Timbuktu
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| Faber & Faber |
Paul Auster
1999
Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible
“That's all I've ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn't matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.”
I don't really get any hits on this website. Admittedly a lot of this is because I barely ever update it and put almost absolutely no effort into promoting it whatsoever. The remaining reason is probably because all I do is write about books, and books aren't massively popular. Don't get me wrong, they're not in danger of going anywhere, and millions of people worldwide enjoy reading, but they're definitely behind films, television and music in the modern entertainment pantheon, and perhaps video games too. It takes the average person far more time to finish a novel than to watch a film, and so anyone who wants to egotistically consider themselves to be well-read has to spend a lot of bloody time sitting still, thumbing paper.
I've distracted myself from the original point of the above paragraph, which I never actually made. Anyway, my point is that the ten people (maybe) who've opened up my blog site today are undoubtedly groaning in unison at the sight of yet another Paul Auster review. He might be a great author, but he's not exactly fashionable, and he's probably not going to shoot up the page ranking. But that's what I get for committing myself to review everything I read.
Anyway, the thing about Timbuktu that genuinely makes it stand out from every other Auster novel such as- gratuitous link time- Invisible, Mr. Vertigo and The Invention of Solitude) as a book that I honestly think could have major mainstream appeal is that it's literally about a dog. His name is Mr. Bones, and he is very clever. He's not a talking, intelligent Disney-style dog, but he does have the neat narrative ability to understand English, leaving him somewhere between Goofy and Pluto on the intelligence scale.
At the start of the novel Mr. Bones is in the care of one Willy G. Christmas, a long-suffering now-homeless kindly soul who also happens to be about to die. He and Mr. Bones take their last journey together to Baltimore, in search of a figure from Willy's past, but inevitably Mr. Bones finds himself alone.
Partly a philosophical look at our hopes for the afterlife and partly a nerve-wracking adventure of danger and confusion, Timbuktu is a book that stayed with me permanently the first time I read it some years ago, and had the same effect the second time around. It might be that it's easy to tug at the heartstrings when your lead character is a lonely dog, but Auster still does it very well indeed, mixing up narrative fantasy with harsh doses of reality to lead to a unique, intense, and poignant ending.
Short, simple and bittersweet, Timbuktu may look like a curio in the author's bibliography, but it's actually one of his strongest efforts and certainly something I'd recommend to anyone wanting to read him for the first time.
I've distracted myself from the original point of the above paragraph, which I never actually made. Anyway, my point is that the ten people (maybe) who've opened up my blog site today are undoubtedly groaning in unison at the sight of yet another Paul Auster review. He might be a great author, but he's not exactly fashionable, and he's probably not going to shoot up the page ranking. But that's what I get for committing myself to review everything I read.
At the start of the novel Mr. Bones is in the care of one Willy G. Christmas, a long-suffering now-homeless kindly soul who also happens to be about to die. He and Mr. Bones take their last journey together to Baltimore, in search of a figure from Willy's past, but inevitably Mr. Bones finds himself alone.
Partly a philosophical look at our hopes for the afterlife and partly a nerve-wracking adventure of danger and confusion, Timbuktu is a book that stayed with me permanently the first time I read it some years ago, and had the same effect the second time around. It might be that it's easy to tug at the heartstrings when your lead character is a lonely dog, but Auster still does it very well indeed, mixing up narrative fantasy with harsh doses of reality to lead to a unique, intense, and poignant ending.
Short, simple and bittersweet, Timbuktu may look like a curio in the author's bibliography, but it's actually one of his strongest efforts and certainly something I'd recommend to anyone wanting to read him for the first time.
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