You know it’s a Paul Auster novel when...
January 18, 2004 | 12:00am
THE X-PAT FILES By Scott R. Garceau
THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS
By Paul Auster
Henry Holt & Company, 321 pages
Available at Powerbooks Paul Auster is so prolific a novelist that, as soon as I finished 2002’s The Book of Illusions – about a widower who discovers the lost films of a forgotten silent film-era comedian – he had a new novel already waiting: Oracle Night (2003).
To say Auster’s novels are about one thing or another is to reduce the whole art of the novel to a formula. Taken together, Auster’s 11 or so novels are about ideas, usually examined through a male protagonist’s search for somebody or something. Sometimes it’s a pair of males, like the two drifting gamblers in The Music of Chance; other times it’s a private eye-type writer with the safe combination jiggled a couple times, as in The New York Trilogy.
Private eyes, mysteries, missing pieces: these are the ingredients of film noir, of course. But in The Book of Illusions, Auster enters into another cinematic reality: That of the silent-film comedians. David Zimmer is a book editor and professor who loses his family to a plane crash. For a year or so, he descends into a pit of grief, drinking heavily, secluding himself in his home, watching late-night television and pondering the abyss. Then one night, something stirs him: a TV documentary about old-time comedians. He sits through film clips of Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd. But one comedian in particular – the nearly-forgotten Hector Mann – elicits something from Zimmer that he hasn’t experienced in a year: laughter.
Zimmer becomes fascinated. He has to learn more about Mann, an Argentine-born actor whose suave looks, pencil-thin moustache and pristine white suit were the perfect foil to his slapstick pranks.
He spends a year in film archives, studios and libraries around the world, tracking down each fragment of celluloid that Hector Mann wrote, directed and starred in. Short films, each under 20 minutes in length, they add up to enough material for Zimmer to write a biography – an appreciation of Hector Mann and his almost-imperceptible influence on film comedy. Writing the book pulls Zimmer back from the brink of despair. As he puts it, "I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book."
Then Zimmer starts receiving strange letters postmarked from New Mexico. Someone claiming to be the wife of Hector Mann wants him to meet with her husband before he passes away.
Zimmer dismisses the letters as a prank, but when a woman with a peculiar facial birthmark arrives in his living room holding a gun on him… well, that’s when you know you’re in a Paul Auster novel.
It was the first time a gun had ever been pointed at me, and I marveled at how comfortable I felt, at how naturally I accepted the possibilities of the moment. One wrong move, one wrong word, and I could die for no reason at all. That thought should have frightened me. It should have made me want to run, but I felt no urge to do that, no inclination to stop what was happening. An immense and horrifying beauty had opened up before me, and all I wanted was to go on looking at it, to go on looking into the eyes of this woman with the strange double face as we stood in that room, listening to the rain pound on top of us like ten thousand drums scaring up the devils of the night.
The narrative then proceeds along film noir lines: She’s a gal with a gun, a stock figure not to be trusted. But Zimmer falls for her, feeling a tenderness that he hasn’t felt since before his wife’s death.
He agrees to accompany this woman to New Mexico, and during the flight, she tells him the amazing story of Hector Mann. A sort of shadowy genius, Mann tried to become a leading man in Hollywood back in the ‘20s, but wound up devising clever one-reel comedies that tackled existential issues of identity amid their slapstick antics. (Mr. Nobody is a typical title, about a man who is "erased" from his job and life by a conniving boss with disappearing serum.)
Then Mann himself disappeared after his studio contract ended amid a cloudy scandal involving a murdered magazine writer. His flight took him around the country, through a series of self-transformations, altered identities and adventures, finally marrying and settling down on a small New Mexico ranch. There, with the help of his wife and former cinematographer, he was able to film a series of experimental films that were never publicly shown, but hint at the brilliant promise of Mann‘s early career. And Zimmer just may be in a position to get a private screening.
This is Auster’s setup for The Book of Illusions, and part of the fun is the reader’s curiosity about just what those lost films might contain. Auster wisely fills us in on one narrative – Mann’s strange life – then runs parallel and inverse narratives around it, from Zimmer’s ambivalence toward life after tragedy to the characters and situations that fill Mann’s lost, flickering archives. Zimmer tells his story in a voice that’s as deadpan as Buster Keaton’s face, but you can’t help getting sucked into his existential dilemma, thanks to Auster’s almost febrile gift for storytelling. As in much of Auster’s work, the multiple levels in The Books of Illusions deal with our perceptions of reality, our fragmentary grasp of existence, and the importance of memory. Writing is one way to combat the flickering nature of reality. Another is through love, which provides a physical and emotional testimony of our being, however fleeting.
But for Zimmer, who has had ample reason to ponder his precarious existential fate, sitting in a darkened room watching the flickering messages of Hector Mann may be the closest thing he has to a clue back to reality, and back to life. And, as in life, that slim chance may just be an illusion, or worse: a gradually fading memory. Auster’s novel hits us on an emotional and a cerebral level, leaving us to ponder this question: What happens after the movie ends and the last bursts of light on the screen flicker out, casting the viewer in darkness? And is the memory enough to sustain us through the rest of our lives?
THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS
By Paul Auster
Henry Holt & Company, 321 pages
Available at Powerbooks Paul Auster is so prolific a novelist that, as soon as I finished 2002’s The Book of Illusions – about a widower who discovers the lost films of a forgotten silent film-era comedian – he had a new novel already waiting: Oracle Night (2003).
To say Auster’s novels are about one thing or another is to reduce the whole art of the novel to a formula. Taken together, Auster’s 11 or so novels are about ideas, usually examined through a male protagonist’s search for somebody or something. Sometimes it’s a pair of males, like the two drifting gamblers in The Music of Chance; other times it’s a private eye-type writer with the safe combination jiggled a couple times, as in The New York Trilogy.
Private eyes, mysteries, missing pieces: these are the ingredients of film noir, of course. But in The Book of Illusions, Auster enters into another cinematic reality: That of the silent-film comedians. David Zimmer is a book editor and professor who loses his family to a plane crash. For a year or so, he descends into a pit of grief, drinking heavily, secluding himself in his home, watching late-night television and pondering the abyss. Then one night, something stirs him: a TV documentary about old-time comedians. He sits through film clips of Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd. But one comedian in particular – the nearly-forgotten Hector Mann – elicits something from Zimmer that he hasn’t experienced in a year: laughter.
Zimmer becomes fascinated. He has to learn more about Mann, an Argentine-born actor whose suave looks, pencil-thin moustache and pristine white suit were the perfect foil to his slapstick pranks.
He spends a year in film archives, studios and libraries around the world, tracking down each fragment of celluloid that Hector Mann wrote, directed and starred in. Short films, each under 20 minutes in length, they add up to enough material for Zimmer to write a biography – an appreciation of Hector Mann and his almost-imperceptible influence on film comedy. Writing the book pulls Zimmer back from the brink of despair. As he puts it, "I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book."
Then Zimmer starts receiving strange letters postmarked from New Mexico. Someone claiming to be the wife of Hector Mann wants him to meet with her husband before he passes away.
Zimmer dismisses the letters as a prank, but when a woman with a peculiar facial birthmark arrives in his living room holding a gun on him… well, that’s when you know you’re in a Paul Auster novel.
It was the first time a gun had ever been pointed at me, and I marveled at how comfortable I felt, at how naturally I accepted the possibilities of the moment. One wrong move, one wrong word, and I could die for no reason at all. That thought should have frightened me. It should have made me want to run, but I felt no urge to do that, no inclination to stop what was happening. An immense and horrifying beauty had opened up before me, and all I wanted was to go on looking at it, to go on looking into the eyes of this woman with the strange double face as we stood in that room, listening to the rain pound on top of us like ten thousand drums scaring up the devils of the night.
The narrative then proceeds along film noir lines: She’s a gal with a gun, a stock figure not to be trusted. But Zimmer falls for her, feeling a tenderness that he hasn’t felt since before his wife’s death.
He agrees to accompany this woman to New Mexico, and during the flight, she tells him the amazing story of Hector Mann. A sort of shadowy genius, Mann tried to become a leading man in Hollywood back in the ‘20s, but wound up devising clever one-reel comedies that tackled existential issues of identity amid their slapstick antics. (Mr. Nobody is a typical title, about a man who is "erased" from his job and life by a conniving boss with disappearing serum.)
Then Mann himself disappeared after his studio contract ended amid a cloudy scandal involving a murdered magazine writer. His flight took him around the country, through a series of self-transformations, altered identities and adventures, finally marrying and settling down on a small New Mexico ranch. There, with the help of his wife and former cinematographer, he was able to film a series of experimental films that were never publicly shown, but hint at the brilliant promise of Mann‘s early career. And Zimmer just may be in a position to get a private screening.
This is Auster’s setup for The Book of Illusions, and part of the fun is the reader’s curiosity about just what those lost films might contain. Auster wisely fills us in on one narrative – Mann’s strange life – then runs parallel and inverse narratives around it, from Zimmer’s ambivalence toward life after tragedy to the characters and situations that fill Mann’s lost, flickering archives. Zimmer tells his story in a voice that’s as deadpan as Buster Keaton’s face, but you can’t help getting sucked into his existential dilemma, thanks to Auster’s almost febrile gift for storytelling. As in much of Auster’s work, the multiple levels in The Books of Illusions deal with our perceptions of reality, our fragmentary grasp of existence, and the importance of memory. Writing is one way to combat the flickering nature of reality. Another is through love, which provides a physical and emotional testimony of our being, however fleeting.
But for Zimmer, who has had ample reason to ponder his precarious existential fate, sitting in a darkened room watching the flickering messages of Hector Mann may be the closest thing he has to a clue back to reality, and back to life. And, as in life, that slim chance may just be an illusion, or worse: a gradually fading memory. Auster’s novel hits us on an emotional and a cerebral level, leaving us to ponder this question: What happens after the movie ends and the last bursts of light on the screen flicker out, casting the viewer in darkness? And is the memory enough to sustain us through the rest of our lives?
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