The Book Of Illusions

THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS.
“The Book of Illusions” is a novel by the American writer Paul Auster, published in 2002.

A LITTLE IDEA ABOUT THE WRITER.-
Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris, France where he worked translating French literature. He returned to the U.S. in 1974. Since then, he haspublished numerous poems, essays, novels made translations of French, screenplays and even directed some films. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, the also writer Siri Hustvedt.
In his works he always searches for identity and personal meaning in life. His most recognized books are The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), Timbuktu (1999), The Bookof Illusions (2002), Oracle Night (2003), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Man in the Dark (2008), Sunset Park (2010) and the most recent Winter Journal (2012).
He has a lot of awards, including the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, and he is being proposed every year as a candidate for Nobel Prize. I have no doubt he will get it.

SUMMARY.-
“The Book of Illusions” by PaulAuster is not an easy book to make a summary. A short summary is possible but it hardly will leave us the complex layers of emotions it has, as it´s a book that provokes and stimulates us until the end, full of philosophical ideas such as identity, memory, life, death or love.
The book opens with the sentence, "Everyone thought he was dead." It refers to a silent film comedian named HectorMann who just disappeared one day back in 1929, but it could also refer to the protagonist of the story, David Zimmer, a literature professor at a liberal arts college in Vermont. David's life came to an end the day his wife and sons were killed in a plane crash. That disaster sent him into drink and depression and he lived in an almost catatonic state in front of the television every day. He sawno purpose to living, but he was also unable to take his own life. He divorced society, quit his job, and broke off all contact with the people in his former life.
One day, a spark of life emerged while he watched a short clip of a Hector Mann movie on the television. He laughed. That moment of laughter made him realize that there was still something inside him that wanted to live, and herealized he needed a purpose, something to occupy his mind and to get him through every day. David decided to write a book about Hector Mann and his movies. He had previously written several books of literary critique and he applied the same thorough research methods of his academic career to find out all he could about Hector Mann. The only copies of the 12 silent movies Hector Mann ever made weredistributed among different film museums around the world, so he travelled to all of them in America and Europe and watched all the movies repeatedly until he had them memorized. David tells us how the movies fit within Hector Mann's life and career. When the book is finished and published by an academic press, the reader has no doubt that David Zimmer had written the definitive book about HectorMann.
Like every other person who had examined Hector Mann's life, David is unable to explain his sudden disappearance in 1929. There were no signs of foul play, no signals of depression or disasters in his life. Hector Mann had a promising career, he was handsome, bright, and popular with women, and had no reason to leave the movie business. Yet one day, he simply vanished and all attempts tofind out what happened to him proved fruitless.
The publication of the book brought the existence of David Zimmer to the attention of the outside world. A friend from his past called and asked him to do a translation for him of French writer Chateaubriand's opus Mémoires d'outre-tombe. David translates the title to be Memoirs of a Dead Man. Chateaubriand didn't want his memoirs were...