Man in the Dark
A Novel
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3.3 • 12 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Man in the Dark is an undoubted pleasure to read. Auster really does possess the wand of the enchanter." —Michael Dirda, The New York Review of Books
From Paul Auster, a "literary original" (Wall Street Journal) comes a novel that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a world capable of the most grotesque violence.
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.
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A retired book critic is targeted by an assassin from an alternate universe in Auster's flawed latest. August Brill lies awake in his daughter's Vermont home, making up stories to fight against insomnia and depression. The stories coalesce around a character, Owen Brick, a professional magician transported to an alternate reality in which the U.S. fell into a civil war after the 2000 election. His mission: to end the war by assassinating August. Back in the real world, August is worried about his 23-year-old granddaughter, who moved back in with her mother after her boyfriend was killed in Iraq. The suspense about whether August's reality and the assassin in his fantasy will collide baits a sharp hook, but about halfway in, the narrative devolves into a long night's tale of the literary New York of yore as August regales his granddaughter with stories. The merging of nostalgia with a Philip K. Dick conceit doesn't wholly succeed, but Auster's juxtaposition of two worlds is compelling and intellectually rigorous in Auster's trademark claustrophobic hall-of-mirrors fashion.
