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

Spooky shit...

ريفيو قريب
أفوق بس B-)

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تحديث 1992012


إنه كتاب غريب ،،،فهو كما تعلم ليس من نوع الروايات التى تميل إليها ، بل لا ينتمى إلى أى نوع على الإطلاق ، و لكن ليس هناك مجال للتشكيك فى قدرة الرجل على الإبداع ،،، لقد قرأت الكتاب قبل ما يزيد عن أسبوعين ، و قد لازمنى منذ ذلك الحين ، و ليس بمقدورى انتزاعه من ذهنى ، فهو يواصل الإلحاح على ذاكرتى ،و دائما فى أغرب اللحظات ، و كما تعلم فإن ذلك لا يحدث معظم الوقت ، و لكن الكتاب يفرض نفسه ، هناك شيئ قوى فيه و أغرب ما فى الأمر أننى لا أعرف ما هو هذا الشئ.







حسنا ،،،،،، الفقرة السابقة منقولة بتصرف من الكتاب نفسه ، يتحدث فيها أحد الناشرين عن كتاب ما بصدد الطبع......

و هذا جزء من عجائبية هذا الكتاب الغريب الذى لا يخضع لتصنيف و قد يصل فى بعض أجزائه إلى الثرثرة المطلقة ،،،،

جزء من جنون هذا الكتاب أن يفرد المؤلف فقرة كهذه تصف شعورك تماما بلا زيادة و لا نقصان تجاه كتابه ، فكأنه *المجنون* يحدثك !!!!!

خلطة غريبة من الأدب الروائى ، الفلسفى و الثرثرة.
هذا كتاب لا يمكننى أن أرشحه فهو كتاب (مزائجى) جدا _ ان كان هناك شيئا كهذا _ فهو إما يخضعك و يجعلك تتبنى جنونه و تصيبك العدوى ، أو تلعنه صارخا

»ماذا تقصد !!!!!!!!«

Очевидно аз и Пол Остър имаме класическа love/hate връзка.
Не е ясно дали ще последва трета среща.

Но тези няколко любими фрази от "Нюйоркска трилогия" все пак дълбаят в сърцето ми:

We always talk about trying to get inside a writer to understand his work better. But when you get right down to it there is not much to find in there - at least not much different from what you`d find in anyone else.

I am fairly certain now that the things that followed had as much to do with the past as with the present. A number of ancient feelings finally caught up with me that afternoon.

True marriages never make sense.

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster - three captivating postmodern novels published back in the mid-1980s. Here's my write-up of each individually:

CITY OF GLASS - Book 1
City of Glass reads like Raymond Chandler on Derrida, that is, a hard-boiled detective novel seasoned with a healthy dose of postmodernist themes, a novel about main character Daniel Quinn as he walks the streets of uptown New York City.

I found the story and writing as compelling as Chandler's The Big Sleep or Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and as thought-provoking as reading an essay by Foucault or Barthes. By way of example, here are three quotes from the novel coupled with key concepts from the postmodern tradition along with my brief commentary.

On the first pages of the novel, the narrator conveys mystery writer Quinn's reflections on William Wilson, his literary pseudonym and Max Work, the detective in his novels. We read, "Over the years, Work had become very close to Quinn. Whereas William Wilson remained an abstract figure for him Work had increasingly come to life. In the triad of selves that Quinn had become, Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist, Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise." ---------- Michel Foucault completely rejected the idea that a person has one fixed inner self or essence serving them as their individual personal identity. Rather, he saw personal identity as defined by a process of on-going, ever changing dialogue with oneself and others. ---------- And Quinn's interior dialogue with Work and Wilson is just the beginning. As the novels progresses, Quinn takes on a number of other identities.

In his role as hired detective (quite an ironic role since Quinn is a fiction writer and has zero experience as a detective), he goes to Grand Central Station to locate a man by the name of Peter Stillman, the man he will have to tail. This is what we read after Quinn spots his man, "At that moment Quinn allowed himself a glance to Stillman's right, surveying the rest of the crowd to make doubly sure he made no mistakes. What happened then defined explanation. Directly behind Stillman, heaving into view just inches behind his right shoulder, another man stopped . . . His face was the exact twin of Stillman's." ---------- The double, the original and the copy, occupies the postmodernists on a number of levels, including a double reading of any work of literature. Much technical language is employed, but the general idea is we should read a work of fiction the first time through in the conventional, traditional way, enjoying the characters and the story.

Our second reading should be more critical than the first reading we constructed; to be good postmodernists, we should `deconstruct' the text to observe and critically evaluate such things as cultural and social biases and underlying philosophic assumptions. And such a second reading should not only be applied to works of literature but to all our encounters with facets of contemporary mass-duplicated society.

"As for Quinn, it is impossible for me to say where he is now. I have followed the red notebook as closely as I could, and any inaccuracies in the story should be blamed on me." ---------- One key postmodern idea is that a book isn't so much about the world as it is about joining the conversation with other books. ---------- Turns out, the entire story here is a construction/deconstruction/reconstruction of a book: Quinn's red notebook. Life and literature living at the intersection of an ongoing conversation - Quinn's red notebook contains references to many, many other books, including Diary of Marco Polo, Robinson Caruso, Holy Bible, Don Quixote, Baudelaire. And the story the narrator relates from Quinn's red notebook is City of Glass by Paul Auster. Again, Raymond Chandler on Derrida.

One final observation. Although no details are given, Quinn tells us right at the outset he has lost his wife and son. Quinn's tragedy coats every page like a kind of film. No matter what form a story takes, modern or postmodern or anything else, tragedy is tragedy and if we empathize with Quinn at all, we feel his pain. Some things never change.

GHOSTS - Book 2
Ghosts (1983) reads like the square root of a hard-boiled detective noir novel, an off-the-wall, bizarre mystery where there is no crime and the whodunit is replaced by a meditation on the nature of identity. Here are the opening few line: "First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown. Brown broke him in, Brown taught him the ropes, and when Brown grew old, Blue took over." Blue is a detective and it is Blue we follow on every page of this sparse (less than 100 pages) novel set in 1947 New York City.

To gain an initial feel for the novel, please go to Youtube and watch a snippet of one of those 1940s black-and-white noir films, like The Naked City. You will see lots of hard-talking tough guys in gray suits and gray hats running around city streets socking one another in the jaw and plugging one another with bullets -- plenty of action to be sure. And that's exactly the point - a world chock-full of police, detectives, crooks and dames is a world of action.

But what happens when one of those 1940s detectives is put on a case where all action is stripped away, when the only thing the detective has to do is look out his apartment window and keep an eye on a man across the street in another apartment sitting at his desk reading or writing? This is exactly what happens in Ghosts. So, rather than providing a more detailed synopsis of the story (actually, there is some action and interaction), I will cite several of Blue's musing along with my brief comments on Blue's relationship to literary and artistic creation:

"Until now, Blue has not had much chance for sitting still, and this new idleness has left him at something of a loss. For the first time in his life, he finds that he has been thrown back on himself, with nothing to grab hold of, nothing to distinguish one moment from the next. He has never given much through to the world inside him, and through he always knew it was there, it has remained an unknown quantity, unexplored and therefore dark, even to himself." --------- So, for the first time in his life, Blue is given a taste of silence and solitude, the prime experience of someone who is a writer.

"More than just helping to pass the time, he discovers that making up stories can be a pleasure in itself." ---------- Removed from the world of action and building on his experience of silence and solitude, Blue is also given a hint of what it might mean to be a fiction writer, one who sits in isolation, exploring the inner world of imagination in order to create stories. And, on the topic of stories, the unnamed narrator conveys how Blue reflects on many stories, including the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, stories from the lives of Walk Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, and several stories Blue reads in his all-time favorite magazine: True Detective. Auster's short novel is teeming with stories.

"For the first time in his experience of writing reports, he discovers that words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say." ---------- Blue discerns it is possible that words cannot adequately articulate the depth and full range of human experience. And what is true of a detective's report is truer for works of great literature: there is a rich, vital, vibrant world of feeling and imagination beyond the confines of words and language.

"Finally mustering the courage to act, Blue reaches into his bag of disguises and casts about for a new identity. After dismissing several possibilities, he settles on an old man who used to beg on the corner of his neighborhood when he was a bog - a local character by the name of Jimmy Rose - and decks himself out in the garb of tramphood . . ." ---------- During the course of the novel, Blue take on a number of different identities and with each new persona he experiences life with a kind of immediacy and intensity. Spending a measure of his creative life as a screenwriter and director, Paul Auster undoubtedly had many encounters with actors thriving on their roles, energized and invigorated as they performed for the camera. I suspect Auster enjoyed placing his detective main character in the role of actor at various points.

Ghosts can be read as a prompt to question how identity is molded by literature and the arts. How dependent are we on stories for an understanding of who we are? In what ways do the arts influence and expand our sense of self? Do we escape purposelessness and boredom by participating in the imaginative worlds of art and literature?

THE LOCKED ROOM - Book 3
“It seems to me now that Fanshawe was always there. He is the place where everything begins for me, and without him I would hardly know who I am.” So begins The Locked Room.

We encounter the narrator, a writer by profession, navigating the choppy waters of passion and commitment, forever brooding on an entire range of topics: life and death, self and other, childhood and memory, friendship and fatherhood, love and hate, reading and writing, self-definition and self-identity.

In a strange, offbeat way, all the philosophic reflections and ruminations give Auster’s short novel an irresistible drive. Fanshawe was a writer, leaving boxes of novels, journals, poetry and plays to be read and judged. Fanshawe also leaves his beautiful wife, Sophie, and his baby boy. Sophie contacts the narrator, who was Fanshawe’s dearest friend, to do the reading and judging. To tell more than these few facts would be to tell too much. Let me simply say that once I started reading The Locked Room, I couldn’t put it down.


American author Paul Auster, born 1947

Auster's trilogy of stories are basically the same story with a different slant. Written in the guise of a detective story : man seeks man but is really seeking himself and the nature of his being? All very metaphysical/existential if you like that sort of thing, but highly readable.

I can't write anything about this novel. This isn't some predictable, pitiful attempt to make an opening. I literally can't write anything about it. I've been squeezing my mind over it since yesterday, but no.
Read it.

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.

[Τα παλιά τα χρόνια στο somuchreading είχαμε τη δική μας Λέσχη Ανάγνωσης. Αυτό ήταν ένα από τα βιβλία που διαβάσαμε, αντιγράφω τα σχόλια που είχα κάνει στο somuchreading.com, αιωνία του η μνήμη]

λοιπόν, δεν είμαι σίγουρος τι να γράψω για το βιβλίο. βλέπω στους περισσότερους από εσάς δεν άρεσε και καταλαβαίνω γιατί. είναι τόσο μεγάλο το κόλλημά μας με την “πλοκή” που οποιοδήποτε έργο της λογοτεχνίας ή του κινηματογράφου δε χωράει στο στενό πλαίσιο του “αρχή-μέση-τέλος” και μοιάζει να υπηρετεί μόνο τους κανόνες του δικού του σουρεαλισμού, συνηθίζουμε να το πετάμε στην άκρη

ο Ώστερ κάνει κάτι φανταστικό εδώ: μιλάει για τον τρόπο που λέμε ιστορίες μέσα από μια απολύτως ωμή και προσωπική ιστοριογραφία. οι λέξεις του είναι πραγματικά ΟΙ ΛΕΞΕΙΣ ΤΟΥ, χωρίς κανένα φίλτρο συγγραφικής μανιέρας και ακολουθίας. και πως το πετυχαίνει αυτό; τηρώντας φαινομενικά όλες αυτές ακριβώς τις συγγραφικές μανιέρες και ακολουθίες τις οποίες έχει πλήρως αποτινάξει από πάνω του

όλοι οι χαρακτήρες του είναι ο συγγραφέας κι όλοι του οι χαρακτήρες, δηλαδή ο συγγραφέας, είναι όντα που εξελίσσονται διαρκώς, που ψάχνουν, όπως ο μπαμπάς Stillman που γυρνάει γύρω γύρω τους δρόμους της Νέας Υόρκης, ένα pattern στον κόσμο τους. το κόκκινο σημειωματάριο είναι το βαρίδιο, η συνεχής υπενθύμιση όλων να μείνουν πιστοί στους πραγματικούς εαυτούς τους, η συνεχής υπενθύμιση του ίδιου τις συγγραφέα να μείνει πιστός στις δικές του λέξεις, πιστός στον εαυτό του, πιστός στην ξεχωριστή θέση των χαρακτήρων του στους φανταστικούς, πλασμένους από τον ίδιο, κόσμους τους

το pattern φυσικά, που ψάχνουν χαρακτήρες αλλά κι όλοι μας, δεν υπάρχει, γιατί, ας σοβαρευτούμε, that’s life και το μόνο που έχουμε είναι ο εαυτός μας. κι άρα μήπως εμείς είμαστε οι χαρακτήρες του βιβλίου; μήπως εμείς γράφουμε συνέχεια σε ένα κόκκινο σημειωματάριο για να μας θυμίζει ποιοι είμαστε και ποιοι θέλουμε να είμαστε;

κι αν, ίσως, προσποιηθούμε πως είμαστε άλλοι από αυτούς που είμαστε, αν κι ο ίδιος ο συγγραφέας μπει βαθιά μέσα στο μ��αλό των ίδιων των χαρακτήρων του, μήπως κι εμείς κι αυτός δεν είμαστε πραγματικά χαμένοι;

υπάρχουν κομμάτια τα οποία είναι σίγουρα από τα καλύτερα που έχω διαβάσει ποτέ, όπως ο μονόλογος του γιου Peter Stillman και η αναφορά στον Dox Quixote [που να θυμίσω πως έχει δώσει το όνομα ετούτου του σάιτ] και θα μπορούσα να γράφω αρκετή ώρα ακόμη για το βιβλίο, δεν έχω πει τίποτα για τις αναφορές του σε βιβλία και συγγραφείς ε, αλλά ας μην το παρακάνω

εγώ του βάζω 4.5 αστεράκια. γιατί; γιατί όχι 5; γιατί βρίσκω λιγάκι πεσιμιστική την κοσμοθεωρία του συγγραφέα. όμως γενικά, δεν υπάρχει αντικειμενικότητα σε αυτά τα πράγματα, καθένας βλέπει τον εαυτό του και τους άλλους με διαφορετικό μάτι. απλά, να, σε σχέση με μένα λέω, που βλέπω την πραγματικότητα κάπως αλλιώς. ναι, pattern στις ζωές μας δεν υπάρχει αλλά αυτό είναι οκ και αυτή είναι η ομορφιά της ζωής. και καμιά φορά, το κόκκινο σημειωματάριό μας είναι ωραίο να το δανείζουμε σε άλλους

I can't believe I read this all the way through, but I just kept thinking that at some point, something has to happen. I was disappointed. The writing is mechanical and boring. It's like being told a story by someone barely interested what they are saying. There is no experience to it, no stake in the characters, and like I said, nothing of note really happens. When Auster makes an attempt to wrap up the disjointed and feeble plot lines after two and three-quarter books of emptiness and abrupt endings, it feels like he is just throwing words and sentences out in order to get it over with. At this point, I didn't care. I just wanted the book finished so I could move on to something with even a little more substance.

M-a purtat cartea asta dintr-o extrema intr-alta, m-a facut sa imi pun sumedenie de intrebari, sa incerc sa descopar sensuri si conexiuni.
Sunt trei parti aparent fara vreo legatura intre ele, si totusi exista un fir rosu, depinde de fiecare cititor sa ii afle misterul.
Concluzia mea este ca toate cele trei vorbesc despre insingurare, cautarea identitatii, dedublare, incercarea de regasire a sinelui, esuata prin pierderea luciditatii intr-o lume complicata.
Nu conteaza ca nu exista o finalitate clara, este tocmai ceea ce imi place, sa analizez si sa caut, sa raman consternata, intrebandu-ma ce a vrut sa spuna autorul.
Te astepti la o poveste politista cu triumfanta descoperire a vinovatului, dar nu primesti asa ceva, ci cu mult mult, un exercitiu de gandire, cu trimiteri la realitati si istorii, la Turnul Babel si autori americani ai secolului al XIX-lea, care l-au influențat pe Auster (Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman) si multe altele. 
Ultima parte, "Camera incuiata" m-a fascinat efectiv, este preferata mea, minunata analiza introspectiva, adorabile personaje, emotionanta.
Dincolo de toate astea, ramane placerea pe care o confera impecabilul stil narativ al lui Auster.

"Toti vrem sa ni se spuna povesti, pe care le ascultam lafel ca atunci cand eram copii. Ne imaginam adevarata poveste in vartejul cuvintelor si pentru a face asta ne punem in locul personajelor din poveste, prefacandu-ne ca putem sa-l intelegem pentru ca ne putem intelege pe noi insine. Asta e o amagire. Poate ca existam pentru noi insine, iar uneori chiar intrezarim cine suntem, dar la urma urmei nu putem fi niciodata siguri, si pe masura ce vietile noastre merg mai departe, devenim din ce in ce mai opaci fata de noi insine, din ce in ce mai constienti de propria noastra incoerenta. Nimeni nu poate trece granita care il desparte de celalat pentru simplul motiv ca nimeni nu are acces la sine insusi."

أعتقد أن الميزة السحرية في أوستر ، أنه يكتب ليكتشف ذاته ، يكتب وكأن أحدا لن يقرأه

I quite enjoyed this trilogy. Originally published as three separate volumes - City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986) are separate stories, though linked by events and characters.

City of Glass is about Daniel Quinn, a writer of mystery novels, which he publishes under a pseudonym. In the middle of the night Quinn receives a phone call. The caller asks for Paul Auster, of Auster Detective Agencies; though he rightly states that he's not Auster and hungs up, the call intrigues him. When some time passes and the telephone rings again, again asking for Auster, Quinn doesn't hesitate, and names himself as the detective, and takes up an intriguing case. Thus begins a dreamlike story of identity and consciousness, where the borders between reality and fiction are slim, if any.

Ghosts is about a private detective named Blue, who's tailing a character named Black, though who really might be watching who is never revealed. A bit dragging and confusing after a pretty straightforward City of Glass, it's the Two Towers of this trilogy, though thankfully it reads much faster.

The Locked Room, the concluding installment, might be the best of the lot. A man called Fanshawe disappears, leaving behind his pregnant wife and a whole stack of papers, and a message to his childhood friend to take care of it. The friend is a writer who suffers from a writer's block; he decides to publish the manuscripts under Fanshawe's name, and soon after marries his wife and replaces Fanshawe in the family. But that's just the beginning, as his life is slowly completely changing in ways he never thought it would.

These three losely connected short novels are genuinely disquiteting and delightful in their loose connections; characters appear and disappear, and more is lost than found. It's never clear who is the watcher and who the watched. The closest comparison I can think up is a David Lynch film where more questions are unanswered than not. Still, the experience of reading is satysfying; full of broodings about the nature of art and existence, with ubiquitous tropes. The writing style is not confining and especially pretentious; might revisit this in the future.