“New York era un luogo inesauribile, un labirinto di passi senza fine: e per quanto la esplorasse, arrivando a conoscerne a fondo strade e quartieri, la città lo lasciava sempre con la sensazione di essersi perduto. Perduto non solo nella città, ma anche dentro di sé.”

Onirico. Spiazzante. Affascinante. Speculativo.
Metaforico e metafisico (New York diventa un metaluogo, la narrazione metanarrazione).
L’atmosfera noir ripercorre i luoghi comuni del genere ma l’intreccio ne confonde le piste consuete.
Bisogna accettare di perdersi nel labirinto costruito abilmente da Paul Auster, consapevoli di non andare da nessuna parte… bisogna accettare che l’identità si disgreghi… che il tempo si avviti su se stesso…che l’origine sia irrimediabilmente perduta. E che sia scrivere la sua unica traccia. Scrivere per raccontare storie. Dove i protagonisti si perdono cercando Godot.
E poi bisogna abitare l’enigma, che è come dire vivere.

“In generale le vite sembrano sterzare bruscamente da un punto all’altro, urtare e sobbalzare, dimenarsi. Una persona prende una direzione, poi a metà strada svolta di colpo, si impantana, scarroccia, riparte. Niente è mai noto, e inevitabilmente giungiamo a una meta completamente diversa da quella verso cui eravamo partiti”.

“Non puoi sapere cosa è vero o falso. Non lo saprai mai.”

“But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next.”

The elaborate setup, leading to the open ending finale, the utter ambiguity of the three stories, might have been frustrating in the hands of a lesser author. I really enjoyed Auster's beautiful prose. As a reader, you (vainly) try to grasp the meaning of this whole book, though, in Auster’s view (or at least in his narrator’s view), sense cannot be made of the story of anyone’s life. Perhaps the best summary of Auster’s point is the narrator’s synopsis of Fanshawe’s work:

It is as if Fanshawe knew his final work had to subvert every expectation [the reader has] for it.

I'll be reading more of his books.

Actually i didn‘t finish it. i read thoroughly to page 101. then it started to blur me and it made no sense at all. to call this stupidity a „literary sensation“...i dont know.
I thought this book will redeem Paul Auster in my head, after the failure called 4321.
This is the first book that i cannot end. Until page 101 it was somehow ok. but then it started to be so absurd and stupid, just opening it made me aggresive. Apart from that, and this was the thing also 4321, Paul Auster writes with no emotion, no feeling. One should be warned - if you want some encyclopedic show off, read this one.

Maybe someday I will feel differently and give this one another try. i will turn back to literature that makes some sense to me. life is too short to read bad books.

It is so great. all the few people that gave 1 star say basically the same things. boring, dull, unnecessary cleverness, superficial. You name it

Each story in The New York Trilogy involves a detective, a writer, an odd investigation, ruminations on language, a red notebook, and a descent into madness. Each starts off normally and looks promising until isolation, boredom, or obsession drive the protagonist crazy. From there, each variation on the theme gets weird and tedious. It was tolerable, but disappointing.

This maybe a love letter to the city of New York, and where Auster takes classic American detective writers like Chandler and gives them a postmodern twist, but The New York Trilogy, his three early metaphysical mystery novellas, are equally fuelled by a European sensibility. There is a stark and ghostly existential tone running through the stories, through confused character identities and their reflections of one another, and where fact and fiction become progressively more difficult to isolate. Just like reading this book for the first time more than ten years ago, I was completely transfixed by these three tales again, with the obvious comparisons to both Beckett & Kafka. It's no surprise really that Auster has been more popular in Europe than in America, and I knew from my time in Paris that he is much admired there. What I loved about the trilogy is that Auster isn't really in it for the whodunnit or end result - open-ending endings here, but rather takes the unconventional approach to the classic detective set-up, by adopting the act of detecting to try and find oneself having lost oneself after keeping a close eye on somebody else. Auster really does a great job of putting the reader in the shoes of his protagonists, as they venture towards the edge of an existential abyss: we experience as they experience: the bewilderment; the feeling of despair being trapped in a maze of one's own mind; the creepy claustrophobic presence of being watched. A quite brilliant piece of work.

Frankly an inconceivable book. I don't really understand how this book of three stories originally published in the second half of the 1980s could have been re-published. If they hadn't left any mark at that time, even less do they now. Three stories cloaked in the feeling that an author wrote them under the influence of alcohol or drugs, so the situations follow one another in the paradoxical, unrealistic and pseudo-absurd. The linguistic tricks that bind them are really so banal that they immediately become annoying; in the first story there is a man looking on the phone for a private investigator named Paul Auster (name of the author of this book); in the second story, all the protagonists have the name of a color and Mr. Black is reading a book by Walden; in the third story there is a character named Walden ....
The three stories are paradoxical, but that somewhat sick paradox that I don't like; I perceived a great spiritual suffering in those pages, as if whoever wrote them were himself in a situation of great mental confusion. And even the city of New York, which is part of the title, does not appear, except to represent any chaotic city, full of noise and confusion, but also of silence and loneliness. A city where a person can disappear for 4-5 months, live in rubbish bins and when he returns to his rented house, he finds it inhabited by other people, because the owner, no longer receiving the rent, has rented the apartment to other people (this is what happens in the first story….). In short, I found the three stories too surreal, hyper-real, almost just a pretext to talk about psychoanalysis and alienation. Certainly they are not the three detective stories that are declared on the cover. Also because none of the three stories gives the reader the satisfaction of finding a conclusive meaning to the stories he has just read. In fact, none of the three stories leads to the unveiling of the mysteries that have gradually been created in history and everything ends up in nothing. Maybe Kafka could do it, but Paul Auster…. Two stars and then into oblivion.

Το πρώτο epic fail της χρονιάς. Το πιο άχρωμο, άοσμο, ανάλατο βιβλίο που διάβασα τουλάχιστον τον τελευταίο χρόνο και που ο ένας και μοναδικός λόγος που το τελείωσα και δεν το παράτησα κάπου στη σελίδα 50 όπου και κολάστηκα για πρώτη από τις πολλές φορές που ακολούθησαν ήταν γιατί ήθελα να δω μέχρι που θα φτάσει η βλακεία του συγγραφέα. Αγαπητοί συνάδελφοι αναγνώστες ένα είναι που πρέπει να θυμάστε πριν επιλέξετε το βιβλίο που θα διαβάσετε. Όπου ακούτε πολλά κεράσια κρατείστε μικρό καλάθι. Καταλαβαίνω την ανάγκη των εκδοτικών να προωθήσουν το προϊόν τους ως το καλύτερο που υπάρχει προκειμένου να πουλήσει αντίτυπα απλά υπάρχουν βιβλία που στα αλήθεια αναρωτιέμαι με τι σθένος πουλάνε το παραμυθάκι. Ε θα μου επιτρέψετε τότε και μένα να γίνω όσο κακιά νομίζω. Ισως από τα πιο οδυνηρά διαβάσματα που έχω κάνει με κάθε σελίδα να κυλάει απίστευτα βαρετά εν μέσω χασμουρητών και αναρώτησης του βασικού νοήματος. Μιλάς με γρίφους γέροντα.
Προσπεράστε με συνοπτικές διαδικασίες και αν ντε και καλά θέλετε έναν Αστέρ στη ζωή σας προτιμήστε το Fred που θα μάθετε και καμιά πιρουέτα
#worst_book_ever #hasta_nunca

ΥΓ. Να γράψω την κριτική μου και στα αγγλικά μπας και τη δει ο συγγραφέας σοκαριστεί και δεν ξαναγράψει τίποτα και μας απαλλάξει απο την παρουσία του στο λογοτεχνικό κόσμο?

City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986): Meta as in metafiction, also metaphysics and metaphor. This is fiction about fiction, writing about the writer. Who’s writing whom? Who’s the author and who’s the imagined character? Auster's characters aren’t “real” people (even when they are autobiographical) in the sense that you might invite one over for dinner, but are real in the sense that you might imagine yourself dissolving into fiction, or have the sense that the self is fiction.
These are stories that demand that the reader NOT check her brain at the door: disquieting, self-weary perhaps, not particularly plot-driven. They include elements of detective fiction, of mysteries and thrillers. Detective stories in the sense that characters follow one another around and spy on one another. Characters disappear and/or mirror one another: one “self” becomes the “other.” Everyone here is lost and almost no one is found. Who is trailing whom becomes undecidable or indecipherable. Characters disappear. We don’t know where they go and neither does the author.

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)

When I started reading this trilogy, I expected something similar to Double Indemnity or The Maltese Falcon. You know, a mystery with a dark atmosphere, a thrill and twists. Instead, the three novels have focused on the inner psychology rather than the mystery itself. Nevertheless, it was fun and engaging till the end. The three stories (City of glass, Ghosts, The locked room), have similar plots regarding finding/monitoring a certain person. However, out of the three, The locked room was my favorite since it delves into the childhood of that person until his growth.

It was a fun ride to me, and I recommend it to anyone who finds the journey more important than the conclusion.

Paul Auster
پل استر نویسنده ی مشهور امریکایی
سه کتاب شهر شیشه ای، ارواح و اتاق در بسته با استقبال بی نظیری همراه شد که باعث ادغام این سه کتاب در یک مجموعه به نام سه گانه ی نیویورک شد


نمی شود آنقدر از کسی متنفر بود مگر آنکه قسمتی از روح مان آن را بسیار دوست داشته باشد

Further update, June 19th 2012.

In response to several thoughtful comments that take issue with the nastiness of my initial review, I have come to the conclusion that the comments in question are essentially correct. Please see my own response in comment #32 in the discussion. And thanks to those who called me on this, apologies for my earlier vitriolic responses. In general, I try to acknowledge the validity of other opinions in my reviews and comments, something I notably failed to do in this discussion. I should have been more civil, initially and subsequently.


Update:

WELL, CONGRATULATIONS, PAUL AUSTER!!

I wouldn't actually have thought it possible, but with the breathtakingly sophomoric intellectual pretension of the final 30 pages of "City of Glass", you have actually managed to deepen my contempt and loathing for you, and the overweening, solipsistic, drivel that apparently passes for writing in your particular omphaloskeptic corner of the pseudo-intellectual forest in which you live, churning out your mentally masturbatory little turdlets.

Gaaaah. Upon finishing the piece of smirkingly self-referential garbage that was "City of Glass", I wanted to jump in a showever and scrub away the stinking detritus of your self-congratulatory, hypercerebral, pomo, what a clever-boy-am-I, pseudo-intellectual rubbish from my mind. But not all the perfumes of Araby would be sufficient - they don't make brain bleach strong enough to cleanse the mind of your particular kind of preening, navel-gazing idiocy.

All I can do is issue a clarion call to others who might be sucked into your idiotic, time-wasting, superficially clever fictinal voyages to nowhere. There is emphatically no there there. The intellectual vacuum at the core of Auster's fictions is finally nothing more than that - empty of content, devoid of meaning, surrounded with enough of the pomo trappings to keep the unwary reader distracted. But, if you're looking for meaning in your fiction, for God's sake look elsewhere.

And, please - spare me your pseudoprofound epiphanies of the sort that the emptiness at the core of Auster's tales is emblematic of the kind of emptiness that's at the core of modern life. Because that brand of idiocy butters no parsnips with me - I got over that kind of nonsense as a freshman in college. At this point in my life I expect a little more from anyone who aspires to be considered a writer worth taking seriously.

Which Paul Auster, though I have no doubt that he takes himself very, very seriously indeed, is not. This little emperor of Brooklyn is stark naked, intellectually speaking.

The only consolation is that I spent less than $5 for this latest instalment of Austercrap.

Gaaaah. PASS THE BRAINBLEACH.


Earlier comment begins below:

My loathing for the only other of Paul Auster's books that I had read (the Music of Chance) was so deep that it's taken me over ten years before I can bring myself to give him another chance. But finally, today, after almost three weeks of reading only short pieces in Spanish, my craving for fiction in English was irresistible, so I picked up a second-hand copy of The New York Trilogy in the English-language bookstore here in Guanajuato.

So far so good. I'm about three-quarters through the first story of the trilogy and I'm enjoying it, without actually liking it, if that makes sense. Auster seems to owe a clear debt of influence to Mamet - there's the same predilection for games, puzzles, and the influence of chance. Thankfully, the influence doesn't extend to dialog, which Mamet has always seemed to me to wield clumsily, like a blunt instrument. Auster is more subtle, but he still holds his characters at such a remote distance, it gives his writing a cerebral quality that is offputting at times. Thus, one can enjoy the situations he sets up and the intricacies of the story, without quite liking his fiction.

Who knows, maybe I will feel differently after I've read all three stories?