BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Brooklyn Follies, The Wit in the Dungeon, Jejuri, Time Was Soft There)(Book Review)

The Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster (Henry Holt; $24). After a "sad and ridiculous life" in the suburbs, Nathan Glass retires, gets divorced, and moves to Brooklyn to die. To pass the time, he decides to write an account of mishaps and mistakes, beginning with his own--"The Book of Human Folly." "The tone would be light and farcical throughout," he says, "and my only purpose was to keep myself entertained." Auster seems to have had a similar intent. A chance encounter with a long-lost nephew leads Nathan into an unlikely second act, involving a longer-lost niece, her runaway daughter, and a host of lively Brooklyn caricatures--a gay used-bookstore owner, a tough widow, an H.I.V.-positive drag queen--all in the midst of unlikely second acts themselves. Nathan narrates increasingly absurd events with persistent cheer, a tone mirrored by the blinkered optimism and liberal conviction of pre-9/11 Park Slope; it's a combination that soon seems less hopeful than hollow, and profoundly disengaged.

Jejuri, by Arun Kolatkar (New York Review Books; $12.95). Available for the first time outside Kolatkar's native India, this sequence of poems (written in English, and first published in 1976) describes a trip to a Hindu pilgrimage site in the state of Maharashtra. Amit Chaudhuri's excellent introduction tells us that Kolatkar was both an amateur musician and a successful art director in the Bombay advertising world, which perhaps explains the acuteness of his ear and eye. Veering between the epigrammatic and the incantatory, these poems capture a place that is both ancient and modern, with crumbling temples and "stock exchange quotations." Kolatkar's pages are populated by saints, beggars, prostitutes, and priests, by rats, stray dogs, and the occasional butterfly, a creature whose transitory beauty is meticulously described: "There is no story behind it. / It is split like a second. / It ...