The Book of Illusions

From Barnes & Noble

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

"A nearly flawless work . . . Auster will be remembered as one of the great writers of our time."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Mr. Auster's elegant, finely calibrated Book of Illusions is a haunting feat of intellectual gamesmanship."—The New York Times

"This noirish, layered tale will keep you guessing to the very end."—Time Out New York

Jonathan Yardley

One of our most inventive and least predictable authors.
— The Washington Post Book World

Richard Locke

A literary original who is perfecting a genre of his own.
— The Wall Street Journal

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."

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.

Library Journal

After his wife and two young sons are killed in a plane crash, comparative literature professor David Zimmer is unable to deal with his grief. By accident, he discovers the works of Hector Mann, an almost forgotten silent film comedian and director who disappeared in 1929. Writing a book about Hector's 12 short films brings a degree of order into David's life. Then David discovers that Hector is not only still alive but has been making films in secret on his New Mexico ranch. David's strange journey there leads to more chaos, death, and guilt. Like Auster's best works, such as The New York Trilogy, The Book of Illusions is a postmodern meditation on the nature of art, especially the question of which is more important, art or life, and whether they are inseparable for the artist. David's investigation into Hector's unusual life and the descriptions of his films are fascinating. Auster himself reads in a slightly halting manner, reminiscent of Rod Serling, though his often melodramatic tale might have been better served by a professional reader. Recommended for all collections.-Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Auster's tenth novel is one of his finest: an elegant meditation on the question of whether an artist or his public "owns" the work he creates, and a thickly plotted succession of interlocking mysteries reminiscent of his highly praised New York Trilogy (The Locked Room, 1986, etc.). Narrator David Zimmer is a professor of comparative literature at a small Vermont college with an impressive resumé and a promising academic future, until his wife and young sons perish in a 1985 plane crash. Following an extended period of drunken despair (eloquently and harrowingly described), Zimmer indulges a casual interest in obscure silent film comedian hector Mann, whose disappearance in 1929 has never been explained. David researches and writes a book about Mann's films (occasioning several brilliant set pieces summarizing their contents), and in 1988 receives a letter from New Mexico informing him that Hector Mann is still alive, and is interested in meeting David. The novel picks up dizzying speed as that letter (ostensibly sent by Mann's protective wife Frieda Spelling) is followed by the appearance of Alma Grund (a beautiful young woman despite a disfiguring facial birthmark), who brings David to the (now nonagenarian) Mann's southwestern ranch, spins a lavish tale of scandal and self-exile that fills in a 60-year gap, and compulsively recapitulates the former comedian's various fateful ordeals, leaving Zimmer once again bereaved and alone. The heavy excess of plot never feels arbitrary or contrived, because Auster (Timbuktu, 1999, etc.) writes with such persuasive directness about both Zimmer's conflicted death-in-life and efforts to get beyond it, and Mann's understandably buried past and quietdesperation to order and give meaning to-and eventually extinguish-his accident-strewn personal history. Further dimensions are added by Zimmer's ironically thematically related intellectual pursuits, particularly his fascination with French writer Chateaubriand's elusive, many-leveled autobiography. In many ways, a summa of Auster's entire oeuvre, and a gripping and immensely satisfying novel in its own right. Author tour