The New York Trilogy: City of Glass / Ghosts / The Locked Room

CRITIQUE:

Consummate Metafiction

If you’re interested in reading just one example of metafiction, I can’t think of any better work than "The New York Trilogy" (except perhaps Thomas Pynchon’s n  "The Crying of Lot 49").n

Paul Auster mightn’t get the same accolades as other writers of post-modern fiction, if only because he has built a loyal readership that doesn’t depend on post-modern academics and spin merchants:

n"This recognition by a non-academic community may account for the lack of critical attention given to The New York Trilogy." ("Paul Auster: Bloom's Modern Critical Views")

Paul Auster’s fiction is innovative without making ostentatious claims to either inordinate length or gratuitous experimentalism. In fact, he seems to regard experiment as a mere transitional step on the way to perfection:

n  "I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing."n  
n  
n  "When you become aware of what your limits have been so far, then you’re able to expand them. And every artist has limits. No one can do everything. It’s impossible. What’s beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos. Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about."n

A Sense of Plenitude and Economy

By these standards, the Trilogy is both beautiful and highly structured. At 314 pages, it’s totally focussed (it’s quite the opposite of chaotic maximalism or excessivism), yet, like the detective fiction or mysteries adored by the character Daniel Quinn, what appeals so much is its "sense of plenitude and economy":

n  "In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant...The world of the book comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions."n

An Organic Part of the Written Word

The Trilogy is also a highly philosophical work. However, unlike most post-modern fiction, the philosophy is tightly wound into the structure or narrative of the novel. The philosophy is almost inseparable from the fiction itself. It’s no mere gratuitous insertion designed to contribute to either length or literary pretension. In other words, it’s both relevant and essential to the fiction:

n  "Over the years, I’ve been intensely interested in the artificiality of books as well. I mean, who’s kidding whom, after all. We know when we open up a book of fiction that we’re reading something that is imaginary, and I’ve always been interested in exploiting that fact, using it, making it part of the work itself. Not in some dry, academic, metafictional way, but simply as an organic part of the written word."n

The Triple Meaning of the Private Eye

This applies equally to the manner in which Auster co-opts elements of detective fiction to pursue his goals. In contrast to Robert Coover, he doesn’t just exploit genre conventions to house a story or myth he has invented.

Auster sees detective fiction as related to the role of both the author and the reader. In the words of Quinn:

n  "The detective is the one who looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable. The reader sees the world through the detective’s eye, experiencing the proliferation of its details as if for the first time. He has become awake to the things around him, as if they might speak to him, as if, because of the attentiveness he now brings to them, they might begin to carry a meaning other than the simple fact of their existence. Private eye. The word held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was it the letter ‘i’, standing for ‘investigator’, it was ‘I’ in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him. For five years now, Quinn had been living in the grip of this pun."n

Each of the three novellas is a mirror image of a private eye novel (not to mention the works of Cervantes, Sterne, Poe and Hawthorne), only, this being Paul Auster, there is a "deft little twist" or reversal in the image. It can’t be and isn’t a perfect analogue of the real object. In the first story, the private eye is a crime writer who pretends to be the fictive detective Paul Auster, in order to accept an assignment. In the third story, a writer very much like the real Paul Auster becomes the literary executor of another writer who has disappeared, so the writer sets out to discover his whereabouts and for a while to write his biography. In the second novella, the real detective, Blue, progressively takes on the role of an author during the process of speculating about the reports he’s required to write for his client, White.

The Perils of Invention and Make-Believe

A detective (particularly in the police force) is a vital part of a legal process that aims to successfully prosecute the perpetrator of a crime. Thus, they must be concerned with the collection of facts that can be used to prove guilt. Paradoxically, fiction is a work of the imagination that does its best to appear real. It strives for verisimilitude and credibility:

n  "Since this story is based entirely on facts, the author feels it his duty not to overstep the bounds of the verifiable, to resist at all costs the perils of invention."n

This statement is part of an almost Nabokovian game, because we readers know and understand that the whole novel is make-believe.

Auster builds his metaphysics on the foundation of facts and empiricism, before embracing the challenge of metafiction.

Speculating on the Other

The author, the reader and the private eye alike take it upon themselves to peer into the world of the other:

n  "If thinking is perhaps too strong a word at this point, a slightly more modest term - speculation, for example - would not be far from the mark. To speculate, from the Latin speculatus, meaning mirror or looking glass. For in spying out at Black across the street, it is as though Blue were looking into a mirror, and instead of merely watching another, he finds that he is also watching himself."n

Fiction is therefore a reflective process.

Blue has previously thought of his own inner life in terms of darkness. Yet his pursuit of Black (no matter how confusing) has allowed him to channel some reflected light on his own self. Nevertheless, Blue gets caught up in the persona of an other (namely Black).

Observed by Another

So we have a scene in which Black is reading a book, and Blue is watching Black reading it. Inevitably, Blue speculates:

n  "It seems perfectly plausible to him that he is also being watched, observed by another in the same way he has been observing Black."n

This other other might be another character in the fiction, or it might be us the readers (who begin and end outside the realm of fiction).

Fiction entangles and ensnares the reader in a hall of mirrors, in which everybody is both watcher and watched:

n  "They have trapped Blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life."n

The Severity of Inwardness and Solitude

Auster also approaches this dilemma from the perspective of the author, who turns their back on the real world in order to create a fictional world. A writer must learn to live with "the severity of his inwardness" and the consequences of his isolation. Perhaps the author doesn’t really exist outside the work of fiction, in that they vanish and become someone else when they’re not writing. They might also die when their writing is done:

n  "What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?"n

In the third novella, the author Fanshawe disappears, leaving behind a beautiful wife and child (Daniel), allowing his childhood friend (also a budding author) to take his place as loving husband and attentive father.

Traditionally, detective fiction has reinforced the reader’s confidence in the power of logical analysis to solve a crime or understand the world (including the world within the book). Here, Auster uses the genre to create a work of fiction that questions the ability of logic and language to convey and understand the outside world and the other, not to mention oneself.

The Trilogy is a book that constantly stimulated me while I was reading it, and already beckons me toward a re-reading.



An image from the graphic novel "City of Glass" by Paul Auster, Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli

SOUNDTRACK:

Robyn Hitchcock - "Beautiful Girl"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYfB4...

Robyn Hitchcock - "Glass Hotel"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlxcH...

Robyn Hitchcock - "Linctus House"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X4Sh...

Robyn Hitchcock - "I Saw Nick Drake"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2tHV...




HOMAGE:

Virginia Stillman and the Two Misses Fanshawe
[An Homage]

Let me tell you a little about myself, so I can then move on and start this story at the beginning.

When I first moved to Manhattan in 1985, I gravitated to Chelsea. This was a natural consequence of the fact that I had stayed in the Chelsea Hotel for two weeks in 1982 and had got familiar with the area.

I found a small apartment in a three-storey brownstone walk-up that didn’t eat up too much of my savings. I sub-let it from Mrs. Jane Fanshawe, an attractive widow in her early 50’s, who lived in the building. Her daughter-in-law, Sophie Fanshawe, lived in her own apartment on the same floor as me. Her husband, Jane’s son, was a writer who had recently disappeared and was believed to have died. The only other tenant in the building was a woman in her late twenties called Virginia Stillman.

Sophie had originally lived in my apartment, but moved to a larger one, when it became available, which left a vacancy that I agreed to fill.

One night, soon after I moved in, I was just about to go to bed, when the phone rang. The person on the other end of the line asked, “Paul Auster?” The name wasn’t familiar to me. I responded, “No, Marvin Graye.”

This happened a further three nights in a row, until finally I surrendered and said, “Yes.”

“Good, Paul. The board has approved your fee. It wants you to keep the man across the road under surveillance. You will receive a weekly payment of $350, upon submission of a weekly report. Do you have a pen?”

I did, and then wrote down the P.O. box number he gave me.

Despite the late hour, I opened the curtain in my lounge, and used my new binoculars to spot the dark-haired man in the apartment on the third floor of the house across the road. He was sitting at a desk illuminated by an old anglepoise lamp. Unlike the previous nights I had seen him, he wasn’t writing in a red notebook. He was reading a book. When he turned the page, I could just make out that it was “Don Quixote”.

My job was to document the man’s activities each week. For the first week, there was nothing much to report. I haven’t read it since school, but “Don Quixote” is a pretty long book. Besides, he didn’t seem to be reading it from cover to cover. He jumped around within the book, as if he was trying to find a particular passage or was trying to check something he had remembered.

During the week, he received no visitors, nor, as far as I could tell, any phone calls. However, about 8pm on Friday night, there was a knock on the door, and an attractive woman I recognised as Virginia Stillman walked in, holding a bottle of champagne. When she handed it to him, he went to kiss her on the cheek. She moved her head, so that their lips collided in what seemed to start a passionate kiss. She nudged him towards the couch, where he spread out full-length on his back. Meanwhile, she walked over to the window and drew the curtains. I have no other verifiable facts about what happened this evening.

The next Friday, when it was still light, I was surprised to see Sophie Fanshawe visit the man, who by now I inferred was a writer, despite how little writing he seemed to be doing, even compared with the amount entailed in the reports I had committed to.

If Virginia Stillman had appeared to be forward, Sophie was even more enthusiastic. She walked into the bedroom, turned on a bedside light and started to remove her blouse. Then she looked out the window, through which it was quite possible that she could see me and my binoculars. She didn’t seem overly alarmed, although she walked over and closed the bedroom curtains.

Sophie arrived at the writer’s apartment each night until the following Thursday, when she seemed to have an argument with him. Nobody drew the curtains this time, because Sophie left the apartment and slammed the front door, leaving the writer to resume his reading.

I took this opportunity to go downstairs in the hope that I would cross paths with Sophie and see what condition she was in. I caught her just as she was entering our building. Although we hadn’t spoken much up to that point, I said I was going out for a drink at the local bar and asked if she was interested. She smiled courteously and replied that she would like to have, but she had to settle some business or other with her mother-in-law.

The following night, Friday, I was surprised to see Mrs. Fanshawe (Jane) enter the writer’s apartment with a bottle of wine and what appeared to be a book wrapped in brown paper.

The writer had set the dining table for a meal for two. He brought out a salad bowl, placed it on the table and opened the wine. It was a white, and Mrs Fanshawe seemed to drink it more voraciously than the writer, as if it was her favourite or something. As they consumed the salad, I could see that Mrs Fanshawe had placed her hand on the writer’s leg, and he had taken no steps to object, which was understandable from my point of view. Pretty soon, they too moved to the couch and drew the curtains, so that I was unable to witness what happened next, though I could and did imagine.

By this time, I had written two reports and received two payments, which I banked in my account. The cheques were drawn by a well-known publishing company. I noticed that the writer had changed his reading matter. He had received some mail, and was now busy apparently transcribing what he had read into his red notebook. A year later, when I met him at a party hosted by Mrs Fanshawe, he gave me a copy of his latest novel. I had never met a novelist before, so I devoured the book quickly, stopping only to note the resemblance of some parts to the reports I had written. But then I suppose it was his life after all (if not his fiction as well).

It is not because of “City of Glass” that I am continuing into the second book of this trilogy; it is because the second installments are contained between the same covers and I neglected to bring an alternate book to the office. It takes hard work to make detective stories dull and to suck the intrigue out of mystery; but Auster seems to know how it’s done. It seems like he had just finished grad school and was filled with the conviction that contriving a book around concepts masquerading as characters who stumble around in symbolic relationship to each other would give readers a wonderful chance to engage with his totally unoriginal thinking on millennia old matters such as chance and free will. His digressions into the age of exploration and the origins of language are entirely forgettable. I hate books that hinge on cleverness; but I pity books that aspire (how ambitious) towards cleverness and fail, ever, to arrive there.

C'est l'histoire d'un écrivain de romans policiers qui devient détective le temps d'un premier roman d'une trilogie, et qui prend en filature un homme qui réinvente le langage dans les rues de Manhattan. Ou alors, c'est l'histoire d'un anonyme qui prend en filature un homme qui ne fait pourtant qu'écrire des romans policiers basés sur des rapports de filature, dans un appartement de Brooklyn. Ou bien, c'est l'histoire d'un écrivain qui disparaît, et de son ami qui prend sa place, puis essaye de retrouver sa trace, de New York à Paris.

Dans les trois romans de sa trilogie new yorkaise – "City of glass", "Ghosts" et "Revenants" – Paul Auster brouille les pistes en emmêlant infiniment les mêmes thèmes et les mêmes images : la filature, le langage, l'écriture, le personnage du détective, surgissent à nouveau sous de nouvelles identités et de nouveaux traits. Les personnages se doublent, se triplent, reviennent sans y paraître. Les mêmes références s'entrecroisent aussi, de Thoreau à Hemingway, Auster cite encore, sous de nouveaux angles, ses auteurs préférés – à moins qu'il ne fasse, finalement, que se citer lui-même.

Je parlais de Moon Palace avec mon libraire la dernière fois, et je lui disais que j'avais l'intention de lire la Trilogie new yorkaise prochainement, il m'a dit : "C'est formidable, vous verrez, c'est la même histoire racontée trois fois" ; alors j'avais imaginé des sortes d'exercices de style à la Queneau. Au contraire, en parcourant les références de goodreaders, j'ai vu que beaucoup d'entre eux ne remarquaient aucun lien entre les trois histoires. Qui a raison ?
Tout le monde, probablement. Auster réussit un coup de maître en réunissant trois histoires qui, en étant absolument identiques, sont tout de même entièrement différentes. On pourrait les lire comme des histoires similaires, ou comme des textes indépendants : tout dépend de votre lecture, et franchement, c'est là le génie du texte. Telle l'unifinished music de John Lennon et Yoko Ono, pour rester dans les références new yorkaises, c'est au lecteur d'Auster que revient l'interprétation finale de son oeuvre.

L'entrelacement d'images et de références fait tenir ces trois textes comme un ensemble ; ça et, bien sûr, le thème de New York. Plus qu'un décor, New York devient personnage. Manhattan est une tour de Babel dans "City of Glass", elle se dédouble en miroir avec le portrait de Brooklyn dans "Ghosts", et elle cherche un nouveau reflet avec la visite de Chicago ou de Paris dans "Revenants". New York parle ses personnages, et signifie dans le texte d'Auster.

On aime ou on déteste la New York Trilogy, je ne pense pas qu'il puisse y avoir de juste milieu. Ceux qui l'aiment aiment forcément son mystère, ils aiment le fait que certaines questions ne trouvent pas de réponse ; ce qui rend forcément la critique sur le triple roman difficile.
Ceux qui détestent le livre ont, en revanche, leurs arguments tout trouvés.

New York Trilogy est prétentieux, ou au moins, l'écriture de Paul Auster est prétentieuse.
Oui ?... Difficile à dire. Le projet d'Auster, et l'écriture à travers laquelle il le mène, sont expérimentaux. L'expérimentation est-elle indissociable de la prétention ? Je ne lui jetterais pas la pierre juste parce qu'il tente d'innover littérairement.

New York Trilogy a des personnages creux, peu profonds. On ne s'attache pas à eux.
... Alors ça, c'est certain, mais pour ma part je n'ai jamais compris pourquoi certains lecteurs avaient besoin de s'attacher aux personnages. Le fait est que les plus grands chefs d'oeuvre ne sont pas toujours construits sur des personnages forts. Ici, les personnages sont évidemment les marionnettes de l'auteur, qui met en place un chef d'oeuvre de narration et de structure.

New York Trilogy est difficile à lire.
Oui. Ce n'est pas une lecture évidente, c'est une lecture qui prend du temps et de la réflexion, mais ce n'est pas un effort que je regrette. Et je suis sûre que mêmes les plus grincheux d'entre nous ne regrettent pas, au fond, d'avoir eu l'occasion de lire quelque chose de foncièrement différent.

Lu dans la très belle édition Penguin Classics Deluxe avec les illustrations d'Art Spiegelman. Ce roman a une grosse couverture en carton qui le rend vraiment confortable, si l'on en croit mon chat.

Lu dans le cadre du Club de lecture francophonie du mois d'avril, sur le thème de New York !

Gledano spolja, tri detektivska romana, pisana tako da se lako čitaju i prosto te prisiljavaju da brzo okrećeš stranu za stranom. Iako se radi o detektivskom poslu i zadacima (praćenje, traženje odredjenih osoba), detektiva je u ove tri priče malo. U glavnim ulogama su pisci.

S druge strane, dok čitaš svaki od ova tri kratka romana (ukupno 270 strana), sa svakom novom stranom jasno ti je koliko ima tu materije za razmišljanje. Prosto ti je žao što te je na nekim mestima ponela priča pa si žurio. Upravo zbog toga, ovo delo je prirodan novi član moje Goodreads “reread” police.

Teme kojima se Oster bavi su pisanje i literatura, samo-analiza i kontemplacija, identitet, prolaznost vremena... Osim toga, tu je nekoliko vrlo zabavnih anekdota, interesantni kvazi-eseji o Don Kihotu i mitovima Starog zaveta, ali i humor u korišćenju likova (u prvom romanu tu je Pol Oster).

Sva tri romana (hm, priče?) otvaraju mnogo više pitanja nego što daju odgovora. Nijedna ne donosi koji završetak u klasičnom narativnom smislu, ali baš zato toliko više prostora za razmišljanje.

Interesante libro que me ha dejado un rato largo pensando. Eso si, quien se decida por este libro esperando encontrar una clásica novela de detectives, lo más probable es que salga decepcionado, Auster utiliza la estructura de novela policial apenas como una herramienta para un juego literario de opuestos y cruce de identidades mucho mas complejo, que invita a reflexionar sobre la identidad, sobre lo que conocemos de nosotros mismos, sobre personas que no son lo que aparentan, o sobre el riesgo de dejarse llevar por las obsesiones.
Es una novela con una prosa ágil pero que exige un rol activo de parte del lector; he terminado el libro y vuelvo a releer algunas lineas con mas pausa y cuanto más reflexiono y lo analizo creo que más estrellas podría darle, pero también es cierto que hay ciertas mesetas que se me hicieron algo pesadas, sobre todo en Fantasmas.

Cabe aclarar que La trilogía de Nueva York es el compendio de tres novelas (Ciudad de cristal, Fantasmas y La habitación cerrada) editadas por separado a mediados de los 80’s pero que referencian temas en común, y particularmente en La habitación cerrada se da que uno puede encontrar llaves que llevan a las otras novelas.

Me parece que no es un novela fácil de recomendar, pero en lo personal me ha gustado.
3,5

For a work that starts so strongly, The New York Trilogy descends into banal gibberish remarkably quickly, and continues in this mode until its unsurprising, unenlightening denouement. Presumably the result of the young Auster having improvised his opening in a fever-dream, put it aside, and then felt constrained but uninspired to continue it at a later date, this opening section is a small marvel of verbal invention and imagination, and entirely worthy of the two other would-be masters that possibly inspired it: Peter Handke (in the play Kaspar) and Werner Herzog (in the film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser). That this sub-genre (of the child locked in the room and forced to develop or not develop its own language) is essentially a cliche is not a problem; in fact it helps propel us into the story, and when couched in terms of the book's other cliches (the crime novelist-become-detective, the Calvino-esque metafictional first few pages) is made to shine in a whole new light. Still, it's brief. Auster, a Beckett disciple, seems to pay homage to his hero and quickly decide it's not worth the effort, and from then on it's as if he's given in to an early, disillusioned middle-age. The prose is wooden, the concepts shallow, the plot non-existent. Every promising lead is forgotten. As to the idea of New York as a setting, forget it - this could be anywhere. Is Auster making comment on the post-modern city's anonymity, or is it just an accident of publishing/marketing that put these three fairly unrelated pieces together and called them a trilogy? Late in the book (in 'The Locked Room') he offers a trite and unconvincing explication of the three pieces as a trilogy, a typically Austerian author's-voice intrusion which feels like an afterthought and does nothing but break the admittedly tenuous flow. By now every mistake of the young over-reaching storyteller has been committed repeatedly. 'Show don't tell'? Nope, Auster's determined to tell - and just in case you miss his meaning he'll spell it out for you. To a degree, I feel for him. The whole idea of this alter-ego (Fanshawe) who disappears bequeathing a lot of unfinished manuscripts to our narrator who has always idolised him - I mean it's the fever-dream inspired-opening-without-a-follow-up scenario in a nutshell, right? And in a way it's an admirable way to tackle the situation - head-on, with a maximum of self-awareness. The type of idea a thousand writers have probably had ever since they first read Borges's 'Pierre Menard'. But if there is a lesson to be learnt here it's 'APPROACH WITH CAUTION'. Self-referential becomes vacuous so easily! From memory I have read this thing twice now, despite my bad first impression. Why? Because I want to like Auster. He makes you feel as if maybe, one day, he'll stumble upon some revelation. But ultimately I suspect he's just too conflicted, capable of inspired passages but too in thrall to the demands of the professional author. You ask me, almost everything he writes has a stilted unnaturalness that bespeaks of either lack of sufficient editing or straight-up not keeping his eye on the ball. Moon Palace was passable, The Music of Chance almost alive; in Oracle Night he just about convinced me he was on the verge of saying something, but when it wasn't forthcoming I gave up and didn't look back. Perhaps tellingly, I came to Auster via a chapter from his early pseudonymous crime novel Squeeze Play, which was included by Michael Dibdon in The Picador Book of Crime Writing, and this piece shone (I thought) more than almost anything in that anthology save Raymond Chandler, or anything Auster has written since. Is this whole subsequent heir-to-Beckett/poet-laureate-of-New-York 'literary' schtick just a case of Auster taking himself too seriously? It might be.

As an aside, does anyone else find Auster's infrequent but jarringly out-of-key sexual passages disturbing? I think it's the way he narrates them so matter-of-factly, usually in a single sentence, after obsessing over trivial details for pages. It's almost as if some bolt of self-expression suddenly breaks through all the consciously-impersonal meandering. Stillman puts 'his worm' in 'whores' who 'squirm'. The narrator of 'The Locked Room' 'finds' himself opposite an exquisite Tahitian prostitute in Paris. Most disturbingly, in The Music of Chance, Nash (the hitherto eminently-sensible adult protagonist) falls obsessively in love with a prostitute brought into his life by the younger, reckless Pozzi. Nothing wrong with that, but it's so glossed-over, so abrupt, working only as a plot-device, that again I'm forced to wonder if it's some unwanted intrusion from Auster's personal life that he has tried to edit out of existence only to be thwarted by its necessity to the plot. Equally as repellent is the scene in 'City of Glass' where Quinn meets Paul Auster's wife, whom Auster-as-narrator eulogises in vomit-worthy tones as if (I can't help thinking) asking forgiveness for those other scenes. Maybe I'm reading this wrongly - certainly Auster gives us little to aid in our interpretation of these stylistic hiccups - and I'm not suggesting he should excise all sexuality from his writing. At least not on principle. But, well, either explore it meaningfully or, yes, excise it. Beckett did without it, after all, whatever went on in his personal life. As it is, it just feels to me as if every 200 pages or so Auster opens his trench-coat to compulsively reveal his naked prick then hides it away again and pretends it never happened. Embarrassing all round.

او همیشه از دنیا چنان که بوده لذت برده و هر چیزی را چنان که هست پذیرا شده،آن‌ها در نور روز و با سرزندگی به او گفته‌اند که هر چه هستند،خودشان هستند و نه چیز دیگری.
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درپغ را هرگز نمی‌شود پس گرفت،حتی حقیقت هم کافی نیست.
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چیزی که از زندگی یاد میگیری همین است: این که چقدر عجیب است.
#سه_گانه_نیویورک
#پل_استر
#ترجمه#شهرزاد_لولاچی#خجسته_کیهان
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La trilogia di New York si compone di tre racconti: "La città di vetro", "Fantasmi" e "La stanza chiusa".

Son definite detective-stories... Mah!!! Nei racconti sì ci sono dei detective... ma con le affinità di genere per me la finiamo lì...
Il detective indaga sì, ma all'interno, nella stanza privata che è il suo cervello, alla ricerca di un senso della vita dell'uomo che non riesce a trovare.

Il detective chi è? E' lo scrittore? E' il lettore? Tale indagine ha un senso? In una ciclica rincorsa alla reciproca necessità di impersonificazione tra lettore e scrittore, la risposta che dà Auster è che un senso non c'è, che ogni vita è inspiegabile, fatta di fatti accidentali e fine a se stessa ("la morale è che ogni vita è fine a se stessa. Che è come dire: le vite degli uomini non hanno senso"). Nessuno è in grado di comprendere il prossimo (nemmeno lo scrittore che, scrivendo, tenta di indagarlo), in quanto rimane esso stesso imperscrutabile a se stesso.

I tre racconti, si comprende avanzando nella lettura, altro non sono che una storia sola, ma ad un diverso stadio di consapevolezza dell'autore (e di conseguenza del lettore che lo segue). Quindi, il lettore, arrivato alla terza lettura si è talmente scervellato per capire dove volesse andare a parare quest'uomo (Auster), che la terza storia non porta alcuna sorpresa, anzi forse è pure un po' troppo convenzionale con tutta la "palestra mentale" che ha fatto con i primi due racconti... :D

Ergo, di giallo a mio giudizio c'è poco poco, ma, in compenso, il "pipponico" e il cervellotico son dispensati a pienissime mani: in estrema sintesi definirei il romanzo un non racconto (uno e trino), in un non luogo, di non persone.
Di seguito i pensieri che mi hanno indotto i racconti da cui ho dedotto le riflessioni più sopra riportate.

"Città di vetro" --> Il significato preponderante del racconto, a mio parere, sta nel gioco di specchi che è la finzione narrativa, nella necessità dello scrittore di impersonificare i personaggi di cui scrive, o almeno il ruolo del personaggio di cui scrive. La risoluzione è la follia in cui cade lo scrittore che ad un certo punto è impossibilitato a distinguere tra finzione e realtà. Che crede di coglierla attraverso gli appunti che prende in un taccuino rosso, ma il taccuino rosso contiene, fatalmente, solo un pezzo della storia.
("Che significa per uno scrittore firmare un libro con il proprio nome? perchè alcuni decidono di nascondersi dietro ad uno pseudonimo? e, in tutti i casi, uno scrittore vive davvero una vita reale?")

"Fantasmi"--> Blue investigatore, sotto commissione di White, assume l'incarico di pedinare Black. Black non fa altro che scrivere una storia, e sembra vivere (o avere scopo di vita) solo per il fatto che qualcuno lo osserva. Ma l'unico scopo di Blue è osservare Black...Ma forse anche Black osserva Blue... Non succede nulla se non l'osservazione reciproca di Black e Blue. E alla fine il lettore capisce...che sta leggendo la storia di Blue che osserva Black, che a sua volta osserva Blue, e questo è l'unico senso della storia... E qui emerge l'ironico e sottile sfottimento che Auster opera nei confronti del lettore, che legge per cercare un senso, ma l'unico senso che si trova è costruito a tavolino...
(".. cosa ci faceva là dentro? Scriveva storie. Tutto qua Scriveva e basta? Scrivere è un mestiere per solitari. Ti prosciuga. In un certo senso, lo scrittore non ha una vita propria. Anche quando lo hai di fronte non c'e' veramente. Un altro fantasma. ")

"La stanza chiusa" --> L'ultimo racconto rientra un po' più nei canoni di un racconto tradizionale. C'e' una trama appena piu' sviluppata, un racconto in cui c'e' pure un amore, c'è pure una presunto abbandono di un uomo della moglie, c'è pure un accenno di sviluppo amoroso, c'è una indagine, c'è sempre uno scrittore, c'è sempre un detective, c'è sempre una ricerca di identificazione tra chi insegue e chi è inseguito che porta a frustrazione per presa consapevolezza che la vita non ha senso.

Auster quindi si mette a tavolino e svela attraverso i tre racconti il raffinato processo intellettuale di costruzione in laboratorio della storia, sempre la stessa storia che si sviluppa man di mano nella testa dello scrittore. I primi due racconti pare contengano il messaggio e l'idea, mentre il terzo racconto li "veste", è il racconto vero e proprio abbellito di particolari (ovviamente mia interpretazione)

Auster talentuoso è talentuoso. Il romanzo così concepito e architettato per me ha del geniale. Il piacere che si trova in questa lettura non è nella lettura stessa ma nelle elucubrazioni che induce nel lettore, negli arrovellamenti che ti fa fare, nel compiacimento di esserti districato in mezzo alle matasse aggrovigliate e parecchio cerebrali.

In questo romanzo ho trovato Auster forse un po' troppo compiaciuto, un po' troppo costruito...ma il grande merito che gli riconosco è che, alla terza lettura di una sua opera, non ho ancora visto una ripetizione, nè nello stile, nè nel genere di romanzo. Muta. E' capace di mutare. E per farlo, per me, bisogna essere bravi.

Quattro stelle quindi ad Auster e al suo talento. Io, che ho il gusto del cervellotico durante la lettura mi son divertita, ma non è sicuramente un romanzo che consiglierei a cuor leggero.