World of Kammbia

Paul Auster is one of the most interesting authors we have in contemporary fiction.  I have read Leviathan and the groundbreaking New York Trilogy over the years.  When I saw Oracle Night at the used bookstore recently, I decided to read and review it.

Oracle Night is the story of novelist, Sidney Orr, who has recently recovered from illness.  He enters a stationery store on September 18,1982 and buys a blue notebook. Over the next nine days, Orr will become entranced by the blue notebook and begin to live out events that happens as a result of his purchase.

Moreover, those events will make Orr question everything he knows about his life: marriage, friendship, and writing. Where does fiction ends and reality begins?  That seems to be question Paul Auster is trying to answer in Oracle Night. Coincidences and Serendipity(common elements in an Auster novel) are used to find those answers. I thought those elements revealed a believable conclusion to Orr’s dilemma.

Auster is the one of our best storytellers and most readable novelists we have in contemporary fiction. Oracle Night is one of my favorite reads of 2015 and highly recommended.