When Orr remembers falling in love with his wife, he quotes Dante's account of first seeing Beatrice, allowing a poetic predecessor to have the experience for him. Their ailments are perhaps a comment on their literary woes: too busy experimenting with life, they are unable to live. Since stories encode the secret lives of the storytellers, does this one contain a clue to Trause's pining affection for Orr's wife?īoth men are more or less moribund, Orr convalescing after a near-fatal collapse, Trause laid low by deep vein thrombosis. His older, more venerable colleague, John Trause, then hands over one of his unpublished stories and invites Orr to adapt it. Tripped up by writer's block, Orr improvises a screenplay based on HG Wells's The Time Machine, except that he chooses to send the time traveller delving into the past rather than hurtling towards the future. Flitcraft is a businessman Orr's version of the man is a publisher, and when he disappears he takes with him the manuscript of a novel he is reading. Auster's narrator, Sidney Orr, sets himself to rewrite the life of Hammett's character, Flitcraft, who, in The Maltese Falcon, narrowly escapes death in an accident and, suddenly aware of his freedom, decides to abandon his routine, his stale identity and his cloying family. Their novels are offshoots of previous novels.
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