(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

In a few weeks I'm going to have the opportunity to read Paul Auster's surprise new novel, 4 3 2 1, which has already been gathering up tons of accolades from early reviewers; but I've never actually read any work by Auster before, so I thought I'd start with the very first thing he published, The New York Trilogy which originally consisted of three separate small novels in the 1980s, but is now only sold as a one-volume set (but more later on why this is). And that's when I discovered the big surprise -- that far from the dowdy, boring academic writer I had thought Auster was all these years, based exclusively on the types of people who like his work and what they have to say about it, he instead turns out to be this incredible penner of so-called "New Weird" stories, the kinds of books that first became popular during the second half of Postmodernism precisely for being hard to define -- part literary, part horror, part mystery, part science-fiction -- and that have since become a staple of our current popular culture here in the 21st century.

And indeed, I don't know why it took so long for all this to click in my head, given how long I've been a fan of some of these writers, but reading Auster for the first time made me realize that there's actually a whole wing of popular writers sort of buried within the second half of the Postmodernist era who can be described this way, including Thomas Pynchon, Jon Crowley, Haruki Murakami, Tim Powers and more; and that since what these authors were trying to accomplish was so new and so hard to define, the literary world has ended up sort of looking at these writers in completely different ways based on the person (Pynchon is considered an academe who's lucked into some popular success; Crowley is considered a genre writer who has lucked into some academic respectability), instead of seeing them as parts of a much larger "New Weird" movement that unifies everything they've been doing over the last forty years.

For those who don't know, the term was invented by Jeff VanderMeer in the '90s, as a riff off the old term "Weird" from the Victorian Age; back then there were no such things as separate categorizations for "science-fiction" and "noir" and "horror," so basically anything metaphysical was thrown into this general catch-all label, which then encouraged writers to freely flow from one trope to the other within a single book. It was only in the Modernist period of the early 20th century, VanderMeer argues, that these genres became calcified and started developing their rigid rules that authors weren't allowed to deviate from; but what Postmodernism gave us was an explosion of these rules (as well as every other rule about "proper writing" that had been invented up to then), allowing a new generation of authors to once again go in and blend these genres together in interesting and unique ways. And although VanderMeer was specifically talking in his case about the newest generation of genre writers who were just starting to become popular in those years -- people like Charles Stross, China Mieville, Cory Doctorow and more -- I'm coming to realize that you can actually go back an entire generation to see the formation of this New Weird school of thought, one that got its start in the experimental hippie years of the countercultural era, but that didn't really come into its own as a cultural force until the Reagan years of the 1980s.

That's exactly what makes these first three novels by Auster so intriguing, certainly, that they're so hard to traditionally describe; ostensibly detective tales, in which private investigators are hired by shady clients to track down nebulous targets, all three of these books start getting weirder and weirder the further in you get, eventually becoming treaties on identity, the power of naming things, and how the concepts of Transcendentalist thought from the 1800s do or do not particularly fit in the Electronic Age of the late 20th century. The more you read, the less you understand what's going on, and soon the books pick up a creepy vibe much more akin to horror than pulp fiction; but the explanation behind this creepy vibe is much more like sci-fi than horror, even as the books never just come out and explicitly state that something metaphysical is actually happening, leaving it a question as to whether our narrators are perhaps simply going insane from existential dread, a clear reference to the work of HP Lovecraft. Then in the third book, The Locked Room, Auster adds an even more complicated twist to it all, by having a certain character reveal that there's actually these strange nebulous ties between the characters in all three novels; and by the time we're done with the whole thing, we realize that all three books are simply large chapters within the same shared universe and uber-plotline, which is why since the '90s they've only been published anymore as one large volume.

Make no mistake -- Auster is essentially the American Murakami, one who even started writing at almost the exact same time as the other, and anyone who's a fan of that Japanese genre master will automatically be a fan of his American equivalent, no question about it whatsoever. And that raises an intriguing question, of why Murakami has become a millionaire superstar by the 21st century, as well as other New Weird writers like Thomas Pynchon finally now being classified as the complicated, genre-bending authors they are, while Auster forty years later is still mostly considered an obscure academic writer who can only be loved by erudite professors? I don't have an answer to this, because it's clearly not the case -- anyone who loved the old TV shows Lost or Twin Peaks, for example, will also love Auster's books, and it certainly doesn't take an MFA to understand what he's trying to do -- and it's my hope that his newest novel, his first in seven years and one being published when he's 70 years old, will finally start turning the tide a bit when it comes to his public reputation. He's an author who deserves to have a much wider audience than he currently does, a writer who would be loved by millions of sci-fi fans if they simply knew about his existence in the first place; and I encourage all of you genre fans to go and check out some of his work when you have a chance, a surprisingly gripping and easy-to-read author who will leave you wanting more. We'll see in a few weeks how he's held up as a writer in the forty years since these debut novels; but for now, I for one plan on checking out a wide range of his subsequent oeuvre when I have a chance, and I encourage you to do the same.

Actually, is 3,5 stars..

I find the writer, to much for my taste. To be honest, I couldn't find the connection between all 3 stories...

n  "Sono nuovo ogni giorno.
Nasco quando mi alzo la mattina, durante il giorno invecchio e muoio alla notte quando vado a dormire. Non è mia la colpa."n

Leggo quest’opera- forse la più nota- a pochi mesi dalla scomparsa di Paul Auster.

“Trilogia di New York” è composto da tre romanzi pubblicati tra il 1985 ed il 1987:

“Città di vetro”
“Fantasmi”
“La stanza chiusa”.

Storie che solo apparentemente sono slegate e con una trama lineare del genere detective story stile anni ’40.
L’unica cosa che crediamo certa è l’ambientazione newyorchese ma il lettore incauto potrebbe ben presto trovarsi impantanato in vischiose sottotrame; veri e propri labirinti narrativi dove il reale e il surreale gareggiano per guadagnarsi la scena.

In “Città di vetro” uno scrittore, Daniel Quinn (che poi è stato uno pseudonimo di Auster stesso!), viene scambiato per un investigatore privato il cui nome è però quello di un altro scrittore: Paul Auster…

In “Fantasmi” un investigatore privato che si chiama Blue, 'addestrato' da Brown, indaga su un uomo di nome Black per un cliente di nome White...

Ne “La stanza chiusa” uno scrittore sostituisce Fanshawe (nome del romanzo fantasma di Nathaniel Hawthorne: Lo studente ) un amico d’infanzia scomparso nel nulla lasciando una mole di testi narrativi..

Solo poche righe di queste trame fanno intuire la dimensione di un vero e proprio meccanismo che movimenta le storie.
Auster, nelle mie esperienze di letture, offre sempre una miriade di materiale di vera e propria riflessione esistenziale.

Caso, coincidenze, destino ruotano attorno ai protagonisti che devono annullare l’esistenza del mondo reale per che questa sia riaffermata.
Ciò è possibile solo a New York: il contesto perfetto per perdersi nella sua immensità.
E se l’identità, ad esempio, è uno dei temi centrali di questi romanzi non sfugge tutto l’impianto metaletterario ed è l’ultimo narratore a dirlo esplicitamente:

” La conclusione, tuttavia, mi è chiara. Non l’ho dimenticata, ed è una fortuna che mi sia rimasta almeno quella. Tutta la storia si restringe al suo epilogo, e se ora quell’epilogo non l’avessi dentro di me, non avrei potuto iniziare questo libro. Lo stesso vale per i due che lo precedono, Città di vetro e Fantasmi. In sostanza, le tre storie sono una storia sola, ma ognuna rappresenta un diverso stadio della mia consapevolezza di essa. Non pretendo di avere risolto nessun problema.”

Soggetto ed oggetto si fondono e rendono speciale quest’opera sicuramente non di facile lettura ma affascinante per tutte le esche letterarie che Auster ci ha regalato in queste pagine..

It's a curious mix Auster has made: detective-stories mingled with metaphysical and existential reveries (or rather the other way round). The three stories are very different in character, but they're full of internal and external references. From a literary point of view the third one (The Locked Room) for me was the best (it's also the most conventional). As detective-stories they are not flawless (the ending of the first and the third are rather disappointing), but I guess that means Auster gave priority to the metaphysical underlayer.
Life as a labyrinth, as a jigsaw-puzzle that you don't lay yourself: you can find it with Borges and other authors. Our own identity as a constructed reality: we know that since Pirandello. And writing, being an author, as an act you don't control yourself, that is the cherished theme of all postmodernists. And then there are the echo's (and more) of the 19th Century American writers Poe and Hawthorne, of French experimentalists like Robe-Grillet and lots of others, ... you can all find it in this book.
So it is true: Auster hasn't reinvented literature or philosophy, and I've noticed (even in the reviews on Goodreads) that for that reason he is despised among intellectuals. That doesn’t do him justice, because the mix Auster presents has an unique merit of its own. You rather should blame the editors and critics that glorify Auster beyond what seems his own ambitions. Although I must admit this book didn't fully captivate me, I can appreciate it as an ingenious tryout of a beginning author, searching for his own voice. So, I give Auster the benefit of the doubt, and surely will read some of his later work too. (2.5 stars)

Video review

The Trilogy of Detective Novels That Are Really About Semiotics (New York, Not So Much)

Identity. Reality. Certain other mysteries perhaps best left unexamined.

Spooky shit...

„Нюйоркска трилогия“ е заплетена и многопластова книга, която надхвърля границите на криминалния жанр! Тя се състои от три отделни части, които се преплитат по сложен начин. Пол Остър потапя читателите в напрегната детективска история в Ню Йорк, появява се и като един от героите в нея, както и предизвиква размисли по важни теми... Не успях напълно да разбера книгата, но пък останах с много добри впечатления от нея!

Life is too short to re-read a book, but someday I will give time for this one. The reason is that I assumed that the book being a trilogy is composed of 3 totally unrelated stories since I read in the write up that the stories were published one at a time in a weekly magazine in the 80s. However, to my surprise, at the end of the 3rd story – The Locked Room (which by itself was the best among the 3) – it was revealed that the detective looking for Fanshawe was the main character in the first story, The City of Glass. So, I had to think back on how the three stories relate to each other but I could not really figure out how the second – Ghosts – fit into the whole story as the main characters were named after colors – Blue, Black, Brown and White. I agree with what they say that Paul Auster contributed to American literature by having a totally different writing style – the mixed up identities, the infusion of psychological insights into the narratives (Don Quixote for example in the second story) and even witty practical advises to the reader (you have to slow down to appreciate literature – to which I am a bit guilty because I have been reading books one after the other). If you want to read a intelligent yet entertaining book, make it this one!

NULLA È REALE FUORCHÉ IL CASO


Disegno dalla graphic novel ”Città di vetro” di Davide Mazzucchelli (1994).

Nulla è reale fuorché il caso è scritto nel primo romanzo della trilogia, Città di vetro, e mi pare una summa della poetica austeriana.

Il mio primo incontro con Paul Auster è stato circa trent’anni fa (1990) quando Guanda pubblicò La musica del caso (e si da il caso che il “caso” ritorna). Fu subito amore. Amore grande.
La libreria dove mi rifornivo allora non esiste più da tempo, adesso è un Ferrari Store.
Anche il mio amore per Paul Auster adesso non esiste più.


Disegno dalla graphic novel ”Città di vetro” di Davide Mazzucchelli (1994).

Dopo il primo libro cercai altro. Ma altro non c’era.
Avrebbe potuto esserci, ma era fuori catalogo: si trattava proprio di questa trilogia. Fu pubblicata da Rizzoli lo stesso anno della sua prima uscita in US, ma nel 1990 era già fuori catalogo. Ho dovuto aspettare sei anni, finché non è stata ripubblicata da Einaudi.

Se avessi dato il voto quando ho letto il libro sarebbero state sicuramente cinque stelle. Adesso quattro vanno bene.
Nel frattempo ho letto anche una versione graphic novel.


Jim Jarmush recita insieme a Harvey Keitel nel film scritto e diretto da Paula Auster “Blue in the Face”, 1995.

Si chiama trilogia di NY perché sono tre storie, tre romanzi diversi, pubblicati in US separatamente (1985, 1986 e 1987) e poi riediti insieme sempre nel 1987.
Città di vetro, Fantasmi, La stanza chiusa sono i titoli delle tre storie.
E New York è il set di tutte e tre. E probabilmente il vero protagonista, anche se sembra una città non-luogo.

In ogni storia il protagonista è impegnato in una specie di indagine, come se fosse un detective. Ma sono inchieste immerse nell’allucinazione, nel surreale, perfino nell’assurdo, dove tutto è sfocato, sfumato. Ma il senso di mistero e attesa è forte, insistente, serra l’anima. Auster gioca col genere thriller, o forse sarebbe meglio dire col genere giallo, poliziesco, ma è ben altro che gli interessa.


Ancora Harvey Keitel, qui insieme a Mira Sorvino, in “Lulu on the Bridge”, scritto e diretto da Paul Auster, 1998.

È un gioco di incastri e scatole cinesi e specchi e matrioske, dove per esempio, il primo detective è uno scrittore di romanzi polizieschi e un altro personaggio centrale si chiama guarda caso proprio Paul Auster. Che anche nel romanzo è uno scrittore di romanzi, ma invece lo becchiamo che sta scrivendo un saggio su don Quixote, le cui iniziali, D e Q, sono le stesse del protagonista, Daniel Quinn.
Daniel Quinn assume l’identità di Paul Auster. Alla fine Daniel Quinn sparisce, ma lascia un manoscritto dove racconta tutta la vicenda: manoscritto che qualcuno ritrova nella stanza dalla quale Quinn scompare, e che diventa il primo romanzo della trilogia, Città di vetro

Nella seconda storia i personaggi si chiama Blue, Black, Brown, White, senza ancora anteporre il Mr che qualche anno dopo (1992) Tarantino rese celebri col suo fulminante esordio Reservoir Dogs – Le iene.


Il terzo e ultimo film scritto e diretto da Paul Auster, “The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007) Qui i protagonisti: David Thwelis e Irène Jacob.

In generale, ci sono scrittori che diventano investigatori, o viceversa. Si indaga, si cerca, non si trova, e più si procede nell’inchiesta più ci si smarrisce. La città è un labirinto. Si perde l’identità, si assume quella di un altro, ci si sdoppia, il caso (caos?) regna sovrano.
La ricerca dell’identità è una costante, ma altrettanto costante è il mutare dell’identità perché nulla e nessuno è quello che sembra e appare.
È l’intera poetica di Auster per come ho imparato a percepirla, temi che si ritrovano anche nelle sue opere seguenti.

Sono stato un gran fan di Auster. Poi, qualcosa s’è spezzato. Forse una certa ripetitività, che si trasforma in monotonia, e quindi noia. Forse questi personaggi smarriti che si cercano per smarrirsi ancora di più, che perdono i riferimenti e li tolgono anche al lettore, alla fine m’hanno confuso e smarrito.
Fatto sta che mi è sceso l’interesse mentre lui è diventato sempre più intervistato, sempre più fico, sempre più familista, ha cominciato a non perdersi un party, di quelli con intellettuali & modelle…


Disegno dalla graphic novel ”Città di vetro” di Davide Mazzucchelli (1994).

"Να νοιάζεσαι για τις λέξεις, να ποντάρεις σε ο, τι γράφεται, να πιστεύεις στη δύναμη των βιβλίων. Αυτό υπερβαίνει όλα τα υπόλοιπα και, πέρα από αυτό, η ζωή του ανθρώπου γίνεται πολύ μικρή."
Δηλώνω Οστερικη μετά απο αυτές τις 3 εξαιρετικές ιστορίες. Θα επανέλθω με περισσότερα σχόλια όταν αναρρώσω από το διαολεμένο συνάχι.

Gave me brain fog in a good way. Detective noir madness. Philosophical, cerebral, puzzling treats.

I will now have to go down the Auster rabbit hole.

It's a singular book, like nothing I've read, like a series of mirrors. I think every reader can see themself rather than the characters of this story (it's one story, in three frames/mirrors, again). I saw men so obsessed with their identity that they have to make themselves disappear, it's the only way out.