February 11, 2004

Book of Illusions, Nr. 2

I perused Oracle Night yesterday, but was disappointed. The book-within-a-book1, and the book within that, was brilliant, but everything tapered off so suddenly that I couldn't but think, as I approached the last few pages, that I had a truncated copy of the book. Perhaps this printing left out a hundred pages? I wondered hopefully as the antagonist became clear. But no.



1 The multi-page footnotes quickly irritated me. The digressions might have been more effectively worked into the narrative; Auster has shown that he's good with quick asides. The amount of detail worked into the footnotes was unnecessary and disrupted the succinct flow of the narration.

The action of this book is set entirely in New York, in the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. And a brief, fantastic trip into Queens.

Posted by salim at 08:21 PM | Comments (0)