Rebecca Gransden's Reviews > Oracle Night

Auster here takes story-telling and uses that as a means to ponder reality and every labyrinthine way this translates through perception. He takes the maze and straightens it out so that every turn, every fork, every dead end corridor or way in or out is set parallel. Then what is left is something like the strata of rock, each layer signifying different eras in soil but here the unknowable passage we take from our point of view, fractured, subjective and incomplete. Auster takes that sample in stone and removes it from its original position, cuts out a slab, showing each layer stark in its particular colour and bleeding into every other, and polishes it until it reflects a clear light. Then he lays it down flat so that there is no point of orientation, we can't make out the bottom from the top, but we can glide over its slippery surface taking great care and occasionally glance down at some weird reflection.

The way in of the story within a story within a story within a going on for infinity is almost the least relevant aspect when experiencing this novel. Sure, it is the point of entry, the conceit, but that is not what is delivered whilst reading this. This is not a puzzle waiting to be solved, or a challenge, or somewhere to find solidity. I feel I float through the best of what he does and it is difficult to get a handle on what is being reached for. In The New York Trilogy Auster writes:

"It was something like the word 'it' in the phrase 'it is raining' or 'it is night'. What that 'it' referred to Quinn had never known."

And that is where I find this novel: walking hand in hand with the 'it'. For all the urban mysticism, the disambiguation folding back on itself, the necessary clarity of prose, the deft straddling of psychological nuance and the conveyance of time and perception relative to existence, I'm none the wiser. Perhaps that is precisely 'it'.

I have added a blue notebook to my Christmas wishlist.