Este me ha gustado mucho. Densito y una fumada del 15. Cojonudo.

I jumped straight from City of Glass into this second part of the NYC Trilogy, and it suffered by comparison. It is not a sequel per se, because it has different characters and is set in the late 1940s instead of the early 1980s, but it shares some of the same concerns (with literature, identity, doubling, the essential otherness of the writer, and so on) and again is a sort of metafictional mystery.

Part of why I couldn’t take this novella entirely seriously is the silly naming: White hires Blue to trail Black (really; all of the secondary characters are named after colors, too). It turns out Black is a writer who does little besides sit in his apartment, writing. Only when Blue disguises himself as a tramp and then as a salesman and meets Black in various other contexts does he realize that Black, too, is an investigator ... writing up a case of following a writer who hardly leaves his desk.

While I appreciated the circularity and the uncertainty over whether these accidental twins would destroy each other, as well as the literary references to Whitman, Thoreau and Hawthorne, the whole felt slightly inconsequential (“Blue watches Black, and little of anything happens.”). Plotlessness is part of the point, but makes for only a moderately interesting read.

There is one coded reference to Auster here: the fact that the book opens on February 3, 1947, the day he was born.

In the first volume of the NY trilogy (CITY OF GLASS), Auster explored identity and language. In this second, his fractal inquiry turns towards the question of authorship and, by necessity, readership.

The plot runs on one level (like the first book) as a detective story, summarized neatly from the back cover thus: "Blue, a student of Brown, has been hired by White to spy on Black. From a rented room on Orange Street, Blue keeps watch out his window, making notes about his subject, who sits across the street in another rented room, staring out of _his_ window."

Auster spins a plot marked typically (for him) by doublings, parallels, erasures, Mobius twists and a dramatic conclusion. The ultimate whodunit, meanwhile, resides with existential questions raised by Pascal (a favorite source of Auster's), and Thoreau. The former figures in a previous book of essays, called INVENTION OF SOLITUDE, in which Auster quotes him numerous times: "All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room."

Auster's inquiry gets more dramatic treatment in the fictional Trilogy; in GHOSTS, Thoreau's work makes a prominent appearance, as Blue discovers while snooping that Black is reading WALDEN. For most of rest of GHOSTS, Blue grapples with WALDEN, both the experience of reading it and the questions it raises.

Why do we do the things we do, particularly suffer destructive encounters with other humans? Why don't we all move out to the pond and live as satisfied hermits? "Because," says one of Auster's characters in a climactic scene (p.75): "Because he needs me… he needs my eyes looking at him. He needs me to prove he's alive."

But if this proof resolves one thing, it unearths multiple more unknowns. In less than 100 pages, Auster makes these phantoms visible, with thrilling and unsettling results.


*

WHY I READ THIS BOOK: I'm re-reading the New York Trilogy. See Volume 1 (CITY OF GLASS) for the whys and wherefores.

سه‌گانه نیویورک
جلد دوم: ارواح
داستان کتاب دوم از سه‌گانه‌ی نیویورک جایی شروع میشه که آقای سفید به آقای آبی که یک کارآگاه خصوصیه مراجعه می‌کنه و ازش میخواد که آقای سیاه رو تحت تعقیب و مراقبت قرار بده و به صورت هفتگی گزارش کار براش بفرسته و برای راحتی کار یه آپارتمان روبروی منزل آقای سیاه براش اجاره کرده. خب ابتدای کار به نظر میاد با یک داستان جنایی-کارآگاهی سر و کار داریم اما هر چی جلو میریم از جنبه‌ی کارآگاهی داستان کم و به جنبه‌ی فلسفی داستان افزوده میشه. جلد سوم رو هم باید بخونم برای نظر دادن.ه

Could it be possible that Auster learned from his weaknesses? The first thing any reader of City of Glass would notice about this second installment is the sophomore effort is still shorter! Weighing in at only 96 pages, I wondered how many crises of existence Auster would try to cram into this one: love in the twentieth century; how far the hand of God reaches toward earth; life after death? But no, Auster sailed through this more complete and better work by picking up on his earlier theme of the relationship between an author and his subject and just staying on target. The result? A powerful vignette featuring basically anonymous figures (all the characters are named after colors) buoyed by Auster’s clean, compact style and simple plots. The tension here is more detectable to the reader. If the reader is jumping at Auster’s questions, he at least feels confident that he is guessing at answers to Auster’s puzzles, rather than imagining what Auster was trying to do in the first place. This is a vast improvement over City of Glass.
tIn Ghosts, the protagonist, Blue, another detective, is assigned to simply keep his private eye focused on a man living in a sparse apartment across the street, Black, and record all of his daily moves, down to the minute details. But all Black does all day is write. Bored and soon lost in his new role, Blue surrounds himself with images of his identity: photos of his parents (pre-Blue), reminders of the stories he forever wants to write, a snapshot with his happily-retired mentor, the movie plot he feels his own story should follow, a shot of his hero Jackie Robinson sliding into third, a portrait of Walt Whitman. Nothing of his current life, only where he has been and where he wants to go.
Becoming stir crazy in this absence of a fulfilling present, and although content with his paycheck, Blue decides to engage Black in a serious of plotted encounters, attempting to learn more about this shadowy character, and inevitably about himself in the process. Eventually, the walls between Black and Blue crumble, and Auster tips his hand as to the novel’s internal struggle: the tension between author and character. Which of the two writes and which acts, which records while the other creates?
We are left with a better sense of how an author struggles with his own characters in trying to avoid becoming the subject of everything he writes. It’s an endless circle, and one the author must inevitably travel alone. Black’s hobby turns out to be studying American writers in an “effort to understand things.” (That’s about as much specificity as we can expect out of Auster.) Black and Blue discuss Hawthorne’s shutting himself in his room for twelve years to write The Vicar of Wakefield, an act which prompts Black to comment “Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.” To which Blue responds, “Another ghost.” Voila, a title.
One thing is certain: Blue is an author through and through. He tosses Thoreau’s Walden aside as worthless. Who would go live in a forest where there’s nothing to write about, we hear Blue think, as we pity his inability to define himself through anything but his characters. As Black and Blue idly sit and script each other’s lives, the reader can’t help but feel a sense of loneliness descend upon this closed, difficult, two-person world. Are they simply alter egos, or are they author and character (and which one plays which)? By the end, we wonder whether Auster summed up the difficulties of writing best by the way he named his characters: what’s harder for any author to describe than “blue”?
But what profession doesn’t have its troubles. Of course, we can only expect Auster to write with such potency about his own demons (although we get the sense he’d rather do otherwise). We see clearly now the link to City of Glass, the elementary lesson that authors, despite their troubles and torments with identities and characters, simply must live through and by writing. And they are only human. Black’s hobby seems suddenly futile. “We always talk about trying to get inside a writer to understand his work better,” Black confesses to Blue on a Brooklyn stoop beneath a summer sunset. “But when you get right down to it, there’s not much to find in there— at least not much that’s different from what you’d find in anyone else.” Auster better stop inviting us into such intriguing stories, or else we will never be able to stop prying, as any good detective should.

Kisa ama etkileyici bir romandı, özellikle hikayenin karakterlerinin gerçekliği konusunda okurken düştüğüm çelişkiler beni epey etkiledi. Bir solukta okuyup, zamanınızı güzel geçirmenize sebep olacak bir kitap. Çevirisini karşılaştırma imkanım henüz olmadı. Keyifli okumalar.

''First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown.''

Even from the beginning, the author incites the reader to take a different perspective on the novel, to not quite immerse themselves in the story but to take it as a metaphor, creating a detached view of the characters that slowly drives you in insanity much like them.

What I’ve concluded from Paul Auster novels is that the questions you ask are more important than the answers.

A truly magnificent mystery novel, even if it is regarded as the “weakest” novel of the trilogy, it still serves the essence of Auster’s mystery novels, questions without answers.

در دومین قسمت از سه‌گانه نیویورک، پل‌استر مجدداً با رویکردی نامتعارف و نسبتاً کنایه‌آمیز به سراغ ژانر معمایی/پلیسی میره. در این کتاب، یک کارآگاه خصوصی استخدام میشه تا روی پرونده‌ای کار کنه که به نظر میاد وجود نداره! تعقیب فردی که هر چقدر در داستان بیشتر پیش بریم، مشخص‌تر میشه که هیچ جرمی مرتکب نشده و دلیلی برای تعیب کردنش وجود نداره.

دوباره پارانویا خیلی زود از راه میرسه، معنای هویت به سوال گذاشته میشه، و معمای داستان با پرسش‌های فلسفی پرشمار عجین میشه.

Another wonderfully written piece by Paul Auster. The reader (as is the main character, Blue) is largely left in the dark about what is going on. Who is Black and why does he have to be watched? Is he a criminal or is a crime going to be done against him ... or is he some innocent person that is being used to set up Blue? These are the questions that Blue tries to work out, even as the reader is pondering the same things. And they are never answered ... but that doesn't matter all that much. The ending is somehow satisfying enough even though you never find out what the hell it was all about.

Reading Ghosts, I had the bizarre feeling, the whole time, that I'd read the story before. That I'd read about this premise being played out somewhere else. In any case, I think I've got more of a handle on the kind of story Paul Auster is telling. It's definitely not a clear-cut detective novel -- I didn't expect it to be, but some people tried to read it and the first book, at least, in that way.

It's oddly absorbing despite the quiet feel of it; I read it more or less in one sitting. It's very odd. Quiet, like I said, with lots of space to think.

Plus court et moins sombre que Cité de Verre.
Il visite les mêmes thèmes d'identités en miroir et de pannes dans la communication. Pourtant, c'était moins drainé que le tome 1, peut-être parce que les personnages sont un peu plus éloignés, plus abstraits.
Je suis très curieux de voir ce que tout cela mène à la chambre dérobée ( Tome 3 ).

What did he do in there?
He wrote stories.
Is that all? He just wrote?
Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he's here, he's not really there.
Another ghost.
Exactly.