Oracle Night

Kurzbeschreibung Recovering from a near-fatal illness, Sydney Orr, a thirty-four-year-old novelist, purchases a mysterious blue notebook from a Brooklyn stationery shop and is drawn into a bizarre world of eerie premonitions and baffling events that threaten to destroy his marriage and faith in reality. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 100,000 first printing. Pressestimmen "A Joseph Cornell box in the form of a novel, with the same wistful tone and sense of meanings just below the surface...It's urban mysticism, a poetry of the hidden and the almost forgotten, with the supernatural power deriving equally from the city and the novelist's imagination....A snow globe of a novel." --John Homans, New York Magazine "Beguiling...Auster is a natural story-teller, with a seemingly inexhaustible trove of yarns at his disposal. All of the stories within stories are compelling in their own right...a joy to read." -- The Economist "Another complicated and suspenseful page-turner...Another tremendous and memorable effort by one of our most brilliant writers." --Thomas Haley, Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Austerland is tricky, filled with dark narrative alleyways and sidewinding plots. One might not wish to play cards with Paul Auster...It's a kind of seduction to dizzy the reader the way Auster does, layering, intermingling and cross-referencing the many stories until one forgets which is the primary and which secondary and who is telling any of them." --Stacey D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review "Compulsively readable yet wonderfully complex and unsettling." - -Eric Grunwald, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "As in New York Trilogy [Auster] subverts our expectations of what a mystery story should be, and the reading experience is far richer for it." --Philip Connors , Newsday "[Auster] shines as a fabulist and tale-teller, putting a high-modernist gloss on noir." -- The New Yorker " Oracle Night is a triumph for novelist Auster. It cements his growing reputation as one of America's most inventive and original writers." --Deloris Tarzan Ament, The Seattle Times Über den Autor und weitere Mitwirkende PAUL AUSTER's most recent novel, The Book of Illusions, was a national bestseller, as was I Thought My Father Was God, the NPR National Story Project anthology, which he edited. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Leseprobe. Abdruck erfolgt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber. Alle Rechte vorbehalten. I had been sick for a long time. When the day came for me to leave the hospital, I barely knew how to walk anymore, could barely remember who I was supposed to be. Make an effort, the doctor said, and in three or four months you'll be back in the swing of things. I didn't believe him, but I followed his advice anyway. They had given me up for dead, and now that I had confounded their predictions and mysteriously failed to die, what choice did I have but to live as though a future life were waiting for me? I began with small outings, no more than a block or two from my apartment and then home again. I was only thirty-four, but for all intents and purposes the illness had turned me into an old man---one of those palsied, shuffling geezers who can't put one foot in front of the other without first looking down to see which foot is which. Even at the slow pace I could manage then, walking produced an odd, airy lightness in my head, a free-for-all of mixed-up signals and crossed mental wires. The world would bounce and swim before my eyes, undulating like reflections in a wavy mirror, and whenever I tried to look at just one thing, to isolate a single object from the onrush of whirling colors---a blue scarf wrapped around a woman's head, say, or the red taillight of a passing delivery truck---it would immediately begin to break apart and dissolve, disappearing like a drop of dye in a glass of water. Everything shimmied and wobbled, kept darting off in different directions, and for the first several weeks I had trouble telling w