GatesyRead

Paul Auster’s Oracle Night was published in 2004. I must have first read it that year, or else the next. I know I enjoyed it. The premise of footnotes that carry over several pages to set up alternative methods of reading the text stayed with me; the typical Auster trick of running several narratives at once and moving in and out of them astounded me then as now. Part of the reason I returned to it recently was to admire, once again, how smoothly Auster creates a series of embedded narratives. Layer 1: Sydney Orr, Brooklyn Author, is recovering from a near fatal illness. He buys a blue notebook and begins to work on a new story, based on a character from Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (a clue – hardboiled detective fiction rarely ends with events “set right”). This layer concerns Orr’s life as a writer, husband and friend to another writer – a more successful one, and a rival of sorts, John Trause. Layer 2: Footnotes. Orr uses footnotes to explain the story behind the stor