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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 hi...

To write thoughts on a book such as this is to court disaster. Hemingway may be in or out of fashion, but there is not a sentence out of place in A Moveable Feast and this makes the reviewer incredibly self-conscious – as if Hemingway’s ghost sits alongside and suggests, gruffly, ‘all you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know’ (p.12). Well, here it is: the only disappointing thing about this book is that I have damaged it by leaving a wet towel on top, travelling back from the pool in Nyons in France to the house in Piégon where I write this review. A Moveable Feast takes its name from the epigraph, and the idea that ends the book, that ‘there is never any ending to Paris’ (p.182). It opens, literally, mid-sentence to provide an early, subtle suggestion of this cycle of eating/feasting/drinking/writing/living: ‘Then there was the bad weather’ (p.3). Hemingway’s memoirs, fiction and fact, were written towards the end of his life, but are a...