Quite possibly the best Paul Auster novel I’ve ever read,
and I don’t say this lightly.
Hector Mann, the real protagonist of the book, is as
mysterious and fascinating a figure as Master Yehudi in Mr Vertigo (and his bizarre career path post-acting reminds one of
Walt’s life in the same book). The love story between the narrator and Alma is
a thing of beautiful delicacy, and by the end of the book the reader is happy
to know that Zimmer has moved on, but also that he sees no need to tell us anything
about who has taken Alma’s place. And it is always refreshing to read an Auster
novel that is not set in New York (despite the fact that Zimmer lives there for
a while, accidentally in Brooklyn – who would have ever thought…).
The fact that Auster went through the trouble of inventing
not just a character, but also his movie plots and his entire body of work, is
something that deserves a literary standing ovation (and they’re so realistic
that I actually had to look up Hector Mann on Wikipedia, thinking he was a real
– if a bit obscure – figure of the silent film era that I had never heard of…).
