MAN IN THE DARK by Paul Auster

Life From Another Angle

   

August Brill is the MAN IN THE DARK. He is a 72-year-old nursing an injured leg in his daughter’s home in Vermont –a house of mourning by all accounts, really.  He spends his sleepless night conjuring stories in his head to save himself from remembering. Yet, every now and then, he loses concentration and finds himself recalling memories of his dead wife, his son-in-law walking out on her daughter, and the tragic death of his granddaughter’s boyfriend.

At first, it seems to be an unfolding of a story within a story. An alternative reality, wherein the made-up characters have to eliminate their own creator, Brill. But halfway through the book, the reader will realize that the alternative reality is not the story, but the bridge by which we must cross to better understand all the hurts this man in the dark conceals.

“I walked around with a feeling that my life had never truly belonged to me, that I had never truly inhabited myself, that I had never been real. And because I wasn't real, I didn't understand the effect I had on others, the damage I could cause, the hurt I could inflict on the people who loved me.”

There is a certain line that kept popping throughout the book, “life is horrible”. And yet, the stories inside tell otherwise.  Life is many things, but never horrible, it would seem.

“At one time or another, every family lives through extraordinary events –horrendous crimes, floods and earthquakes, bizarre accidents, miraculous strokes of luck, and there isn't a family in the world without secrets and skeletons, trunkfuls of hidden material that would make your jaw drop if the lid were ever opened.”

There is one particular story that really touched me more than anything. Katya’s birth brought her grandparents together after years of separation.  It took a blessing of another life for Sonia and August to take another chance together. It was the joy of looking at life from another angle, another inspiration.

This is a mere 180-page book, but like the rest of Auster’s book, it required a huge amount of contemplation. Like I tell my friends, an Auster book is slow sex; a quicky will not give the satisfaction it promised. Often, my mind would drift away to a time and place where the narrative hammered home a point. And those were the moments that count.

If there is anything I learned from this book, it’s that darkness is not a place to hide. It is a place to see things through, to let the story be told once and for all; because even amid darkness, we can take comfort in life’s simple joys.  

“The only thing we can do is hope for the best.”

The story was so satisfying, it is definitely insane not to give it full marks and highly recommend it.

Thank you, Bennard for lending me your copy. 

Book details:

Title:  A Man in the Dark

Author:  Paul Auster

Publisher:  Picador

Published:  May 2009
Genre: Metafiction

Rating: ★★★★★

Read more →

Books: Gifts, Borrowed, and a Dare

It is prevalent to give bookish people books as gifts.  The challenge lies in how to pick the right book and why. In that effect, let us peruse the books I recently received.

§  Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus- from Angus – A collection of short stories depicting loneliness, lack of love, and moments of redemption. Dubus’ creations were compared to Raymond Carver’s. This will be a pleasure indeed.

§  The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster- from Bennard- The story, more or less, is about redemption, having reasons to see life again in a different avenue, after having considered death as an only option. This is something I want to sink my teeth into.

§  Everlasting by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss- from Maria- One of the last two books before this favorite author died. Romance is the key theme here, and I do need some dose of that. LOL

§  Project 17 by Eliza Victoria- from Lynai- This is my first Victoria piece and it’s a mystery novel. A mystery is my kind of candy!

§  White Teeth by Zadie Smith- from Bennard- This one I snagged from the book pile during the TFG Yuletide Party.  Monique and I agreed to buddy-read it this year. The story is surrounded by extremism and dilemmas. I think this one is already cut out for us.

Thank you very much, guys!

This next book is something I purposely borrowed. The lender is such a sweet soul, trusting me with his copy.

§  Man in the Dark by Paul Auster- from Bennard- I have a certain love for Paul Auster.  For a while now, he’s my source of good mindfuck that left me breathless and wanting.

The last book is a dare. We had our F2F25 last January 18, at The Appraisery. Our post discussion activity involved stating our best and worst reads from 2013, then being dared to read someone else’s worst read, standing on the belief that “one man's trash is another man's treasure.”

§  The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien- from Patrick- We drew lots, and this is what I picked up. It is a collection of short stories, semi-autobiographical, about American soldiers (platoon) who fought during the Vietnam War. It’s too early to assume that I’ll find a treasure here, but I’m keeping an open mind since I do enjoy reading short stories. I have a mental note of associating short stories with the term gleaning.

I have to make some adjustments on my reading plan this year, I think I can still work it out.  Determination and management!

Read more →

THE NEW YORK TRILOGY by Paul Auster

Identity, Solitude, Language

The New York Trilogy is a series of novels by Paul Auster. 

Originally published sequentially as City of Glass (1985), 

Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986),

it has since been collected into a single volume. 

- Wikipedia

This is one of those rare books that work on many levels of mystery, philosophy, and drama.  While this was coined as a trilogy, it was not written in that sense.  The stories were related thematically, rather than narrative or plot. Yet after reading, I realized that writing an individual reflection on each story will not convey the wholeness of the book -its different stages of awareness.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

I've read somewhere that these stories were referred to as “meta mystery”, which honestly I don’t know what.  So, I am not going to pretend that I do.  What I do understand is that this is a mystery book, because the whole book is the mystery itself.  For even if we remove the identifying marks of a mystery novel -antagonistic characters, plot twist, and deathly climax- the book remains to be mysterious.  And, although there are detectives or, at least, characters involve in detecting, none of the three is a detective story.

In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant.  And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so –which amounts to the same thing.

Plenty of adjectives had been shot, ricocheting on the walls, to describe this book.  If a reader wants to enjoy this book, he has to dodge them all.  Paul Auster wrote a very readable book.  It is not arduous, but it will ask you to think.  The concepts echoed across the book were about man's subconscious control of his constant and definitive identity, the different causes and effects of solitude, and the limitation of language to convey all thoughts.  All of which were tested in extremely unusual situations, yet believable.  The testing variables were simple by imagination, yet the effects were staggering.  Time and again, while reading, I asked -what the hell did he do that for- then realized that I was merely looking from the outside.  To be in such a situation is more than mere thought can comprehend.

“We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves.  This is deception.  We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself. 

Paul Auster had the good sense to tackle all this through fiction.  The concepts he presented were unlikely to be accepted as a day-to-day occurrence.  But if we are to understand that our lives are stories itself, and we being the author of it, it is foolish indeed to overlook the times that our identity was challenged, or when solitude bogged us down, or even when our thoughts stunted the words we wished to convey.

No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.

I suspect that all these leaves more questions behind, rather than answers.  Maybe that is well because this is not a traditional fiction; it requires a certain level of engagement from the reader.  The stories will not end at the last page of the book, it continues on with our lives.  How we deal with it is entirely up to us.

Everyone knows that stories are imaginary.  Whatever effect they might have on us, we know they are not true, even when they tell us truths more important that the ones we can find elsewhere.  As opposed to the story writer, I was offering my creations directly to the real world, and therefore it seemed possible to me that they could affect this real world in a real way, that they could eventually become part of the real itself.  No writer could ask for more than that.

Book details:
Title: The New York Trilogy
Author: Paul Auster
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication: April 1st, 1990
Genre: Metafiction
Rating: ★★★★★

F2F23, Frankie's, November 30, 2013
Moderated by Aldrin Calimlim
Photo courtesy of Joy Abundo

Read more →