Man in the Dark by Paul Auster

There were two things going through my mind while reading this book.  First off, Auster kind of, well, he kind of sounds like Mitch Albom.  OK, a gold-plated Mitch Albom, but that same semi-mystical tone is there.  Maybe Albom is a plastic Auster, whatever.  I couldn’t get it out of my head that this book reminded me of ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’.  Second, there is a lot going on here…alternate worlds, film review, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter, a second Civil War, Insomnia, medieval torture techniques, and so on. 

I know it sounds like I didn’t enjoy this book, but I actually did - I couldn’t put it down.  Somehow Auster makes his seemingly disjointed narrative work.  If for nothing more than the opening paragraph, it is worth a read…

“I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness. Upstairs, my daughter and granddaughter are asleep in their bedrooms, each one alone as well, the forty-seven-year-old Miriam, my only child, who has slept alone for the past five years, and the twenty-three-year-old Katya, Miriam’s only child, who used to sleep with a young man named Titus Small, but Titus is dead now, and Katya sleeps alone with her broken heart.”