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2003
My previous reviews of Paul Auster HERE
When I read ORACLE NIGHT, my thoughts as aide memoire will appear in the comment stream below…
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
I had been sick for a long time.
“…the onrush of whirling colors – a blue scarf wrapped around a woman’s head, say,…”
…as if the woman stranger lived in a Shirley Jackson book, divorced completely from this book?
The man is 34 and has suffered illness in hospital and leaves, hardly better, to go back to his wife like an old man or someone with a prophecy of Long Covid. This new aide memoire of mine starts where that of The New York Trilogy left off, where a red notebook was important and now, on one of his solitary struggling walks, he buys a new blank notebook that seems to settle his nerves, as he listens to the near silent oasis of a stationery shopkeeper’s scratching pencil.
I have so far read up to…
“There were just four notebooks left on the pile, and each one came in a different color: black, red, brown, and blue. I chose the blue, which happened to be the one lying on top.”
‘The problem with writers is that most of them don’t have much money to spend.’
Blue Portugal notebook?
The character and backstory of the proprietor Chang of Paper Palace stationery shop. Ha ha ha ha.
I wonder if Chang is short for Change?
Read up to the following in the important first footnote:
“…the first Orrs in America had been Orlovskys. My grandfather had shortened the name to make it sound more American – just as Chang had done by adding the decorative but meaningless initials, M. R., to his.”
I shall now be reviewing this book alongside ‘Blue Self-Portrait’ by Noémi Lefebvre: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/blue-self-portrait-noemi-lefebvre-2/
Read up to: “…a man named Nick Bowen. He’s in his mid-thirties, works as an editor at a large New York publishing house, and is married to a woman named Eva.”
Elizabeth Bowen’s last novel was EVA TROUT, where she explicitly consoled her elbows. This is the narrator precariously starting to write in his blue notebook, with a story derived from The Maltese Falcon? Starting his life again in a world of randomness and chance deaths ?
Seems I forgot yesterday to transfer this from my cyber-notebook to this review or aide memoire….
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“As the story opens, the manuscript of a novel has arrived on Bowen’s desk. A short work bearing the suggestive title of Oracle Night, it was supposedly written by Sylvia Maxwell,…”
Absolutely two page-turning novels interweaving, one being written within the other. With inversions as well as similarities between them. As if competing like the two novels in Nemonymous Night? And a wonderful stub of pencil producing a long stylish Footnote 3 about the freehold narrator’s wife Grace “…looking into her eyes and studying the contours of her lean, angular body, that was what I fell in love with: the sense of calm that enveloped her, the radiant silence burning within.”
There is much about the women in these novels that reminds me of the physical as well as spiritual being of Elizabeth Bowen, including, in Sylvia’s, if not in Rosa’s, case, contemporaneity.
Read up to, as well as now written up to: “All in all, I had covered eight pages in the blue notebook.”
“…a prize relic from the 3-D craze of the early fifties.”
This is 1982. Footnote 4 has, for me, a stub of pencil tell us of Sidney Orr, the narrator, and his friendship with now age-haggard John Trause, an uncle figure to whom he is allowed to call ‘Gracie’, JT today suffering with phlebitis and JT thinking of his beloved late Tina’s brother Richard who was almost Tina in a kissable male form…
“…the chignon knot in Tina’s hair, the whooshing of her long yellow dress.”
Some telling of other writers telling a story of others telling a story? — with footnotes, and replicable blue Portugal notebooks, JT going back in time with 3D slides he had suddenly rediscovered, till the projector broke… a bit like an unfinished period novel? 1982 in 2024. “…supernaturally sharp.” I wonder if I shall live long enough to complete ‘Oracle Night’? Stick with me here, and we shall eventually see.
Then Orr’s nosebleed: “…the crimson of a mad artist…”
“Those notebooks are very friendly, but they can also be cruel,…”
I have so far read and written up to: “…you’re a little off in the head. And I’m just as off as you are. We write books, don’t we? What else can you expect from people like us?”
Read up to: “Break me in two, Sid.”
Sid Orr, the narrator, and Grace, after visit to JT, negotiating the dark of Brooklyn and a taxi, a conversation on colours, reminding me of this author’s GHOSTS, and Shirley Jackson’s inverse BLUE in much of her fiction. And a sudden marital debate leading to G’s erotic request above to the narrator when they got home. I note that in American English, COLOUR does not have yoU in it.
Cross-referenced with today’s section of the Lefebvre: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/blue-self-portrait-noemi-lefebvre-2/#comment-28380
“I didn’t have to approve of Bowen’s actions in order to write about them. Bowen was Flitcraft, and Flitcraft had done the same thing to his own wife in Hammett’s novel.”
Longest footnote yet, no. 6: de Kooning and Grace.
Notebooks about notebooks, novels, too.
Read up to: “Everything still had to be worked out concerning the plot,…”
Image: William de Kooning’s Self-Portrait With Imaginary Brother
“Kansas City was an arbitrary choice for Bowen’s destination – the first place that popped into my head. Possibly because it was so remote from New York, a town locked in the center of the heartland:”
A quote from another footnote, this is Nick Bowen’s escape (written about in Orr’s novel, or Auster’s?), while reading Sylvia Maxwell’s novel ‘Oracle Night’ about Lemuel Flagg, a means to help his escape, I am confused but delightfully so, so this aide memoire may be wrong even at a minuscule distance of time between reading and writing, and I can’t remember who Rosa was, including even the taxi driver today with a business card and odd telephone number about ‘history preservation’, and that may not even be an accurate quoted wording. Not forgetting the Hyatt Hotel disaster.
Aspects of Maxwell’s novel about Flagg remind me of Elizabeth Bowen’s HAPPY AUTUMN FIELDS here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/10/29/fuming-cataracts-and-null-eternal-snows/ or is it one of her other works I am thinking of
“How odd. I just noticed that the numbers go down in order, one digit at a time.”
“Call me at once. Eva Bowen.”
From quite a few points of view, including various female characters, too, and to be reminded just in time before I forgot that Nick Bowen is Orr’s creation, and I need to gain Head Victory over the various metafactions of fiction, one with a locale I run my eye down that is pre-Ligottian for black people. A leapfrog movement towards his story’s preservation, but to whom does this ‘his’ refer? Read and written so far, without jumping anything, up to… “…there was nothing to stop me from jumping back into the blue notebook.”
“– even if it’s no more than a suggestive overlap, a spatial congruency that means nothing.”
Beware SPOILERS FROM WITHIN (see my review in 2013 of Auster’s ‘Report From The Interior’ here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/report-from-the-interior-paul-auster/ )
Read up to this quoted aide memoire and now used for my own aide memoire:
“Nick starts working for Ed on Thursday morning, and the task of rearranging the telephone books is so daunting, so colossal in terms of the poundage to be dealt with – the bulk and heft of countless thousand-page volumes to be taken off the shelves, carted to other areas of the room, and lifted onto new shelves – that progress is slow, much slower than they anticipated it would be. They decide to work straight through the weekend, and by Wednesday of the following week (the same day Eva walks into a photocopy store to design the poster that will broadcast the news of her missing husband, which also happens to be the day Rosa Leightman returns to New York and listens to Bowen’s lovelorn messages on her answering machine), Nick’s growing concern over Ed’s health finally blossoms into full-scale distress.”
Timeline confusions between Kansas City and New York, the Bowen story is so far-fetched and so controversial regarding memories in 1982 of the aftermath of The Holocaust are excusable as they are in a novel written by Sidney Orr, or maybe by the story’s mole called John Trause who knew the story from within it? It is ostensibly not written by Paul Auster at all, but written by one of his created characters ‘from its interior.’
My other large-scale review of Auster is 4321 in 2017 here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/09/16/4-3-2-1-paul-auster/. Please compare Ed Victory’s own telephone number with the numbers 4321!
“That’s when Nick learns that Ed’s real name is Johnson, but he quickly decides that this discovery is of little importance and makes no comment.”
The telephone-number book museum, and the connection of a Warsaw directory to the Holocaust, and thus loosely at least to the para-Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre, Ed’s Heart Defeat, and the far-fetched cult de sac, literally, Orr’s alternative novel about Bowen reaches with a self-locked interior of the museum’s bomb shelter… and the variables upon Hammett, as well as upon Wells’ The Time Machine that Orr is asked to screenplay following his success with, yes, Tabula Rasa! Not forgetting the Flagg novel, of course. More Swift than Wells? Not forgetting, too, Orr’s recurrent nosebleeds and his Grace. And the sudden vanishing of Chang’s Paper Palace.
“…from the bowels of hell” cf elbows?
“…as Nick walks toward that door now, already flipping through the pages of the Warsaw phone book and thinking about some of the gruesome stories Ed told him about 1945,…”
“Words had rushed out of me as though I were taking dictation, transcribing sentences from a voice that spoke in the crystalline language of dreams, nightmares, and unfettered thoughts.”
Read so far up to a description of this book itself:
“Instead of being a continuous progression of discrete moments inching forward in one direction only, it would crumble into a vast, synchronistic blur.”
“We pulled up in front of an old house. It was a huge place – a mansion, really – and then the four of us went inside and started looking around. All the rooms were empty, with no furniture in them, but they were enormous, like museum galleries…”
Bluebird Avenue, Time Machine, Jack and Jill, Kennedy assassination, Grace pregnant, but what of that baby at Dachau?
A para locked room in a (roofless?) mansion, its basement with a ceiling. Or a dream of the locked room in another Auster? All the books in the museum a series of Orrs as ‘ors’, instead of telephone directORies?
“As long as you’re dreaming, there’s always a way out.”
The rules of Time Travel deployed.
In my gestalt real-time reviewing over the years, I have speculated on the printed words — still up ahead in a book I was reading — changing overnight….
“…hundreds of words scrambling around and rearranging themselves on printed pages, moving back and forth like tiny, maddened bugs.” — which is where I’ve read up to, so far.
Footnote 10: Nick Bowen still in locked room, How to write him out of it?
Footnote 11: Chang’s possible lie, regarding some event with the Red Guards in history.
Footnote numbers climb, against the others descending.
In SO’s real-time, if not mine, the chancer Chang (re-encountered by SO by chance) makes him tipsy and Chang almost kidnaps him in a strange car to a club where sexual change of tempo awaits the temporary narrator SO in the form of a Haitian woman. I shall leave the book temporarily at this most tantalising moment:
“I reached out my hand and ran it down the length of her bare arm.”
“Self-Portrait was published…”
“Portugal is perfect.”
Chang has taken SO to a place where it is hands-on by Martine. To tell you the reader was shocked is nothing to write home about.
Ensuing guilt.
Read up to: “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it some other time.”
“The first time I used the notebook, Grace tells me I wasn’t there anymore.”
The time machine?? John Trause as catalyst, his leg now with two clots, cares for Gracie, so lends Sidney Orr as mixed-up derisory narrator one of JT’s own book manuscripts so that SO can screenplay it for money.
Two attractive black women, JT’s son Jacob, and more, all subsumed by this rare obviously classic elbow moment where SO loses the manuscript (up to which point I have so far read)…
“The surge of the departing crowd carried me along with it for six or seven feet, and by the time I spun around to elbow my way back into the car, the doors had already closed and the subway was moving again.”
“: a swooping configuration of variegated, glowing blues, punctuated by a roundish blank in the center and a broken streak of red.”
The elbow moment opens a tidal floodgate of further problems, viz. a burglary at SO’s apartment, his Grace missing overnight, then, on her return, she sees that her ‘footnote 12’ of a lithograph (described in quote above) involving Beckett in some way, is missing, instead!
Read up to:
“I had regressed to some earlier stage of my recovery and was back in the period of swirling colors and fractured, unstable perceptions.”
“But it seemed I’d plucked Maxwell out of thin air and ‘Oracle Night’ was an original story, with no connection to any novel other than itself.”
Sylvia Maxwell v Sylvia Monroe, Jacob v Grace when kids, novel within a novel, neither of which nicked Bowen, I guess.
“…make sure Mr. Johnson’s ready for action.” Today, an apt name between lovers for a man’s billy bob!
Indeed, SO and G (Miss Virginia) seem to be naked & nosebleed happy.
‘Has anything happened since Portugal?’
“The bones of the building were still intact (the huge entrance hall with the black-and-white tile floor, the curving staircase with the mahogany banister), but the flesh looked sad and dirty, dilapidated after years of strain and overwork.”
An old mansion refitted as rehab for otherwise roofless druggies, including Jacob whom SO visits supposedly on behalf of JT. Meatloaf and mash. Roles played out.
By later chance finds the change of Chang with new Paper Palace, and his zeno’s paradox within the book we read…
“Chang seemed to live in a blur of accelerated motion, as if the clocks of the world ticked more slowly for him than they did for everyone else.”
A RED notebook, not blue, seems a crux worth fighting over. A real nemo book?
The earlier accidental loss of JT’s manuscript healed by a cc version…
Read up to “…I went back into the blue notebook for the last time. Forty of the ninety-six pages were already filled, but there were more than enough blanks…”
A painful reconcilement of known facts and fictions, stemming from Bowen’s ever locked room, and the far from far-fetched extrapolations about G and JT, despite their age difference, explaining several behaviours in hindsight, and the tearing up of the blue notebook and dropping it by chance and non-chance near Chang’s place.
Read up to : “Words could alter reality, and therefore they were too dangerous to be entrusted to a man who loved them above all else.”
And the mayhem of the many last or lost pages, the footnotes having already been read, the interlocking theories of fiction and future, novel v novel, notebook v notebook, or in my own Nemonymous notebook, stub of pencil v stub of pencil, the deaths of characters one by one as in a Shakespearean tragedy, and the near final elbow moment as Jacob and Grace clash in frenzy before the former clashes with SO, followed by a coda or aftermath, yes, this mayhem made me feel mad. Was it worth experiencing all the great experiences of reading this book, just to end up here… and having red it, finding it blue me away, took the wind out of me to seek for more?
“…and without even bothering to turn around, he sent his elbow straight into my stomach.”