Book Review: Travels in the Scriptorium

Fiction
By Anna Wainwright
Paul Auster, Travels in the Scriptorium (Picador, 2007)

Travels in the Scriptorium, Paul Auster’s latest novel, is a beautiful and chilling little book. The style is spare, philosophical. A man sits alone in a room, not sure of who he is, where he is or what he is doing there. He is unaware of the fact that he is under constant surveillance, both audio and video. He is completely unfamiliar with all the mechanisms of his body. His name is Mr. Blank.

The novel is a reverse caper of sorts. An Orwellian manuscript, author unknown, is in the room for Mr. Blank to read and decipher. He is visited, in his small space, by a variety of characters both eerily familiar to him and totally new. A devoted Auster reader will recognize the characters from his earlier works: Anna Blume from In the Country of Last Things, Peter Stillman of City of Glass and David Zimmer from The Book of Illusions, among others; all make cameos both onstage and off. These characters drop clues as to why they are visiting him; most notably, it is made clear that he has wronged Anna somehow, and is responsible for her suffering. The characters keep coming, the manuscript is read, Mr. Blank relearns how to urinate, defecate, vomit and orgasm again. He begins to piece together the puzzle, and discover how he relates to all these people entering and leaving his room.

I was reminded when reading Scriptorium of a passage in Ghosts, the second novella in The New York Trilogy: “Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.”

Auster is known for his obsession with stories within stories. Writers abound in his tales, and find themselves in precarious, even life-or-death situations not generally associated with the literary lifestyle. His great skill is in dosing literature with peril. Scriptorium gives authority to the many characters that Auster himself has, over the years, put through insanity, despair, even death. In some sense, the author has allowed his characters to finally grant him his own comeuppance. After all, he seems to ask the reader, what life does a writer have without his characters?

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/03/books/prose-roundup-march-08