About this title: From the bestselling author of "Oracle Night" and "The Book of Illusions," comes an exhilarating, whirlwind tale of one man's accidental redemption.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Date Published: 2006-05-31
ISBN-13:9780786285037ISBN:0786285036
Description: Like New. A great book in like new condition that was an ex. -lib. book with usual stamps and stickers. FREE TRACKING in US and email to you when shipped. Inquires welcomed and we want your complete satisfaction! read more
Description: Very Good. 0805077146 *HCDJ * SHIPPING WITHIN 24 HOURS! ** QUESTIONS ANSWERED QUICKLY ** THANKS ** HARDCOVER BOOK WITH DUST JACKET. read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very good. Dust Cover Missing. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Purchasing this book supports the King County Library System Foundation. Thriftbooks and KCLSF have partnered to help raise additional funds for the library system. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
"I confess I waited a long time to pick this up because Paul Auster was getting hyped up one side and down the other and I was fed up with it. My loss, it seems, as this was very good, the kind of book where I liked it more with every page. It's a character-driven novel about a somewhat unlikely assortment of people who are thrown together, and spends most of its time looking at how their various backgrounds impact how they develop relationships (all sorts) with each other. The characters were maybe a little too quirky all together to be perfectly realistic, but that kept things snappy and moving along. One thing that threw me, though, was that I know a big deal was made about how this was such a novel about Brooklyn, and really, I felt like it didn't have very much unique to Brooklyn at all, it could have been interesting people living just about anywhere. Perplexing.
Grade: A Recommended: Highly, especially to people who like to keep up on current fiction, and I suppose people who like Brooklyn, because perhaps there's something more Brooklyn-centric there that I just didn't pick up on."
"I suppose I should declare an interest in that anything Auster does is alright by me, a bit like Murakami or Eggers, and I'm a bit blind now perhaps to his flaws.
The thing that gets me about him is his ability to drive forward a sprawling narrative without really adhering to any recognisable plot structures - his later works genuinely seem to unfold as they are being put down on paper, and although you sense the presence of a controlling hand in the frequent coincidences and doublings that Auster finds so irresistible, his books are genuinely unpredictable.
This book is not as good as some of his other works, but with a back catalogue like his, that's not much of a critcism. And it has an astonishing final sentence that throws the rest of the book into disarray, good on him."
"Auster won me over long ago with Mr. Vertigo and The New York Trilogy, but I have grown tired of his increasingly self-indulgent, chauvinistic narratives.
The Brooklyn Follies started okay, but the curious faux-stage play at page 99 signaled the demise of this story. Dudes blathering incessantly about "life" in the most pretentious, unrealistic terms possible. Dialogue that is unrealistic and breezy is one thing, but this was the opposite of breezy; this was tedious, contrived, undergraduate malarkey. If I knew anyone who really talked the way Nathan and Tom talk, I would avoid conversations with them at all costs.
One could write a lengthy thesis about the embarrassing chauvinism that has hijacked many of Auster's books, including this one, but suffice it to say that, once again, every female character in this book is presented with minimal depth and often patronizing motives and emotions. "No more ethereal B.P.M.s, but an unmarried woman desperate to hook a man. A steamroller. A tornado. A hungry, fast-talking wench who could flatten our boy into submission." No doubt Auster thought he was being complimentary with descriptions like this, so I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. But the weird, unnecessarily derisive tangents became intolerable by the end of the book: "...I was turning into something of a woman myself: a person who wept at the mere mention of babies, a lachrymose saphead who need to walk around with a box of emergency tissues so as not to embarrass myself in public."
I've read about 7 or 8 Auster novels, but this will probably be my last. The plot formula has gotten tiresome, and so have the old "deep male / foolish female" pairings so ubiquitous in every one."
"I read the first two-thirds of this story at a fairly good clip. It's a retired, divorced gentleman's account of what happens when he moves to Brooklyn in search of "a quiet place to die." Once there, he does anything but die. He discovers a much-liked nephew is now living in the same neighborhood, and they renew their close relationship. Through the nephew, he forms ties with remarkable people of both sexes. He takes in a stray nine-year-old girl. He travels to Vermont and to my own hometown in North Carolina. He makes short work of crooks and religious fanatics. Oh, whatever his life had been before, it now becomes astonishingly eventful.
But I did put the book down at one point, and when I finally finished, it was without much enjoyment. Why? Two reasons come to mind.
First, the main players in this story - the good guys, anyway - seem to come from a single mold. My problems began when I sensed that they were all manifestations of the author. I think he identified with each of them and so had to make each seem competent, level-headed, and something of a paragon. He creates situations in which dialog cannot be terribly interesting because everybody pretty much sees the world in the same way. They're all politically liberal, for example, and when the subject of politics comes up, as it often does, all they can do is agree with one another.
Even Ayn Rand, who used her fiction to advance a political philosophy, provided foils against which her heroes could test themselves.
Secondly, despite the series of potentially dramatic developments summarized above, there is precious little real drama. Most often, it is just a matter of our narrator telling, not showing, what happens. There's a place in storytelling for summary, and I don't immediately break out in hives when I see a passage like this:
Months passed. By the middle of October, the lawyers had finished their work on Harry's estate, and Tom and Rufus had become the legitimate owners of Brightman's Attic and the building it was housed in. Tom and Honey were already married by then, and Lucy, silent as ever on the subject of her mother's whereabouts, was enrolled as a fifth grader at the local public school ..."
But when the weight of that kind of narrative reaches a certain point, one cannot avoid noticing it, and noticing what is absent.
The cover says this is a national bestseller. I cannot imagine why."
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