The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Book of Illusions, by Paul Auster
reviewed by Thomas Hove

Paul Auster. The Book of Illusions. Holt, 2002. 321 pp. $24.00.

In his best novel in over a decade, Paul Auster revisits several of his familiar themes: traumatic regrets, mysterious pasts, chains of miraculous and diabolic coincidences, and the quest for redemption through unusual and obsessive creative activity. The Book of Illusions is narrated by a comparative-literature professor named David Zimmer, who has lost his wife and two sons in a plane crash. He suffers from a severe case of survivor’s guilt, which is exacerbated by meditations on the small coincidences that caused them to die without him: “Everything was part of it, every link in the chain of cause and effect was an essential piece of the horror.” To save himself from emotional and alcoholic self-destruction, Zimmer takes up a book project on a forgotten silent film comic named Hector Mann. He eventually visits the dying Mann, escorted by a woman with close personal ties to Mann named Alma Grund. Zimmer’s brief encounters with Alma and with Mann’s life and works parallel his own private explorations of art’s potential to redeem action. Although Auster is known for his formal experimentation, his most well-honed skill is still the judiciously paced, transparent narration characteristic of novels like The Music of Chance and Leviathan. His set pieces on Zimmer’s and Mann’s personal tragedies, for example, read so compellingly that one can easily forget the mediation of the printed page. More technically impressive, though, are Zimmer’s transcriptions of Mann’s silent films into the written word. To Zimmer, silent films are “like poems, like the renderings of dreams, like some intricate choreography of the spirit.” Auster tough-mindedly denies both cinematic and narrative art the transcendent powers that could fully redeem Mann’s, Grund’s, and Zimmer’s lives. But for all the bizarre tragedies that punctuate their stories, Auster does invest these art forms with the power to affirm a vague, yet nevertheless life-sustaining, sense of hope.