The World that is the Book : Paul Auster's Fiction

"The Way That is the Book" offers an in-depth analysis of Paul Auster's fiction from "The New York Trilogy" to "Timbuktu".

It explores the literary and cultural sources that Auster taps into to create stories that investigate the nature of language, the workings of chance, and the solitary individual's complex relations with the world at large.Beginning with a re-assessment of theories of intertextuality, the book analyses Auster's relationship with his chosen literary forbears, including Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Beckett and Kafka.

At the same time, Auster's work is read in the context of the postmodern novel's subversion of established genres and narrative forms, and its relation to history and the contemporary world.Whereas most Auster criticism has concentrated on readings of indivdual novels, this book emphasises the continuity in Auster's writing by discussing throughout the philosophical underpinnigs that lead the author to question the boundaries separating the fictional from from the factual and the real from the imagined.