Description
“Alone in the dark, I turn the world upside down in my head as I battle another bout of insomnia, another sleepless night in the vast American wilderness.”
In his novel *Man in the Dark*, Auster imagines that the September 11, 2001 attacks never happened, that the Twin Towers still stand, and that no American soldiers are fighting in Iraq. Instead, a different scenario unfolds. Following the 2000 Supreme Court decision to declare George W. Bush president instead of Al Gore, a civil war erupts in the United States, which is divided into “independent states” led by Gore loyalists, and “federal states” led by George W. Bush.
All of this takes place in the imagination of August Brill, a retired literary critic in his seventies, who was involved in a car accident and is battling insomnia and helplessness in his daughter Miriam’s home.
The members of this household are victims of their own personal battles: Miriam is alone after her divorce, and his granddaughter Katya is trying to recover from the murder of her beloved Titus, who was killed in Iraq.
August himself is grappling with the aftermath of his wife’s death. As a backdrop to the narrative, some believe the only way out lies in a parallel life. Thus, August invents the character of Owen Breck, a 29-year-old who wakes up one day to find himself a soldier in this civil war, his sole mission to kill the writer in whose mind the war rages, hidden in darkness.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.