The Book of Illusions is brief. I finished this baby in two days, both because it is rather short (only 9 chapters I think), but also because it is so gripping that it's hard to wrestle yourself away. The writing and plot are very contemporary, and it was refreshing to read something like that after so many classics I've dragged myself through thanks to this giant list of British-favoring titles.
It's a romance, through and through, but curiously I was never able to fall in love with the love interest Alma. It might be because I'm shallow, and she's ugly, but I was never able to openly accept her as a trustworthy character. She's very independent...and that might be it...but I also felt like she was intruding (or rather, crashing) into David's life and I was uncomfortable with that. Of course, I'm not the one in love with her, so naturally I wouldn't understand.
Auster must be a lover of films. All of the moments in the book where David is describing Mann's movies were a more than uncanny representation of many film reference titles I used while I took a ludicrous number of film classes in college. He also does a fantastic job of creating faux black-and-white films from scratch, to a seriously meticulously believable degree. It often happened that when I read those real-life critiques and analyses on film, the words on the page described the pictures and plot in such a lovely way that they were in fact much more powerful and captivating than the real thing. I got the same sense reading David's narration of the fictional films he was watching.
I did get a sense of the familiar being-overwhelmed-from-the-excess-of-misfortune residual from The Jungle, but here, I accept it as a fitting over-the-top drama genre. Besides, there is so much fancy writing/film things being done here like symbolism and foreshadowing and allusions that I'm too distracted with feelings of like.
Also, those "little people" seem like they are pure evil. That feels offensive to say.
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