Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter's house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed ...
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Jan 11, 2012
K.D.
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The Philippines exports lots of domestic helpers (household helpers, nannies, girl Fridays, cleaners, caregivers, etc.) to overseas. Those ladies and men are normally college graduates or finished some units in college. Most of them are teachers because their monthly salary here in the Philippines is low and not enough to satisfy that they think they families deserve. Most of them find their possible employers from agencies who have contacts abroad, mostly in Hong Kong, Singapore and some countr
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6 comments
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(28 people liked it)
Sep 23, 2008
Kitty-Wu
rated it:
Me da igual que Auster empiece a jugar a las muñecas rusas en la página 3, me da igual que me recuerde a Travels in the Scriptorium, me da igual que sus personajes me recuerden a otros, me da igual que haya tanto escritor suelto en Nueva York, me da absolutamente igual todo, porque una vez más, Auster me engancha desde la primera página y no me deja ir. Y estoy tan a gusto dentro de su mundo... el otro día salía por esta página el tema de nuestros autores vivos favoritos: bien, yo me iría de cop
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9 comments
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(7 people liked it)
Jun 21, 2008
Imogen
rated it:
Back when I was an undergraduate in college (not that I ever did any graduate work, but I'm about to make fun of myself, and making fun of 'undergraduates' is a literary tradition in these parts) I got a total boner* for structuralism. And then post-structuralism. I was dating Sarah and she was like, 'Hey, you like this soulless pomo bullshit, you should read this book I just read and didn't like, the New York Trilogy,' I was all, sweet, empty soulless pomo bullshit! And read it, and didn't real
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(16 people liked it)
Sep 18, 2008
R.
rated it: 
Listen: Owen Brick has come unstuck in time awakened in a hole in a battlefield in an alternate America. He's now been chosen as the assassin (after a fashion) of the man in the high castle responsible for imagining this war-torn America into existence. Along the way he meets a feisty waitress (blonde) and his high school crush (brunette). Meanwhile, an old man recovering from a car wreck (the same man who is imagining this alternate universe wherein Brick is trapped) has an incredibly dumbed-
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Jul 11, 2008
Jason
rated it:
Man in the Dark resembles an entire series of the Twilight Zone compacted neatly into a single episode. Auster has become known for spinning small stories within larger ones, but now his inner narratives have inner narratives. It all comes to resemble the skin of an onion. I’ve always wished he’d write a book of short fictional pieces, but one only has to look to his body of work for dozens of them. Jorge Luis Borges spoke once about the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia, but Paul Aust
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(4 people liked it)
Apr 06, 2009
Kim
rated it: 
I'm not sure what compelled me to pick this up. I think the line 'Themes are hungry ghosts' caught my eye. Interesting phrase, I thought.
I've never had a real issue with insomnia. Sure, there are those tension filled days that carry over and transmute into a jaw clenching, sheet wrasslin', sigh-fest. But, it doesn't last. The pull into oblivion is too strong.
I do, however, find that I tell myself stories to urge on said oblivion. It's an easier escape than relivin More...
I've never had a real issue with insomnia. Sure, there are those tension filled days that carry over and transmute into a jaw clenching, sheet wrasslin', sigh-fest. But, it doesn't last. The pull into oblivion is too strong.
I do, however, find that I tell myself stories to urge on said oblivion. It's an easier escape than relivin More...
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(6 people liked it)
Oct 27, 2008
patxi
rated it:
Es que cuando Paul se pone, se pone...
Novela más que redonda, de facilísima lectura, dejando caer con ligeras sutilezas su posicionamiento frente a grandes temas (y sin querer hacer apostolado laico, lo que es de agradecer), reflexionando sobre el acto de la creación literaria como escape a un mundo real... que tiene dramas reales y estrategias infantiles para evitar enfrentarnos a ellos.
Muy bien escrita (eso es lo habitual), muy bien narrada, alternando dos historias hasta la ruptu More...
Novela más que redonda, de facilísima lectura, dejando caer con ligeras sutilezas su posicionamiento frente a grandes temas (y sin querer hacer apostolado laico, lo que es de agradecer), reflexionando sobre el acto de la creación literaria como escape a un mundo real... que tiene dramas reales y estrategias infantiles para evitar enfrentarnos a ellos.
Muy bien escrita (eso es lo habitual), muy bien narrada, alternando dos historias hasta la ruptu More...
Oct 09, 2008
Jose
rated it:
Una vez más Auster nos presenta un libro de relatos como si de una novela perfectamente estructurada se tratara. Y todo encaja, como siempre. Mundos paralelos, fantasía, realidad, creatividad, imaginación, todo junto, revuelto y perfectamente creíble (para quien quiera creer, supongo. Y yo quiero). El único problema es que el libro pierde casi todo su interés cuando uno de los relatos acaba bruscamente (la historia de Owen Brick trasladado por la mente calenturienta de un crítico literario jubil
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3 comments
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(2 people liked it)
Sep 20, 2008
Tom LeClair nailed my sense of the book, as far as I'd gotten in it:
"After, say, 10 books, maybe novelists should be retested, like accident-prone senior citizens renewing their driver’s licenses. Veterans of literary wars would anonymously submit a new manuscript to agents. Of “Man in the Dark,” I think they’d say, “third-rate imitation of Paul Auster.”"
"After, say, 10 books, maybe novelists should be retested, like accident-prone senior citizens renewing their driver’s licenses. Veterans of literary wars would anonymously submit a new manuscript to agents. Of “Man in the Dark,” I think they’d say, “third-rate imitation of Paul Auster.”"
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Jan 28, 2009
L
rated it:
A most interesting premise--August Brill, extreme insomniac--makes up stories when he can't sleep. In the process, he creates a parallel world (America in the midst of a civil war, no 9/11, no war in Iraq, and more). The parallel-world premise, obviously not original with Auster, is definitely in the hands of a master in this book. Poor Owen Brick, caught up in this world, comes to live so vividly that you feel his confusion and entrapment. The weaving between the worlds of Brill and Brick is pr
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Feb 01, 2009
Paula
rated it:
Man in the Dark is a short novel (180 pages) composed of one long chapter. I would categorize it as meta-fiction once removed or fictionalized meta-fiction (In this it reminds me of 2 novels I read last year: Queen of the Prisons of Greece, by Osman Lins and Diary of a Bad Year, by J.M. Coetzee). August Brill, the storyteller/ protagonist, is a 72 year old retired book critic and insomniac who lies awake at night telling himself stories while worrying about his 47 year old daughter Miriam and h
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(1 person liked it)
Aug 05, 2008
Abby
rated it: 
Meh. I feel sort of like a fraud reviewing this book when it is the first Auster I have actually read, but whatever. I was not so impressed. The story-within-a-story, blurring-the-boundaries-between-narrator-and-characters might have felt fresh and exciting back in 1992, but now it just seems cliched and boring. I liked the idea of an alternative United States at war with itself instead of Iraq, but when the narrative abandoned this thread, I lost interest. Do we really another book with an agin
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(2 people liked it)
Aug 16, 2008
Jayme
rated it:
Auster is at his best when he writes about the complex effects of the world on the human heart. Using an interpretation of the current political climate, what with our useless, endless war and the useless, endless president, Auster has taken a dark snapshot of society's pull on one man, August Brill. Brill takes us on a roller coaster through his imagination on a single sleepness night, incorporating his grief and projecting it onto an imaginary character of his own making in a hope to heal hims
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(1 person liked it)
Sep 08, 2008
Carrie
rated it:
I am a real fan of Paul Auster even though I don't like every book he has written. His latest is a beautiful story that lives up to the promises of his great books (New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, Leviathan).
With the twist you can expect from Auster, there is the surreal plotline of a character sent on a mission to kill the author of his story. But most of the plot focuses on an elderly man's look back on his life and the people in his real story -- his wife, his daughter and his gr More...
With the twist you can expect from Auster, there is the surreal plotline of a character sent on a mission to kill the author of his story. But most of the plot focuses on an elderly man's look back on his life and the people in his real story -- his wife, his daughter and his gr More...
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(2 people liked it)
Feb 05, 2009
Reactions to Paul Auster's new novel may very well have come from alternate universes themselves. In one world, Auster is a great American man of letters writing a postmodern response to the events of our time, particularly 9/11, as only he can. In another world, his novel is yet another failed attempt at fictional engagement with the past eight years. There is a universe where Auster has matured from a young writer with a genius for multilayered, self-referential plots to a more sensitive obser
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Jan 24, 2009
christa
rated it:
August Brill can't sleep. Since his car accident, he can't walk very well. His wife recently died. He's living with his daughter, who's husband recently left her, and his granddaughter, who's boyfriend was beheaded by terrorists for a live audience. Clips are available online.
If August Brill has to pee in the middle of the night, it is easier for him to just go into a bottle, rather than fumble around looking for his cane.
"Man In The Dark" by Paul Auster spans More...
If August Brill has to pee in the middle of the night, it is easier for him to just go into a bottle, rather than fumble around looking for his cane.
"Man In The Dark" by Paul Auster spans More...
Jan 21, 2009
Trish
rated it:
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
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Jan 05, 2009
Read the STOP SMILING review of Man in the Dark:
Such a Fearful Thing to Love What Death Can Touch: Paul Auster Waxes Mortal
Going back as far as his first novel City of Glass, the New York-based author Paul Auster has been known for his sublime intellectual play, his text-within-a-text narrative structures. His œuvre calls to mind Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel,” with its manipulation of language and knowledge in ways that are contradictory, labyrinthine More...
Such a Fearful Thing to Love What Death Can Touch: Paul Auster Waxes Mortal
Going back as far as his first novel City of Glass, the New York-based author Paul Auster has been known for his sublime intellectual play, his text-within-a-text narrative structures. His œuvre calls to mind Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel,” with its manipulation of language and knowledge in ways that are contradictory, labyrinthine More...
Dec 22, 2008
Cornelio
rated it:
“Auster is one of those authors that I try to read everything he writes and over the years has built a lot of cred with me. So even if I don't think a particular work is his best effort and honestly if written by someone else I suspect I might criticize much harder, I am willing to always go on the ride with him. The thing about Auster is he constantly makes me think about the act of writing, reading, and "art" and what place they have in the contemporary world. This was again the case
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Dec 20, 2008
Stephanie
rated it:
AS someone who is definitely not a Paul Auster fan, I never thought I would say this, but his new novel is an enjoyable and touching read.
Sure, it has an abundance of faults: like many of his recent novels like Travels In The Scriptorium (2007) and Oracle Night (2004), it is lacks a satisfying narrative structure, goes off in arbritrary directions and incorporates numerous half-baked parables.
But where these novels by the author of the iconic New York Trilogy have been cerebral and More...
Sure, it has an abundance of faults: like many of his recent novels like Travels In The Scriptorium (2007) and Oracle Night (2004), it is lacks a satisfying narrative structure, goes off in arbritrary directions and incorporates numerous half-baked parables.
But where these novels by the author of the iconic New York Trilogy have been cerebral and More...
Dec 15, 2008
Stephen
rated it:
Paul Auster is an American novelist better known in France than in the United States. That’s too bad, because he is a writer who deserves a larger readership, even if his stories of coincidence, mystery, and the mingling of reality and imagination are not to everyone’s taste. His two latest works, In the Scriptorium and The Man in the Dark, both deal with isolated men trying to make sense of the peculiar situation in which they find themselves. In the first case, the protagonist is locked in
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Dec 04, 2008
Mike
rated it:
Quite a few of Auster’s novels have a surreal quality. Man in the Dark does too. In this case, it’s an almost science fictional scenario - an alternate America where civil war has broken out and the United States has become the Disunited States.
This imagined world exists only in the mind of August Brill, an elderly man (in the real world) lying in bed recovering from an accident that has left him immobile. Brill’s imaginary excursions into this parallel world are interspersed wi More...
This imagined world exists only in the mind of August Brill, an elderly man (in the real world) lying in bed recovering from an accident that has left him immobile. Brill’s imaginary excursions into this parallel world are interspersed wi More...
Dec 03, 2008
bookczuk
rated it:
For the most part, i love the way Paul Auster sweeps me into a story. I wasn't disappointed in this. Pulls you right into the story, totally absorbs the restless mind. Every once in a while, you remember you're sitting in a living room in SC, reading a book. It's not long, and has moments that made me think I was still reading Brooklyn Follies. Finished it in 2 sittings and now javaczuk is reading it. What is it about absurdist fiction I so like?
(Speaking of absurd, hazrabai was read More...
(Speaking of absurd, hazrabai was read More...
Nov 20, 2008
Tony
rated it:
Auster, Paul. MAN IN THE DARK. (2008). **1/2. I read and collect Auster’s books, but this one leaves me non-plussed. When I got to the end of the book, I thought that I had bought a copy with the last fifty pages missing. The plot that he introduces in the beginning of the novel simply disappears, and the alternative plot – loosely related to the first – appears, but only developed to a point. Then, it stops and the book is over. The protagonist is August Brill, a 72-year old retired boo
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Feb 16, 2012
Leah
rated it:
This entire book takes place in one insomniac night. It's about an old man with a shattered leg, who lives with his daughter and granddaughter.
He is writing a story in his head about a world in which 9-11 never happened. Instead of America focusing its energy on other countries (i.e. the Iraq and Afghanistan wars), it focused on its own divides, and had another Civil War.
Aside from the meta-narrative (which most Auster books seem to have) about 9-11, there's also the re More...
He is writing a story in his head about a world in which 9-11 never happened. Instead of America focusing its energy on other countries (i.e. the Iraq and Afghanistan wars), it focused on its own divides, and had another Civil War.
Aside from the meta-narrative (which most Auster books seem to have) about 9-11, there's also the re More...
Nov 02, 2011
Христо
rated it:
“Човек на тъмно” на Пол Остър – чудесно начало и развитие, будещ недоумение край
http://www.knigolandia.info/2011/06/blog...
Алтернативна американска реалност, кулите си стоят, а гражданска война е разкъсала държавата. Няма инвазии, американците се избиват яростно помежду си, вместо да избиват други народи. И всичко това се развива в главата на старец, който иска да избяга от своята реалност. Само че алтернативното съществуване осъзнава произхода си и вербува действителен човек, к More...
http://www.knigolandia.info/2011/06/blog...
Алтернативна американска реалност, кулите си стоят, а гражданска война е разкъсала държавата. Няма инвазии, американците се избиват яростно помежду си, вместо да избиват други народи. И всичко това се развива в главата на старец, който иска да избяга от своята реалност. Само че алтернативното съществуване осъзнава произхода си и вербува действителен човек, к More...
Nov 01, 2011
Scott
rated it:
Like so many other Paul Auster works of late, Man In the Dark is a story taking place within another story. The basic premise is that an old man can't sleep at night, and so he tells himself stories in order to pass the time.
Auster flashes between the reality of the old man and his fictional story detailing a second American civil war. Consequently, things get interesting when the fictional bleeds into the real. Yes, that's right: the old man's character is assigned to find the old man More...
Auster flashes between the reality of the old man and his fictional story detailing a second American civil war. Consequently, things get interesting when the fictional bleeds into the real. Yes, that's right: the old man's character is assigned to find the old man More...
Jul 29, 2011
Elsa
rated it:
Comment réécrire sa vie par le récit et l'imaginaire ?
Un récit en patchwork où chaque personnage (le grand-père, la mère, la petite-fille) porte des blessures. Ainsi, ce vieux handicapé retrouve chaque nuit des terreurs nocturnes avec lesquelles il s'amuse à écrire une histoire parallèle, celle d'une Amérique qui n'aurait pas connu le 11 septembre mais qui se déchirerait dans une abominable guerre civile. Ici, le récit qu'il soit mental lors des insomnies d'August Brill, critique dans More...
Un récit en patchwork où chaque personnage (le grand-père, la mère, la petite-fille) porte des blessures. Ainsi, ce vieux handicapé retrouve chaque nuit des terreurs nocturnes avec lesquelles il s'amuse à écrire une histoire parallèle, celle d'une Amérique qui n'aurait pas connu le 11 septembre mais qui se déchirerait dans une abominable guerre civile. Ici, le récit qu'il soit mental lors des insomnies d'August Brill, critique dans More...
Jul 16, 2011
April
rated it:
When I finished reading, I wanted to know what happened to Owen !! I don't know if you guys felt the same way, but the book left me craving to know what happens to him. But, that was the whole point of the story. We suffer because we can't ever surmise what life is going to throw our way, or take away. The metaphor of the dark ties in nicely with the idea that we are all in the dark; we don't have a manual that tells us how to live life, or what to do if caught in bad situations. We do what our
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Jul 10, 2011
Jane
rated it:
I've been known to make up silly word games, lists, etc. when insomnia strikes, but nothing like August Brill. He constructs a whole alternate America in his mind in which there was no 9/11, no Iraq war, but the country fell into civil war after the 2000 election. In this America a character named Owen Brick must kill August Brill! A death wish?
In reality Brill is a 72-year-old man living with his daughter and granddaughter while recovering from an auto accident. All three are st More...
In reality Brill is a 72-year-old man living with his daughter and granddaughter while recovering from an auto accident. All three are st More...
