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Read the first sentence of ORACLE NIGHT and you'll be caught in the vortex of this intricate, well-crafted story. The plot seems simple enough at first. A man recovering from an undefined illness takes a walk around his neighborhood to gather his thoughts and get his bearings. He stops at a new stationery store, introduces himself to the strange but friendly owner, and buys a crisp blue notebook made in Portugal. He returns home to get ready for dinner with his wife, whom he adores, and her old-time family friend, another writer who --- it is rumored --- is finishing yet another book.
Upon closer inspection readers realize that the main character, Sidney Orr, is grasping at a writing career he fears may be slipping away from him. The blue notebook inspires fevered writing sessions that lead him to question whether fiction predicts or limits his future, and reveals a darker version to the sunnier reality that he conveys or believes to be true.
With every sentence and each turned page, readers gather new scraps of information about Sidney and his life. Yet ORACLE NIGHT is a story within a story, a piece of multifaceted fiction revealed as Sidney scribbles in his blue book from Portugal. And what he discovers as he writes is that the secrets of daily life can be worse than the scariest fiction and what may appear to be a dead end.
ORACLE NIGHT is a tightly spun tale, a compilation of several stories or portraits of people who struggle to live the lives they think they've always wanted, and ultimately discover that it may be okay to change course somewhere in the middle. Somewhere in the middle is where we join these characters who live in New York within the intertwined circles of the publishing world and struggle with the question of who they are, will be and ultimately should be.
Paul Auster, well-known author of THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS and TIMBUKTU, will not disappoint readers who have looked forward to his new work; this 243-page novel is a fast but memorable read. The structure alone is a testament to the author's craft. Using footnotes to introduce elements of character background and progress reports on the fiction that Sidney is working on, Auster throws readers off course, making them struggle to maintain a hold on the story at hand without getting lost in past events. Or is it his way of reintroducing the theme --- or question --- of whether fiction predicts or limits the future?
Because of this structure and the way the story begins, readers may feel as if they have interrupted a story somewhere in the middle, but they will be too interested in what happens next to worry about what they have missed.
--- Reviewed by Heather Grimshaw
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