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themselves in the novel under review. When you pick
up a novel you become a reader, not a consumer.
Orr describes burning the blue notebook in order
to escape its mysterious power; in order to flee the
nightmare of possibilities it summoned. Indeed, the
end of the novel seems overladen with terrible events.
Orr writes: “The true story started only then, after I
destroyed the blue notebook.”
We might compare this with something Auster – or
should we say Orrster? – wrote in The Invention Of
Solitude at the very beginning of his career following
after death of his father:
For the past two weeks, these lines from
Maurice Blanchot echoing in my head:
‘One thing must be understood: I have said
nothing extraordinary or even surprising.
What is extraordinary begins at the moment
BUY Paul Auster books online from and
I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of
it.’ [from Death Sentence]
To begin with death. To work my way
back into life, and then, finally, to return
to death.
In Oracle Night, we joined Sidney Orr working his
way back into life from the brink of death – working,
that is, by writing. Yet the main symptom of his unnamed
illness was dizziness, where the world became
blurred and incoherent: a world without form. Almost
as if language and meaning had been removed from
his life. It took the discovery of the blue notebook and
the writing of the new story to return him to both. But
that only returns threatens another death, the death of
possibility. It is Auster’s rare achievement to keep possibility
alive and kicking even as it suffers a death by a
thousand plots. �
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