has it bad: as if the annotated furniture and the typescript-strewn desk weren't enough, soon, with terrible inevitability, even the ceiling begins to resemble "a sheet of blank paper." All the world's a page! OR all the world's a book, in which the Figure of the Author (could it be Mr. Blank?) writes with his arbitrary pen. The author writes, and a story unfolds, the purest possible demonstration of chance: characters only coming to be, events only coming to pass, because - hesitating at the top of the page - the writer chose to say this and not that. As Orr says in "Oracle Night," "randomness stalks us every day of our lives." Auster is usually brilliant at evoking this kind of contingency, but it feels thin and unsatisfying here. When his novels work, it's because he successfully persuades us of the writer's oldest trick: that his characters have somehow broken free of their creator. They may be make-believe, products of a playful ideology, but they feel real and their feelings matter. In Mr. Blank's Staples universe, this never happens, which makes it hard to care. Later, Mr. Blank finds the labels on the objects have been changed by an unknown hand - DESK is now marked LAMP, and so on. Which made this reader want to place a label marked WHY? on Mr. Auster. Sophie Harrison is a contributing editor at Granta.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Auster, a literary descendent of Kafka and Borges, is fascinated by the very act of storytelling. Consequently, his novels always involve some form of doubling as one story coils within another. In the wake of The Brooklyn Follies0 (2006), an expansive novel, Auster presents a spare, metaphysical fable. Mr. Blank, Auster's protagonist, is confined to an austere room, uncertain of his status or the room's location. Names carry great weight in Auster's uncanny fiction, and so it figures that Mr. Blank has lost his memory. His keepers have provided him with a stack of photographs of people who seem dimly familiar and with a typescript written by another prisoner in another time and place. As Mr. Blank reads this compelling account of violence and loss in the Confederation, a land that vaguely resembles nineteenth-century America during the genocidal assault against indigenous peoples, various visitors arrive, claiming to be Blank's victims. But what are his crimes? Auster fans will recognize a parade of characters from earlier works, reaching back to his famed New York Trilogy 0 (1985-86), In the Country of Last Things 0 (1987), 0 and Leviathan 0 (1992), as Auster coyly celebrates the power of the imagination and marvels over the labyrinthine nature of the mind in an archly playful and shrewdly philosophical tribute to the transcendence of stories. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
On the centennial year of Samuel Beckett's birth, Auster's new novel nods to the old master. We open with a man sitting in a room. The man doesn't remember his name, and a camera hidden in the ceiling takes a picture of him once a second. The man whom the third-person narrator calls Mr. Blank spends the single day spanned by the book being looked after, questioned and reading a fragmentary narrative written by a man named Sigmund Graf from a country called the Confederation who has been given the mission of tracking down a renegade soldier named Ernesto Land. During the course of the day, a former policeman, a doctor, two attendants and Mr. Blank's lawyer visit the room, and Mr. Blank learns he is accused of horrible crimes. (His lawyer claims he is accused of everything "from conspiracy to commit fraud to negligent homicide. From defamation of character to first-degree murder.") But this may or may not be true the narrative veers toward ambiguity. While Auster's lean, poker-faced prose creates a satisfyingly claustrophobic allegory, the tidy, self-referential ending lends a writing-exercise patina to the work. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
An old man awakens in a room he doesn't recognize and begins reading a mysterious manuscript seemingly left there for him. Kafkaesque? No, Austeresque. With a national tour; reading group guide. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Rarely has a novelist pulled the strings of his puppetry more transparently, as ardent fans may find this meta-fictional fable profound, while others may dismiss it as a literary parlor trick. With a Kafkaesque protagonist in an M.C. Escher plot, Auster (The Brooklyn Follies, 2005, etc.) returns to the themes of identity, memory, illusion and creativity that have marked his work since his breakthrough New York Trilogy (The Locked Room, 1986, etc.). During that period, he was regarded as a sort of metaphysical mystery writer, a reputation he lives up to here. The protagonist is nameless except as "the old man," until author and reader make a compact to refer to him as "Mr. Blank," which immediately becomes the name by which other characters know him. Those characters then invoke the names of others recycled from Auster's fiction (Benjamin Sachs, David Zimmer, Fanshawe, Quinn), whom Mr. Blank is supposed to know but doesn't. Except for vague memories and dreams, he knows nothing. He has been committed to or incarcerated within a room that is the totality of his environment, or perhaps he is there by choice. Everything in the room carries a label ("lamp," "desk," etc.), for his command of the connection between language and reality (whatever that is) is tenuous. There are photographs on the desk that might well spark clues to his identity, and a manuscript that purports to be the memoir of a previous occupant of this very room. Visitors come and go: a doctor, a former inspector, a lawyer and others, some of whom may have had some connection with Mr. Blank, none of whom he remembers and most of whom he will forget as soon as they leave. Otherwise, nothing much happens, until the novel culminates in Mr. Blank's discovery of another manuscript with which the reader will be quite familiar. Though some will find that the illumination within the final three pages justifies the existential tedium preceding it, others will agree with Mr. Blank, who is "not the least bit amused" and wonders, "When is this nonsense going to end?" Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
