2009 – this edition LES FUGITIVES 2017
When I read this work, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
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2003
My previous reviews of Paul Auster HERE
When I read ORACLE NIGHT, my thoughts as aide memoire will appear in the comment stream below…
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4 thoughts on “Oracle Night – Paul Auster”
I had been sick for a long time.
“…the onrush of whirling colors – a blue scarf wrapped around a woman’s head, say,…”
…as if the woman stranger lived in a Shirley Jackson book, divorced completely from this book?
The man is 34 and has suffered illness in hospital and leaves, hardly better, to go back to his wife like an old man or someone with a prophecy of Long Covid. This new aide memoire of mine starts where that of The New York Trilogy left off, where a red notebook was important and now, on one of his solitary struggling walks, he buys a new blank notebook that seems to settle his nerves, as he listens to the near silent oasis of a stationery shopkeeper’s scratching pencil.
I have so far read up to…
“There were just four notebooks left on the pile, and each one came in a different color: black, red, brown, and blue. I chose the blue, which happened to be the one lying on top.”
‘The problem with writers is that most of them don’t have much money to spend.’
Blue Portugal notebook?
The character and backstory of the proprietor Chang of Paper Palace stationery shop. Ha ha ha ha.
I wonder if Chang is short for Change?
Read up to the following in the important first footnote:
“…the first Orrs in America had been Orlovskys. My grandfather had shortened the name to make it sound more American – just as Chang had done by adding the decorative but meaningless initials, M. R., to his.”
I shall now be reviewing this book alongside ‘Blue Self-Portrait’ by Noémi Lefebvre: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/blue-self-portrait-noemi-lefebvre-2/
Read up to: “…a man named Nick Bowen. He’s in his mid-thirties, works as an editor at a large New York publishing house, and is married to a woman named Eva.”
Elizabeth Bowen’s last novel was EVA TROUT, where she explicitly consoled her elbows. This is the narrator precariously starting to write in his blue notebook, with a story derived from The Maltese Falcon? Starting his life again in a world of randomness and chance deaths?
This book was sent to me yesterday as a gift out of the blue by a friend who knew I was interested in listening, with my innocent ear, to the music of Arnold Schoenberg, a book where this composer’s portrait is said to be featured in it. I shall now be reviewing it alongside Paul Auster’s ‘Oracle Night’ here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/04/19/oracle-night-paul-auster/
Read so far up to: “Schoenberg’s face versus the Nazis’ face—“
An all-consuming monologue (“the unquenchable stream of observations and ingenious associations that flowed from me, each new idea more striking, subtle, singular and wondrous than the last”) taking us from the bellow of a moocow, the touch of an arm (its ‘elbow’ being, for me, in the ‘bellow’) and what is below a plane flight, later on ’autopilot’ in an exhibition of Third Reich Art in interface with visits to German cafés and her teaching an accomplished male pianist about playing a Mozart piano concerto when she claims to us not to know anything about music, as I don’t, either. And knowing nothing known about cars, too, like me.
I have been researching the Wannsee and Heydrich on 20 January 1942 overseen from the writer’s sororal plane, and Schoenberg’s position in the Nazis and Music syndrome. A context for this ever-compelling soliloquy that has word associations to die for. Theodor Adorno, Thomas Mann, Beethoven’s bust and howl, and I am, alongside the soliloquist’s crush, mesmerised, too, by the café pianist she describes, an alternate para-situation which makes me think of Dr Faustus and the Magic Mountain, and the aesthetics of music where contrast feeds on contrast to allow one to soar! And bovines to bellow from below! Read up to: “…and you’ll die of shame.”
Read up to: “…the cuckoos’ debut…”
Resonating with this very tuckoo’s moocow? Much hangs on the pianist, when arriving amid the soliloquist’s pent breath at sight of him, choosing a blended malt not a single. (Being mid-air in the blue, between earth and heaven, is, for a human being, sort of blended, too?)