Paul Auster- Travels in the Scriptorium

Travels in the Scriptorium

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

2007

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - In The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Man in the Dark - Invisible

“Without him, we are nothing, but the paradox is that we, the figments of another mind, will outlive the mind that made us, for once we are thrown into the world, we continue to exist forever, and our stories go on being told, even after we are dead.”

If there's anybody who's looked at this blog more than once and become reasonably annoyed at the constant stream of positive reviews for Paul Auster books, then this is your lucky day; an Auster book that I really did not like. Preceded in the author's bibliography by The Brooklyn Follies (which I have not read yet, though I hear and expect good things), and followed by the previously-reviewed similarly-sized novella Man in the Dark, the novella Travels in the Scriptorium is, an ambitious and confident piece of post-modernism. It's an author literally calling back to his characters and concepts of the past in order to try to create something distinctly new with the aid of a ton of metafiction. Far too much of it, as it turns out.

Auster, like all of the authors I most enjoy, has made a career out of focusing on certain deep-seated philosophical themes that become the basis for most of his novels. He's also a pioneering postmoderinist harking back to his debut collection of stories The New York Trilogy (mandatory reference complete) who uses his characters to toy with our notions of identity. I can see why the intensely focused strangeness of the genre can (fairly) put off casual readers, but usually with Auster's books, no matter how strange a plot development or how seemingly irrelevant a side-story might be, it all pays off for the dedicated reader by the end, and then I write an annoyingly positive review.

Spot the difference

The problems I had with Scriptorium arrived at the beginning. First of all, the main character is a non-entity with no memory and barely any personality. His name is Mr. Blank (or at least that's the name the narrator gives him, while insinuating he has another) and he lives in some sort of medical facility. Throughout the novella he is visited by a selection of different people whom he doesn't remember, but who know him, and they have a selection of pointed ethereal conversations where none of them actually explain what's going on (just like watching Lost). The real kicker, and the thing that's set to initially appeal to dedicated Auster fans, is that these visitors are all characters from prior novels of his. Anna Blume, from In the Country of Last Things is the most prominent one. Ultimately, though, there's no real established connection bar the character names.

The overall tone is a little bit irritating, written in the present tense with a certain sense of smugness, also minimalistic in style and explanations to the extent where I found it hard to care. I get the sense that Auster was trying to present an ourobourian piece of metafiction; Mr. Blank is clearly meant to be a simulacra of Auster himself, and some of the characters hint at knowledge of a higher relationship between them and he. I found it to ultimately be an unappealing mess thanks to the incoherent structure. Auster's typical elements are there in various ways, like a story-within-a-story tangent, but none of them hit the right note, and in this 120-page paperback have little time to leave an impact. Maybe other readers out there have deconstructed a clearer understanding of Scriptorium, but even if there is one the overall writing drove me away from seeing it. i hate to criticise Paul Auster's writing because I usually love it, but Travels in the Scriptorium was a big miss for me.