Book Review | MAN IN THE DARK by Paul Auster

MAN IN THE DARK

by Paul Auster | Published: May 2009
Picador | Genre: Metafictionbr /> Rating: ★★★★★

"Auster reminds us that joy often comes from unexpected angles, offering new reasons to keep going."

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Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident at his daughter's house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget: his wife's recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend, Titus. The retired book critic imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America the twin towers did not fall and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union and a bloody civil war ensued. As the night progresses, Brill's story grows increasingly intense, and what he is desperately trying to avoid insists on being told.

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Life From Another Angle

August Brill is the man in the dark — a 72‑year‑old recovering from an injured leg in his daughter’s Vermont home, a house steeped in mourning. Through his sleepless nights, he spins stories in his mind to avoid remembering. But memory is persistent. It slips through the cracks of his imagination: his dead wife, his son‑in‑law abandoning his daughter, the senseless tragedy of his granddaughter’s boyfriend.

At first, the book feels like a story within a story — an alternate reality where invented characters must eliminate their own creator, Brill himself. But halfway through, it becomes clear that this imagined world isn’t the point. It’s a bridge, a necessary detour, a way for us to understand the weight of the hurts Brill carries in silence.

“I walked around with a feeling that my life
had never truly belonged to me…
because I wasn’t real,
I didn’t understand the effect I had on others.”

August’s sadness is unmistakable. His vulnerability isn’t just about age — it’s about loneliness, about the quiet ache of living with memories that no one else can help you hold. But Auster never leaves him there. Beneath the grief, there’s a steady pulse of hope. Life folds, life rolls over, and though hurt is woven into every crease, so are love and renewal.

A line echoes throughout the novel: “life is horrible.”

And yet, the stories inside contradict that. Life is many things — painful, strange, miraculous — but never simply horrible.

“Every family lives through extraordinary events…
and there isn’t a family in the world
without secrets and skeletons.”

One story touched me more than the rest: Katya’s birth. Her arrival brought her estranged grandparents back together after years apart. It took the blessing of a new life for Sonia and August to try again. Auster reminds us that joy often comes from unexpected angles, offering new reasons to keep going.

This is a slim 180‑page novel, but like all of Auster’s work, it demands contemplation. I always tell my friends: an Auster book is slow sex — a quick read won’t give you what it promises. My mind drifted often, pulled toward moments in my own life where the narrative struck a nerve. Those were the moments that mattered.

If this book taught me anything, it’s that darkness isn’t a hiding place. It’s a space where truth can finally be seen, where stories can be told without flinching. Even in the dark, hope rolls over hurt, and small joys keep us steady.

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

Auster delivered a deeply satisfying story. It would be insane not to give it full marks — and to recommend it wholeheartedly.

Thank you, Bennard for lending me your copy.

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About the Author:

Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Invisible, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. He has been awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, the Prix Médicis étranger, an Independent Spirit Award, and the Premio Napoli. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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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!

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Book Review | THE NEW YORK TRILOGY by Paul Auster

THE NEW YORK TRILOGY

BY PAUL AUSTER | PUBLICATION: APRIL 1ST, 1990
PENGUIN BOOKS | GENRE: METAFICTION
RATING: ★★★★★

“Strip away the usual hallmarks of the genre—antagonists, plot twists, climactic deaths—and it still pulses with enigma.”

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The New York Review of Books has called Paul Auster's work “one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature.” Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this uniquely stylized triology of detective novels begins with City of Glass, in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.

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"Living the Questions: Auster’s Fictional Mirror"

Are we the authors of our lives—or just characters trying to make sense of the plot? Is a mystery solved when the story ends—or when we stop asking questions?

THE NEW YORK TRILOGY is one of those rare books that operates on multiple levels—mystery, philosophy, and psychological drama. Though labeled a trilogy, it wasn’t written as one in the traditional sense. The three stories are thematically linked rather than narratively connected. And yet, after reading them, I realized that reflecting on each story individually would fail to capture the book’s cumulative effect—its evolving stages of awareness.

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

I once read that these stories fall under the category of “meta-mystery.” I’m not entirely sure what that means, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What I do know is that this is a mystery book in the most essential sense: the book itself is the mystery. Strip away the usual hallmarks of the genre—antagonists, plot twists, climactic deaths—and it still pulses with enigma. While there are detectives, or at least characters engaged in acts of detection, none of the three stories is a detective story in the conventional sense.

"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."

Many adjectives have been hurled at this book, bouncing off its walls in an attempt to pin it down. To truly enjoy it, a reader must dodge them all. Auster has written a remarkably accessible book—it’s not difficult to read, but it demands thought. The recurring themes—man’s subconscious grip on identity, the causes and consequences of solitude, and the limits of language—are explored through strange yet believable scenarios. The setups are deceptively simple, but their implications are profound. More than once, I found myself asking, Why on earth did he do that?—only to realize I was judging from the outside. To be inside these situations is to confront something beyond rational comprehension.

“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."

Auster wisely chose fiction as his medium. The ideas he explores would be hard to accept in everyday terms. But if we accept that our lives are stories—and we are their authors—then it’s foolish to ignore the moments when our identity falters, when solitude overwhelms us, or when language fails to express what we truly mean.

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

In the end, this book leaves more questions than answers. And perhaps that’s as it should be. This isn’t traditional fiction; it demands a certain level of engagement. The stories don’t end on the final page—they continue in our lives. How we carry them forward 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
than 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."

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About the Author:

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Sunset Park, The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. His other honors include the Prix Médicis étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Burning Boy, and the Carlos Fuentes Prize for his body of work. His novel 4 3 2 1 was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. Paul Auster died in 2024.
Photo by Spencer Ostrander

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

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