SALCEDO,+PALOMA

PALOMA SALCEDO BENAVENTE ** Oracle Night, by Paul Auster. **  Oracle Night is an interesting novel writing by Paul Auster. The main character of the story is Sidney Orr, a writer who begins to write a novel after he has suffered an accident. Because of the accident, he has been sick for a long time and when he leaves the hospital, he begins with small outings. In one of these walks, he discovers a curious shop called the Paper Palace and feels that he wants to start writing again. He goes into the shop, whose owner is an eccentric man named Mr. Chang, and buys a special notebook from Portugal. Soon Sidney realizes that for some inexplicable reason, the Portuguese notebook makes him feel the need to write, hence he begins a new novel.With the advice of his mentor, John Trause, Sidney takes the story of Flitcraft, a minor character from Dashiell Hammet's //The Maltese Falcon//, as his first project. The theme of the story is how a random occurrence can completely change the path of a person's life. The main character of the story that Sidney begins to write is Nick Bowen, who has a good job and a good family life. However, one day he decides to give it all up and disappears. Bowen is a New York book editor who has just received an unpublished manuscript entitled //Oracle Night// from the granddaughter of a literary figure. After that, Bowen decides to leave his life and take the first plane from New York, bringing with him only the copy of //Oracle Night//. From here on in, Auster's novel describes in equal parts Sidney's own life and the life of his character, Bowen. Sidney realizes that the mysterious notebook he bought in Mr. Chang´s shop has some kind of power over his writing. Also, he finds out that Trause has been using the very same notebooks for his own novels. Trause warns Sidney that those notebooks are very friendly, but they can also be cruel. In fact, soon Sidney realizes that he is predicting with his novel his own life, with the same problems suffered by his main character. He will discover a connection between himself and the story of his novel, as if the notebook were speaking to him about his own circumstances.