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Then, one day, he sees by chance a clip of a silent movie and is
captivated by the image of a long-forgotten actor, beautiful
Hector Mann, with his thin black moustache, his white suit and
expressive eyes. For a brief moment, Zimmer feels himself
released from acute pain, focusing on something outside himself
and, for the next three months, he uses the figure of Mann as a
thread with which he can find his way out of his own despair.
He travels round
America and then to London and Paris, seeing all of Mann’s
films, the only person, he reckons, ever to have done so. He
spends his days alone in archives and tiny viewing theatres,
staring at the screen, meditating on the allure of silent
movies, making meanings out of Mann’s graceful wordlessness.
He writes a book about Mann’s films and, in doing so, finds a
small amount about the actors life: how, just as his career was
taking off, he disappeared, never to be seen again. Of course,
Zimmer knows the actor is dead and forever an enigma. You can’t
erase yourself for 80 years and then come back to life again.
After his book is
published, the professor agrees to translate Chateaubriand’s
Memoires d’outre-tombe (which he will call in English, Memoires
of a Dead Man), but just as he immerses himself in this next
round of dealing with the dead, he receives a letter from a
woman purporting to be Mann’s wife, inviting Zimmer to New
Mexico to visit the old man, who has not long left to live.
By a series of
melodramatic turns, which include his highly charged suicide
attempt and his miraculous resurrection through a love affair
with Mann’s confidante and daughter-figure, Zimmer finds
himself in New Mexico. The dead actor is not dead after all; the
silent star has been a reclusive movie director all these years,
making films in the desert that no one will ever see (a
different kind of silent movie); and there is, of course, a
complex tale to be told about his baroque afterlife.
Auster is not a
realist. As the title of his latest novel insists, he inhabits a
world of illusion. His novels are worldly, finely tuned,
elegant, knowingly self-referential. In The Book of Illusions
the story we are reading is being written by the narrator: shape
and intellect are locked on to a seething gothic tale of crime
and guilt, full of stock figures (the pornographer, the
prostitute, the sinner, the murderer, the deceived wench) and
situations (the house on fire, the hidden body, the secret
book).
Everywhere, there
are pairings and echoes. The lives of the two men reflect one
another other in their disintegration and reparations. They have
both died and come back to life again; they are both full of
guilt and the need to do penance; they seek salvation through
art. They are dead men talking. Hector Mann, in his underworld
pilgrimage after his disappearance, has had to travel through
stages of penance, which are then repeated by Zimmer. Mann
becomes, in one of his incarnations, a pornographer who wears a
mask for his shows, and he is then attacked by a bank robber in
a mask, who, by nearly murdering him, saves him.
The lost films
show stories that the characters then enact, as if they have
made their fates into art before experiencing them in life.
Literary references continually spike the text. The woman whom
Zimmer falls for — falls like his wife and sons fell to their
death — has a birthmark disfiguring her cheek, and thus
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale, The Birthmark, is her
reference. Chateaubriand hovers over the text, with his ghostly
autobiography. Pedagogic film criticism becomes another text.
At times, the
scaffolding of the book pokes through its tender surface, like
one of those postmodern buildings in which the insides are on
the outside. At times, the dialogue can feel awkwardly Socratic,
the echoes and reverberations too insistent.
Yet there is great
pleasure in Auster’s meticulous artifice, which, rather than
damping down the emotions of the book, controls them. And of
course, like a film reel in the dark, the story must loop round
to its beginning.
The words ‘The
End’ may flicker but then they disappear and the beautiful man
in a white suit appears again, talking to us silently.
— Guardian
News Service
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A
professor whose entire family has died in a plane crash, leaving him
so ravaged by grief that he becomes like a zombie stumbling through
a living death; a silent movie star of the twenties, who disappeared
mysteriously 80 years ago, with only the haunting, mute, image of
himself as a trace: these two men form the plaited story of the The
Book of Illusions, with the first man tracking down the second
in order to lose himself so that he may find himself.
