“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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s a tale where isolation intertwines with imagination, as a lonely man weaves a parallel world to avoid confronting his own wounds. The boundaries between reality and illusion blur in a profound narrative imbued with psychological and philosophical undertones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":21174,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_cat":[905,949,911,921,834],"product_tag":[1252,1188,1082,1359],"class_list":{"0":"post-21176","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-world-literature","7":"product_cat-general-literature","8":"product_cat-novels","9":"product_cat-literary-texts","10":"product_cat-philosophy","11":"product_tag-feelings","12":"product_tag-fiction","13":"product_tag-novels","14":"product_tag-philosophy","15":"pa_book-author-paul-auster","17":"first","18":"onbackorder","19":"sale","20":"shipping-taxable","21":"purchasable","22":"product-type-simple"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/21176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21176"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=21176"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=21176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}