The Book of Illusions

Paul Auster combines the picaresque novel and the metafictional novel in this engaging, and disturbing work, The Book of Illusions. Like Mr Vertigo, it is a story of an extraordinary life journey; that story is the tale of the fate of a one-time Hollywood star of the (silent) screen, Hector Mann. Through a series of echoes related to loss and death, the storyteller (Professor David Zimmer) researches the life of Mann. Along the way, Zimmer meets Mann’s biographer and thus Mann’s story is integrated neatly within Zimmer’s narrative. Writing about writers is Auster’s special talent and Auster’s chief technique of story-telling, introduced to us with The New York Trilogy so brilliantly, and continued with variations in (for example) the writer in Oracle Night. In this case, The Book of Illusions plays with text on a variety of levels, including the story of Zimmer’s life, the story of Mann’s life, the narratives of Mann’s films, and the biography of Mann as relayed to Zimmer by his lover, Alma. There is also a little-known French biography Zimmer is translating – fittingly called Memoirs of a Dead Man, with some passages included.

Like Borges before him, Auster’s talent for inventing stories within stories and conveying these in quite matter-of-fact tones is at the heart of his genius. In some respects, this makes it harder to pin down brilliance at the sentence level – it’s more in the inventiveness than in the prose itself, because the prose is often written in the impersonation of summary when it is at its (imaginative) best. As an example, Zimmer views of Mann’s secret films, The Inner life of Martin Frost demonstrates this tight control over narrative with the voice of an appreciative professor:

‘The camera pans from a close-up of Martin’s face to a wide shot of the trees. The wind is blowing again, and as the leaves and branches tremble under the assault, the sound amplifies into a pulsing, breathlike wave of percussiveness, an airborne clamour of sighs. It has a strangely ethereal effect, but just when we are about to ask ourselves what this curious emphasis could signify, we are thrown back into the house. It is a harsh and sudden transition. Martin is sitting at a desk in one of the upstairs rooms, pounding away at a typewriter’ (p.246).

Zimmer’s grief, which opens the novel, provides the base on which an extremity of emotional states of despair can be explored. Because the style is intellectual, and masculine in terms of the viewpoints, death, grief and suicidal-thoughts are all portrayed in a manner that never gets morbid or cloying. Like Mr Vertigo, Mann seems to have acquired the need to suffer for his talents, and the question of his changing identity is at the disturbing heart of the novel. Nor does Auster allow any easy solution to the problems he poses in regards to the philosophical question of whether art exists if it is made but never shared with a public. To say more would risk the pleasure of finding out what I mean by this. For me, this is a very fine book and one that could only have been written by Paul Auster. In an age of derivative literature, this is high praise of a significant artist of words and images, a writer who explores the world of ideas and human concerns and integrates these so effectively, in this book of illusions, or this illusionary book of a book of illusions ...  

(See also my thoughts on 4321, Oracle Night, Timbuktu).