The Book of Illusions [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Vermont professor David Zimmer is a broken man. The protagonist of Paul Auster's 10th novel, The Book of Illusions, hits a period in which life seemed to be working aggressively against him. After his wife and sons are killed in an airplane crash, Zimmer becomes an alcoholic recluse, fond of emptying his bottle of sleeping pills into his palm, contemplating his next move. But one night, while watching a television documentary, Zimmer's attention is caught by the silent-film comedian Hector Mann, who had disappeared without a trace in 1929 and who was considered long-dead. Soon, Zimmer begins work on a book about Mann's newly discovered films (copies of which had been sent, anonymously, to film archives around the world). The spirit of Hector Mann keeps David Zimmer alive for a year. When a letter arrives from someone claiming to be Hector Mann's wife, announcing that Mann had read Zimmer's book and would like to meet him, it is as if fate has tossed Zimmer from one hand to the other: from grief and loss to desire and confusion.

Although film images are technically "illusions," this deft and layered novel is not so much about conscious illusion or trickery as about the traces we leave behind us: words, images, memories. Children are one obvious trace, but in this book, they are not allowed to carry their parents forward. They die early: Hector Mann losing his 3-year-old son to a bee sting just as David Zimmer has lost his two sons in the crash. The second half of The Book of Illusions is given over to a love affair, and to Zimmer's attempt to save something of Hector Mann, and of the others he has loved. In the end, what really survives of us on earth--what flickering immortality we are permitted--is left to the reader to surmise. --Regina Marler -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Auster's signature fascination with the capriciousness of fate and adept use of the classic story-within-the-story motif are writ larger than ever in his brilliant, sage, and suspenseful tenth novel. Here, too, is Auster's passion for film (he has three to his credit), the soulfulness of Timbuktu (1999) and I Thought My Father Was God [BKL S 15 01] (a remarkable collection of evocative real-life stories), and an entwining of the strange and the erotic, not unlike Howard Norman's Haunting of L [BKL F 15 02]. It all begins when a Vermont English professor, paralyzed with grief over the loss of his wife and young sons in a plane crash, sees a clip of silent film star and director Hector Mann's witty shtick on television and laughs for the first time in months. David embarks on an intense study of Mann's nearly forgotten work, an arduous quest given the fact that Mann disappeared at the peak of his powers, then ends up embroiled in Mann's complicated and tragic secret life after a woman with a prominent birthmark and a gun takes him to New Mexico. Auster limns Mann's many-layered cinematic and earthly worlds in mesmerizing and voluptuous detail within an artful, poignantly metaphysical, and delectably Hitchcockian tale of mayhem, murder, and myriad illusions within illusions. Donna Seaman
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The theme of Auster's tenth novel is best summed up in the epigraph: "As Chateaubriand once stated, `[Man] has many lives, placed end to end, and that is the cause of his misery.' " This "book of illusions" shows how those many inner lives intertwine and diverge, setting off an array of possibilities. At the outset, David Zimmer, a Vermont professor of comparative literature, grieves over his wife and two sons, who perished in an airplane crash. His life changes when he stumbles upon a clip from a silent film by comedian Hector Mann, who mysteriously vanished 60 years ago. Zimmer immerses himself in researching Mann's work and soon publishes an authoritative study. His life changes again when he unexpectedly receives a letter from Mann's wife inviting him to visit her ill but still-living husband. Thus begins another quest, this time to unravel the mystery behind Mann's disappearance at the height of his success. Much of Auster's work has already probed the unpredictability of faith, and his fans are also familiar with heroes trapped in the "labyrinth of memories" and the story-within-the-story writing technique. But Auster never repeats himself, instead attacking familiar territory from a new angle to craft tales of profound dimension. Essential. Mirela Roncevic, "Library Journal"
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Written with breathtaking urgency and precision, this stunning novel plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagines, the violent and the tender dissolve into one another. One of America's most powerful and original writers has written his richest, most emotionally charged work yet. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Paul Auster , geb. 1947 in Newark, New Jersey, als Nachkomme eingewanderter österreichischer Juden. Er studierte Anglistik und vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft an der Columbia University New York (B.A. und M.A.) und fuhr danach als Matrose auf einem Öltanker zur See. 1971-74 lebte er in Frankreich, hauptsächlich in Paris. Nach seiner Rückkehr in die USA nahm er einen Lehrauftrag an der Columbia University an und arbeitete zusätzlich als Übersetzer französischer Autoren (Blanchot, Bouchet, Dupin, Joubert, Mallarmé, Sartre) sowie als Herausgeber französischer Literatur in amerikanischen Verlagen. 2006 erhält er den Prinz-von-Asturien-Preis in der Sparte Literatur.