I have an issue with trying to review this book. I normally try to stay relatively spoiler free, not saying much more about the plot as you can glean from the back cover. Especially when I like the book.
However this is such a short book, and the reasons for its genius can't really be described without giving spoilers. So consider yourself warned.
This is not a book for someone who has never read anything by Auster to pick up and read. If this is your first Auster novel, you will likely as not not understand anything that's going on, without a lot of associated google-fu.
The reason for that is how self referential this book is.
An old man wakes in a room with no memories. He's visited by an array of people and finds a half written novel on the desk along with many photographs of people he cannot remember. We learn that every action he takes, including all the most intimate and scatological, is being recorded by an unknown omniscient third person narrator who describes all this detail to us. The prose is clinical with occasional forays into the poetic.
The reader is referenced many times throughout the novel(la?). Nothing ever seems to exist to the old man until it is desribed in detail in the text. He never finds the closet, although Anna Bloom, the first of two nurses to visit him lays out his change of clothes for him from somewhere while he is busy elsewhere. All items visible in the room have been labelled with their names. Wall. desk. Bathroom. etc.
These are switched mysteriously later on in the narrative, causing our Mr Blank to panic. Words are things of power and should be applied correctly. This is as good a visual metaphor for that as I think I've ever seen.
The names of the various visitors seem familiar to te long time reader of Auster's work. The missing Mr Fanshawe is the same Fanshawe who is missing in New york Trilogy. Anna Bloom is the lead character from In The Country of Last Things, and so on. The title itself is actually quite a big clue to the answers to all the questions raised in this book. The closing pages show the creation of a metafictional and existential nightmare.
Some would argue that Auster has vanished up his own rear end and currently resides somewhere near his own ileum after reading this and I can actually understand why. However I derived so much pleasure from this book that I really don't care if he's gone so far up his rear end that he's set up a granny flat in his tonsils.
This is vintage Auster. If you like him, you'll probably love it as much as I did. If you've not read him before, read some of his other books first. Start with New York trilogy, move on to Leviathan and Mr Vertigo and maybe a couple of others before you read this one. If you don't like him, why are you reading this review?
An easy 8.5 maybe 9 out of 10.
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