Jason's review
Travels in the Scriptorium: A Novel
by Paul Auster
Jason's review
Travels in the Scriptorium: A Novel by Paul Auster
Jason's review
rating:
bookshelves:
reviewed
recommended for: Readers who enjoy Borges, Eco, and Calvino
Before Travels in the Scriptorium, I’d never read Paul Auster. Now I have to read everything he’s written.
Travels in the Scriptorium was an impulse buy based on the cover. I found an advanced readers copy at work. It was that simple. The book turned out to be anything but.
An elderly man wakes up in a simple room. He is being monitored. He’s essentially locked in. He can’t remember his past. He doesn’t know where he is. Over the course of one day, nurses and mysterious visitors reveal hints, but no solid details, of his previous life. There is a desk with a stack of photographs and a manuscript of a novel or memoir, half western, half post-colonial. The story, if you can call it that, consists of the man reading and trying to figure out what’s happening to him. It’s an extended Borgesian story within a story, and when it concludes, you’re left groping with questions and an eagerness to turn back to page one, to begin again with more attention, more questions.
...more
Travels in the Scriptorium was an impulse buy based on the cover. I found an advanced readers copy at work. It was that simple. The book turned out to be anything but.
An elderly man wakes up in a simple room. He is being monitored. He’s essentially locked in. He can’t remember his past. He doesn’t know where he is. Over the course of one day, nurses and mysterious visitors reveal hints, but no solid details, of his previous life. There is a desk with a stack of photographs and a manuscript of a novel or memoir, half western, half post-colonial. The story, if you can call it that, consists of the man reading and trying to figure out what’s happening to him. It’s an extended Borgesian story within a story, and when it concludes, you’re left groping with questions and an eagerness to turn back to page one, to begin again with more attention, more questions.
...more
