A man pieces together clues to his past — and the identity of his captors — in this fantastic, labyrinthine novel.

An old man awakens, disoriented, in an unfamiliar chamber. With no memory of who he is or how he has arrived there, he pores over the relics on the desk, examining the circumstances of his confinement and searching his own hazy mind for clues.

Determining that he is locked in, the man — identified only as Mr. Blank — begins reading a manuscript he finds on the desk, the story of another prisoner, set in an alternate world the man doesn't recognize. Nevertheless, the pages seem to have been left for him, along with a haunting set of photographs. As the day passes, various characters call on the man in his cell — vaguely familiar people, some who seem to resent him for crimes he can't remember — and each brings frustrating hints of his identity and his past. All the while an overhead camera clicks and clicks, recording his movements, and a microphone records every sound in the room. Someone is watching.

Both chilling and poignant, Travels in the Scriptorium is vintage Auster: mysterious texts, fluid identities, a hidden past, and, somewhere, an obscure tormentor. And yet, as we discover during one day in the life of Mr. Blank, his world is not so different from our own.

"On the centennial year of Samuel Beckett's birth, Auster's new novel nods to the old master. We open with a man sitting in a room. The man doesn't remember his name, and a camera hidden in the ceiling takes a picture of him once a second. The man — whom the third-person narrator calls Mr. Blank — spends the single day spanned by the book being looked after, questioned and reading a fragmentary narrative written by a man named Sigmund Graf from a country called the Confederation who has been given the mission of tracking down a renegade soldier named Ernesto Land. During the course of the day, a former policeman, a doctor, two attendants and Mr. Blank's lawyer visit the room, and Mr. Blank learns he is accused of horrible crimes. (His lawyer claims he is accused of everything 'from conspiracy to commit fraud to negligent homicide. From defamation of character to first-degree murder.') But this may or may not be true — the narrative veers toward ambiguity. While Auster's lean, poker-faced prose creates a satisfyingly claustrophobic allegory, the tidy, self-referential ending lends a writing-exercise patina to the work." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Determined reading keeps the mind's attention. And you will want to be very determined in reading Paul Auster's fictional treatise on crime and amnesia, 'Travels in the Scriptorium.' It's not the characters or plot that is difficult to keep tabs on but your own emotions, as this is a chilling story of isolation.

The setup is this: An old man, known only as Mr. Blank, wakes up in a sparsely..." Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) furnished room. 'He can't remember how long he has been here,' Auster writes, 'or the nature of the circumstances that precipitated his removal to this place. Perhaps he has always been here; perhaps this is where he has lived since the day he was born. What he knows is that his heart is filled with an implacable sense of guilt. At the same time, he can't escape the feeling that he is the victim of a terrible injustice.'

Because this is an Auster novel, writing itself has, almost inevitably, a spectral presence: Soon Mr. Blank begins to read a manuscript he finds on the desk. It's a harrowing account of another prisoner, Mr. Blank's doppelganger. This account immediately becomes part of a narrative duet. As time passes, characters from the manuscript show up, each slightly familiar to Mr. Blank, each delivering shards of his past life. Altogether they constitute an uncanny guest list of interlocutors. As a result of their visits — visitations — Mr. Blank becomes convinced that he may well have done dreadful things to these characters (some are from Auster's previous novels!). What's more, everything is recorded by an overhead camera and hidden microphone.

Anna is Mr. Blank's most merciful visitor; yet in the way she sponge-bathes and even sexually services him, in her almost perversely accommodating conversation, scenes with her are mesmerizing and uncomfortable in equal measure. Auster keeps upping the voyeuristic ante: 'It should be noted that a second camera and a second tape recorder have been planted in the bathroom ceiling, making it possible for all activities in that space to be recorded as well, and because the word all is an absolute term, the transcription of dialogue between Anna and Mr. Blank can be verified in every one of its details.' With this passage, a reader understands that Mr. Blank will keep no secrets, except possibly from himself.

Anna, another caretaker named Sophie, an ex-policeman named James P. Flood, a doctor named Samuel Farr — all mention treacherous 'missions' Mr. Blank sent them on in the past. Then there's that manuscript. It delineates a newly formed country called the Confederation and specifically chronicles the political quagmires of a certain Sigmund Graf, who, when he returns from a dangerous assignment in the forbidden Alien Territories, is sentenced to death.

In this and other aspects, 'Travels in the Scriptorium' is part dystopian myth and part literary seance; allusions intersect with allusions, identities are fluid, the past is folded almost chokingly tight into the present, shadows of the truth have shadows. All of this refracting inventiveness is why Auster is often referred to as a master of the metaphysical detective story. While in these pages there's no actual detective working a beat, still, as revelation after revelation is delivered, the reader is kept on edge, guessing until the very end.

Auster is one of our most intellectually elegant writers. He has persistently subverted the ordinary mechanisms of suspense, chronology, even genre. In certain fundamental attributes, this new novel resembles his 'Oracle Night,' published in 2003. Yet determined readers come to savor the inimitable way Auster keeps restructuring and vivifying his novelistic obsessions. Themes are hungry ghosts, Borges said. Fortunately, Auster's ghosts are insatiable.

Howard Norman's new novel is 'Devotion.'

" Reviewed by Howard Norman, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Say what one will about Auster's repetition of devices - the book within a book, the off-stage tormentor, the loss of memory - he has become frightfully good at manipulating a good story out of them." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Auster fans will recognize a parade of characters from earlier works, reaching back to his famed New York Trilogy...as Auster coyly celebrates the power of the imagination and marvels over the labyrinthine nature of the mind in an archly playful and shrewdly philosophical tribute to the transcendence of stories." Booklist

"With a Kafkaesque protagonist in an M.C. Escher plot, Auster...returns to the themes of identity, memory, illusion and creativity that have marked his work since his breakthrough New York Trilogy." Kirkus Reviews

Both chilling and poignant, this labyrinthine novel by the author of "Leviathan" follows a man who awakens disoriented in an unfamiliar chamber, as he pieces together clues to his past--and the identity of his captors.

Paul Auster is the bestselling author of twelve previous novels, including The Brooklyn Follies, Oracle Night, The Book of Illusions, and Timbuktu. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn.