Words with power beyond the page

By Deloris Tarzan Ament
Special to The Seattle Times

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How much more of the future and the present are we aware of than we permit ourselves to know? Can we, on some subconscious level, foresee what is about to occur? Can we sometimes sense what is happening to those we love even when they are far out of sight?

Paul Auster's "Oracle Night" posits a world in which writer Sidney Orr, recovering from near-fatal illness and injury, buys a new blue notebook that inspires him to spin out a nightmarish story about the power of random accidents on our lives. Almost immediately his wife, long his emotional rock, breaks down in tears and begins to act strangely. Orr's story appears to prefigure a situation that is coming into being in his own life.

"Oracle Night" by Paul Auster Henry Holt, $23

His wife disappears for a day. His apartment is burglarized. Orr recalls a celebrated French writer whose 5-year-old daughter drowned two months after he published a long narrative poem about the drowning death of a young child. Fearing that words could kill, the French author never wrote again. Orr likewise stops writing, despite an insistence that nothing other than a random occurrence could possibly be at play. But Orr's writing mentor maintains, "Thoughts are real. Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment."

Orr's emotional roller coaster dives into such unexpected disaster that even as he tells it from the cool hindsight of 20 years, he can scarcely contain his grief. "Oracle Night" is a triumph for novelist Auster. It cements his growing reputation as one of America's most inventive and original writers.

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