Man In The Dark

Man In The Dark by Paul Auster Man in the Dark is Paul
Auster’s brilliant devastating novel about the many
realities we inhabit as wars flame all around us.
Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car
accident in his daughter’s house in Vermont. When sleep
refuses to come he lies in bed and tells himself stories
struggling to push back thoughts about things he would
prefer to forget—his wife’s recent death and the horrific
murder of his granddaughter’s boyfriend Titus. The retired
book critic imagines a parallel world in which America is
not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other
America the twin towers did not fall and the 2000 election
results led to secession as state after state pulled away
from the union and a bloody civil war ensued. As the night
progresses Brill’s story grows increasingly intense and
what he is so desperately trying to avoid insists on being
told. Joined in the early hours by his granddaughter he
gradually opens up to her and recounts the story of his
marriage. After she falls asleep he at last finds the
courage to revisit the trauma of Titus’s death. Passionate
and shocking Man in the Dark is a novel of our moment a
book that forces us to confront the blackness of night
even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a
world capable of the most grotesque violence.