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Travels in the Scriptorium: A Novel
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Product Description
An old man awakens, disoriented, in an unfamiliar chamber. With no memory of who he is or how he has arrived there, he pores over the relics on the desk, examining the circumstances of his confinement and searching his own hazy mind for clues.
Determining that he is locked in, the man--identified only as Mr. Blank--begins reading a manuscript he finds on the desk, the story of another prisoner, set in an unfamiliar, alternate world. As the day passes, various characters call on Mr. Blank in his cell, and each brings frustrating hints of his forgotten identity and his past.
Both chilling and poignant, Travels in the Scriptorium is vintage Paul Auster: mysterious texts, fluid identities, a hidden past, and, somewhere, an obscure tormentor. And yet, as we discover during one day in the life of Mr. Blank, his world is not so different from our own.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #302904 in Books
- Published on: 2007-12-26
- Released on: 2007-12-26
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: .45" h x 5.54" w x 8.26" l, .33 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 160 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This enigmatic interrogation into the life of the sequestered and nameless protagonist referred to as Mr. Blank will leave some listeners perplexed and others awestruck by Auster's manipulative narrative devices. Trapped within a room, Mr. Blank tries to recall who he is as a host of people from his past visits him. As usual, Hill performs fantastically with much energy and emotion. His edgy gravelly voice is tempered with a range of intensity that will grip listeners. Yet this doesn't deter him from a softer tone when vocalizing women or revealing a more sentimental element of the story. The only problem with Hill's voice is that his pitch ranges drastically, even in the same sentence. The sound engineers need to pay close attention and level it out. Otherwise, listeners are left constantly turning up and down the sound.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From AudioFile
Paul Auster writes of isolation by recounting a day in the life of Mr. Blank, a man locked in a room for reasons he doesn't know and visited by people he can't remember. Throughout the course of the day, characters from Mr. Blank's past begin to fill in vague details about why he is there and the crimes he has committed, all while a camera clicks away, recording every detail. Dick Hill does a near-perfect job as Mr. Blank, capturing his frustration with his circumstances, his fear of the unknown, and the feebleness he feels. Altering his voice, Hill gives each character an equally believable persona, creating a fitting aura for Auster's sinister tale of confinement and lost identity. H.L.S. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
Auster, a literary descendent of Kafka and Borges, is fascinated by the very act of storytelling. Consequently, his novels always involve some form of doubling as one story coils within another. In the wake of The Brooklyn Follies (2006), an expansive novel, Auster presents a spare, metaphysical fable. Mr. Blank, Auster's protagonist, is confined to an austere room, uncertain of his status or the room's location. Names carry great weight in Auster's uncanny fiction, and so it figures that Mr. Blank has lost his memory. His keepers have provided him with a stack of photographs of people who seem dimly familiar and with a typescript written by another prisoner in another time and place. As Mr. Blank reads this compelling account of violence and loss in the Confederation, a land that vaguely resembles nineteenth-century America during the genocidal assault against indigenous peoples, various visitors arrive, claiming to be Blank's victims. But what are his crimes? Auster fans will recognize a parade of characters from earlier works, reaching back to his famed New York Trilogy (1985-86), In the Country of Last Things (1987), and Leviathan (1992), as Auster coyly celebrates the power of the imagination and marvels over the labyrinthine nature of the mind in an archly playful and shrewdly philosophical tribute to the transcendence of stories. Donna Seaman
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