logo
Wrong email address or username
Wrong email address or username
Incorrect verification code
The Book of Illusions - Paul Auster
The Book of Illusions
by: (author)
5.00 5
A man's obsession with a silent-film star sends him on a journey into a shadow world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love.Six months after losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in a blur of alcoholic grief and... show more
A man's obsession with a silent-film star sends him on a journey into a shadow world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love.Six months after losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a clip from a lost silent film by comedian Hector Mann. Zimmer's interest is piqued, and he soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to research a book on this mysterious figure, who vanished from sight in 1929 and has been presumed dead for sixty years. When the book is published the following year, a letter turns up in Zimmer's mailbox bearing a return address from a small town in New Mexico — supposedly written by Hector's wife. "Hector has read your book and would like to meet you. Are you interested in paying us a visit?" Is the letter a hoax, or is Hector Mann still alive? Torn between doubt and belief, Zimmer hesitates, until one night a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever. This stunning novel plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, the violent and the tender dissolve into one another. With The Book of Illusions, one of America's most powerful and original writers has written his richest, most emotionally charged work yet. Paul Auster's most recent novel,Timbuktu, was a national bestseller, as was I Thought My Father Was God, the NPR National Story Project anthology, which he edited. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. The Book of Illusions is his tenth novel.
show less
Format: paperback
ISBN: 9780312421816 (0312421818)
Publisher: Picador
Pages no: 336
Edition language: English
Bookstores:
Community Reviews
Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud
Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud rated it
1.0 So dreary, so sure it's Art, so smugly Writerly. Bah.
I've never been fond of pompous writing, the kind that checks its look in the mirror of acclaim and piles on the self-satisfied smirking smugness that makes me want to torch all the MFA schools I can reach. http://tinyurl.com/lyb8649 My review, which I've moved to my blog, says that and more. Ap...
bossyfemme
bossyfemme rated it
1.0 The Book of Illusions
I seriously hated this book nearly the entire way through - I think I finished it in a stubborn desire to prove to myself that I wouldn't like it. The long expositions of other plot lines - from films for example - was so clunky & exhausting, I thought.
adrianaalbuquerque
adrianaalbuquerque rated it
5.0 The Book of Illusions: A Novel
I am still trying to find the right words to describe this work of art. Or, I guess I just did. Absolutely amazing. There couldn't be any other way to turn this book into a better romance than it is. The level of mistery, despair, anguish, belonging, doubt, is carefuly but freely placed over the cha...
willemite
willemite rated it
After having lost his wife and children in a plane crash, writer and teacher David Zimmer is on a path of self-destruction, drinking, behaving badly around people, rejecting any and all understanding and sympathy. But seeing a bit of silent film comedy on TV, he takes up the task of examining and wr...
debnance
debnance rated it
5.0 Book of Illusions
David Zimmer loses his wife and sons in a plane crash and his life begins to spin out of control. Then one night he watches a silent screen comedian and, for the first time in months, he laughs. His life becomes his search for information about the work of this comedian, an obscure and mysterious ma...
Other editions (23)
Books by Paul Auster
On shelves
Share this Book
Need help?