One of the best Auster books I have read if not the very best, a complex narrative weave, a sparkling prose often bordering on the sensuousness of painting and poetry and not to mention a great narrative drive from beginning to end.
It's all music of chance, life in all its microscopic nuances and randomness: from mourning to peace, from the horror death to the appreciation of the mortal order of beauty in our fleeting world, from love and eroticism to heartbreaking melancholy, from the spectrality of archive to the necessary evil of hope in resumption of things, from the postmodern craftsmanship of frame narratives to an equally layered texture of affective intensity, The Book of Illusions has everything a reader would demand from a work of literature.
For me, above anything else, it's a book about the power of books, how writing and reading can mend a wounded mind on the verge of collapse, how books can cobble together, distant lives into a single thread, how translating a book exposes the self to the life of the other and paves way for identifications, how reading is always a dialogue and completeness of books always a posthumous phenomenon, how books can make you express and keep at bay your own suffering, how books open a future of faint hope against all odds of logic, how losing a book in your mind as well as in the world can kill you and how finishing and unfinishing a book both can finish you, how all books in all different languages at different nooks and crannies of this world speak to one another, how they whisper about things that were never there, things that could be there, how they seduce you into the unlived possibilities in the crevices of the lived life and this endless list is only punctuated by my unreadability.
It's all about the future of the illusion as if Freud says to Paul Auster and he responds with a silence that bites into words.
This is where cinema and novel meet, life and non-life too, a non-life that cannot spell the word death.
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