The Book of Illusions

David Zimmer’s Grief

David Zimmer is a professor of literature whose wife and two sons die in a plane crash. For a year afterward he drinks, barely functions, and watches television. One night, by accident, he watches a clip of Hector Mann — a silent film comedian of the 1920s who vanished without explanation in 1929 at the height of his brief fame — and laughs for the first time since the crash. He becomes obsessed, tracks down Mann’s twelve surviving films, watches each repeatedly, and writes a book about them.

Auster renders Zimmer’s grief not sentimentally but with clinical precision: the specific texture of depression, the way time stops meaning anything when the people you love are suddenly absent from it, the odd arbitrariness of what breaks through — not therapy, not friendship, but a dead comedian’s physical comedy glimpsed on a television at 3 a.m. What Mann’s films do for Zimmer is not heal the grief but give it an object outside himself. He has somewhere to put his attention that is not the plane crash; the obsessive scholarship of locating and watching all twelve surviving films gives his days a structure they would not otherwise have. The book Zimmer writes about Mann is, on one level, a book about grief, though it never announces itself as such. The critical act and the personal act are the same act, and the novel is interested in what it means that this is possible — that a man can work through devastation by losing himself in someone else’s vanished art.

Hector Mann’s Films

The ekphrastic challenge Auster sets himself in The Book of Illusions is considerable: he must describe twelve fictional silent films in enough detail that they become real to the reader, real enough that Zimmer’s obsession seems proportionate to its object. He meets the challenge by writing about Mann’s films the way the best film criticism is written — attending to physical detail, recurring motif, tonal signature, and the cumulative argument a body of work makes about its maker.

Mann’s films play variations on the same themes: entrapment and escape, the body as obstacle and instrument, the gap between intention and outcome that is the engine of all physical comedy. A recurring motif is Mann’s hat — always the same hat, always lost and recovered and lost again in a different way. The films are, in Auster’s descriptions, genuinely funny, which is the hardest thing to achieve in prose about comedy. They are also, the more Zimmer watches them, about something: the hat that keeps getting away from its owner is a figure for the self that keeps eluding its apparent subject. Mann as an artist is someone whose work outlasted and recontextualized the life — his films have survived their maker’s disappearance and are more real, to the reader, than the man himself. The art is the evidence; the life is the mystery the art was produced to conceal.

The Letter and the Desert

The letter from Alma Grund arrives after Zimmer’s book on Mann has been published: Hector Mann is alive, in his nineties, living in New Mexico with his wife Frieda, and he wants to meet Zimmer before he dies. The journey into the desert is the novel’s structural pivot — up to this point, Mann has been a historical object, a subject for scholarship. Now he is a person, and the shift in register is handled with care: the Mann Zimmer meets is not the Mann he wrote about.

What Zimmer discovers is that Mann has spent the decades since 1929 making films in complete secrecy, never shown to anyone except Frieda, films he intends to be destroyed at his death. The final confrontation between Zimmer, Mann, and the films themselves is the novel’s moral and aesthetic climax. Auster poses the question without resolving it: does art have an obligation to exist, to be seen, to enter the world? Or is the act of creation sufficient regardless of audience — is a film made in a desert and burned at its maker’s death as real as a film that played in a thousand cinemas? Frieda’s answer is one thing; Zimmer’s is another; the novel declines to arbitrate, leaving the reader with the image of the films burning in a New Mexico field and the question of what, exactly, has been destroyed.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A grief narrative and a film mystery wound tightly together, with Auster’s most emotionally accessible protagonist and some of the best ekphrastic writing in contemporary American fiction.

Reading Guides

• Paul Auster Books in Order: The Complete Reading Guide (2026)