On The Man in the Dark

The reviewer in 'Independent on Sunday' writes about Paul Auster's 2008 novel 'Man in the Dark':

"After a dozen novels one is used to watching him break new ground. This time Paul Auster breaks your heart too" and for once I do agree with the reviewer's remark here.

A heart-rending tale of memory on fiction and fiction on top of memory; of relations made, unmade and remade in time; of wars inside out in parallel worlds of fantasy; of loneliness and the horror of a life of facticity; of the unrelenting quest for dialogue in the dark; of metaphors in memory which turn real on the windows of fiction; of transgenerational transmission of similarities and differences, of lives and life writings as discoveries of liminal zones; of the authority of the author and the failed rebellion of his figment; of death and its lingering persistence in life to come; of cinema and its affective communication through the silence of objects; of the political experience of change, trouble and violence as markers of the self; of the devastating illumination of images over the opacity of words; of everything else in between the real and the imaginary and finally, to quote Rose Hawthorne, the youngest daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose life one of the characters of this book attempts to reconstruct, of the "weird world" which "rolls on"...on and on in rounds...