Demob Happy

Book of the dead The third in a trilogy of books I’ve read by Paul Auster recently – following ‘The Music of Chance‘ and ‘Mr Vertigo‘ – ‘The Invention of Solitude’ is a markedly different work, an autobiographical account divided into two parts: ‘Portrait of an Invisible Man’ and ‘Book of Memory’. The former is [...]

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Chance – the musical ! 9/10 I’m having a sudden urge to raid Paul Auster’s works, following up ‘Mr. Vertigo‘ with ‘The Music of Chance‘, a book I had long-neglected but somehow – like an Auster character, perhaps – convinced myself I had already read. This is probably because of the low-key but cultish film [...]

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Scaling the dizzy heights ? 8/10 It’s impossible to write about Paul Auster’s ‘Mr Vertigo‘ and completely avoid the dreaded term ‘Magic Realism’ – even if it’s a genre the writer is not commonly associated with. The fact that the novel centres around a street urchin taught how to fly by a Hungarian showman named [...]

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