A man in the dark

Alone in the darkness, I turn over the world in my head, while I am fighting another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness. This is how Paul Auster — the American novelist and author of the New York Trilogy — begins his brilliant novel about the many truths that surround us when wars erupt around us. August Brill, seventy-two years old, in his daughter’s house in Vermont, is recovering from a car accident. When sleep eludes him, he lies on the bed and tells himself stories, trying to push away the things he prefers to forget: the death of his last wife, and the murder of his granddaughter’s friend, Tates... He imagines a parallel world to this one, where America is not at war with Iraq, but with itself. In this “Other America,” the two famous towers did not fall, and the United States was paralyzed after a bloody civil war! — Auster is one of our most elegant cultural writers. The Washington Post Book World — Auster has a tremendous talent for creating believable fantasy worlds. San Francisco Chronicle