Travels in the Scriptorium

October 16, 2006
On the centennial year of Samuel Beckett's birth, Auster's new novel nods to the old master. We open with a man sitting in a room. The man doesn't remember his name, and a camera hidden in the ceiling takes a picture of him once a second. The man—whom the third-person narrator calls Mr. Blank—spends the single day spanned by the book being looked after, questioned and reading a fragmentary narrative written by a man named Sigmund Graf from a country called the Confederation who has been given the mission of tracking down a renegade soldier named Ernesto Land. During the course of the day, a former policeman, a doctor, two attendants and Mr. Blank's lawyer visit the room, and Mr. Blank learns he is accused of horrible crimes. (His lawyer claims he is accused of everything "from conspiracy to commit fraud to negligent homicide. From defamation of character to first-degree murder.") But this may or may not be true—the narrative veers toward ambiguity. While Auster's lean, poker-faced prose creates a satisfyingly claustrophobic allegory, the tidy, self-referential ending lends a writing-exercise patina to the work.

May 28, 2007
This enigmatic interrogation into the life of the sequestered and nameless protagonist referred to as Mr. Blank will leave some listeners perplexed and others awestruck by Auster’s manipulative narrative devices. Trapped within a room, Mr. Blank tries to recall who he is as a host of people from his past visits him. As usual, Hill performs fantastically with much energy and emotion. His edgy gravelly voice is tempered with a range of intensity that will grip listeners. Yet this doesn’t deter him from a softer tone when vocalizing women or revealing a more sentimental element of the story. The only problem with Hill’s voice is that his pitch ranges drastically, even in the same sentence. The sound engineers need to pay close attention and level it out. Otherwise, listeners are left constantly turning up and down the sound. Simultaneous release with the Holt hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 16).