Shining a light into the long night of the soul
August Brill is an aging book reviewer. He lives in a haunted house.
Haunted by grief. Brill has recently lost the use of his leg in a car accident, beloved wife to cancer, son-in-law to divorce and precious granddaughter’s lover to murderers. Such tragedies, for any of us, threaten to cave in the soul.
Brill survives as our 21st-century Walter Mitty, a man who dreams to live instead of living to dream. He imagines fiction to pass his lonely nights, inventing Owen Brick, an ordinary magician caught up in an apocalyptic second American Civil War, who must assassinate Brill himself, the storyteller, to end the world’s suffering and destruction.
The real magician here is Auster. Our new century so far has been as bleak and troubled as Brill’s last years. This little dream of a novel invests it with something newly precious. Hope riffles the pages of this beautiful, heartbreaking book.