Oracle Night (2003) is set in Brooklyn, New York, over nine days in September 1982. Author Paul Auster’s narrator is a 34-year-old man Sidney Orr, married to Grace. Their friend is author John Trause. Sidney buys a blue notebook, and as soon as he does, his months of writer’s block, from a near-death accident, come to an end. He has a burning need to write again. He discusses this with John, and they both agree that some notebooks make you want to use only that brand, and make it easy to write. What is it about that blue notebook? Sidney begins with John Trause’s suggestion. ‘There’s a novel in there somewhere’ he says about the Flitcraft episode in the 7th chapter of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon – in which Sam Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy about ‘a man who walks away from his life and disappears.’ Sidney starts writing about book editor Nick Bowen, Nick’s wife Eva, and the woman who gives him a story to edit. Rosa Leightman has...
REJECT GREED; TREAD LIGHTLY; CARE LOCALLY; RESPECT DIVERSITY ... by Martina Nicolls