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

Spooky shit...

La lettura di “Baumgartner” mi ha fatto venire voglia di rileggere “Trilogia di New York”, il mio primo romanzo di Paul Auster. Anni fa ero rimasta folgorata dal libro. Temevo che la rilettura sarebbe stata meno interessante e, invece, lo è stata ancora di più. “Trilogia di New York” è, senza ombra di dubbio, uno dei libri più geniali, cerebrali e affascinanti che abbia mai letto.
 
La trilogia è composta da tre storie apparentemente scollegate, tutte ambientate in una New York alienante, labirintica. Le storie si presentano come anti-detective stories, in cui un protagonista deve pedinare qualcuno o cercare una persona scomparsa. Essendo anti-detective stories, i casi non hanno risoluzione e i protagonisti finiscono per smarrirsi nel nulla.
Inutile dire che si tratta di romanzi altamente simbolici (come tutti i romanzi postmodernisti), il cui tema centrale è la complessità e la frammentarietà della società contemporanea - una società che non è più a misura d’uomo.
 
La conseguenza principale del vivere in tale società è la perdita della propria identità. Tutti i protagonisti delle storie hanno smarrito la propria identità e cercano di ritrovarla inseguendo altre persone; l’investigazione, quindi, è metafora della ricerca del proprio io - una ricerca impossibile, destinata al fallimento. I tre romanzi contengono livelli diversi e sempre più esasperati della perdita della propria identità.
Nel primo, il protagonista, Peter Quinn, è uno scrittore di gialli inizialmente diviso tra tre identità: quella di Quinn persona, quella di Wilson, lo pseudonimo che usa come scrittore, e quella di Work, l’investigatore protagonista dei suoi romanzi. Quando Quinn viene scambiato per un investigatore e riceve l’incarico di pedinare un certo Peter Stillman, la sua identità si frammenta ulteriormente e questo lo porta progressivamente a perdersi.
Nel secondo romanzo, il protagonista, Blue, è un investigatore diviso, inizialmente, tra le tante identità che ha dovuto assumere nel corso di anni di indagini. Quando gli viene chiesto di investigare Black, diventa talmente ossessionato dall’indagine da identificarsi completamente nell’uomo, vedendo in lui il suo doppio.
Nel terzo romanzo, il protagonista, privo di nome, non si limita a cercare un amico scomparso ma si sostituisce addirittura ad esso, pubblicando i suoi romanzi e sposando sua moglie. Qui, quindi, la perdita della propria identità raggiunge il suo apice.
 
La seconda conseguenza del vivere in una società complessa e frammentata è il fatto che le parole non sono più in grado di rappresentare appieno la realtà. Tutti e tre i romanzi contengono riferimenti al linguaggio e ai suoi limiti.
Nel primo romanzo, un personaggio di nome Peter Stillman tenta un esperimento sul figlio per appropriarsi del linguaggio originale, antecedente al peccato capitale - un esperimento fallimentare. Anni dopo, Stillman continua la ricerca cercando di inventare un nuovo linguaggio, in cui le parole cambiano a seconda delle funzioni che hanno gli oggetti a cui si riferiscono. Anche questo esperimento fallisce, spingendo l’uomo a interrompere le proprie ricerche.
Nel secondo romanzo, Blue si rende conto che le parole non sono sufficienti a descrivere in modo esaustivo ciò che osserva e ha sempre maggiore difficoltà nello stilare i report relativi all’investigazione.
Nel terzo romanzo, infine, il narratore legge il taccuino dell’amico Fanshawe sperando di capire le scelte dell’uomo, ma trova le parole incomprensibili.
In un mondo il cui il linguaggio non è più in grado di descrivere la realtà, lo scrittore perde importanza - diventando un semplice mediatore tra il mondo dei personaggi e il mondo reale - e il lettore assume, per contro, una funzione rilevante: quella di interpretare ciò che legge, attraverso gli indizi disseminati dallo scrittore. Ecco perchè “Trilogia di New York” risulta complesso ed enigmatico: sta al lettore interpretare e completare il lavoro iniziato da Paul Auster.
 
Ma “Trilogia di New York” non è solo un libro sulla società contemporanea. È anche un libro metaletterario che riflette sul potere dell’immaginazione, sul processo creativo della stesura di romanzi e sulla vita di uno scrittore.
Le storie che compongono il libro hanno un’ambientazione volutamente irreale, in quanto specchio della mente dell’autore. Tutti i protagonisti sono ossessionati dall’indagine che è stata loro affidata e si concentrano talmente su di essa da dimenticare di vivere la propria vita; questo non è altro che metafora della vita di uno scrittore, che deve immedesimarsi così tanto nelle vite dei propri personaggi da trascurare la propria. Le trame della trilogia, inoltre, presentano continui rovesciamenti di ruolo, con scrittori che diventano personaggi e viceversa. Tutto questo è metafora del rapporto che lega uno scrittore ai suoi personaggi. Un autore, infatti, non ha pieno controllo sui personaggi, in quanto il processo creativo di un romanzo spesso muta in corso d’opera. Nella trilogia ci si trova di fronte, quindi, a situazioni paradossali, in cui i personaggi seguono o sorvegliano il proprio scrittore o in cui un autore riesce a comunicare con i suoi personaggi solo attraverso una porta - simbolo della distanza incolmabile tra i due.
 
Ci sarebbe tanto altro da dire (ad esempio, sui collegamenti con “Don Chisciotte” e “Walden” e sui collegamenti con la fede e il peccato originale), ma mi fermo qui.
So bene che si tratta di un libro faticoso da leggere, che va diluito e assimilato nel tempo. Ma penso che lo sforzo vaga assolutamente la pena. Basandomi su quanto ho letto finora, Paul Auster ha scritto degli ottimi romanzi (come “4321”), dei romanzi nella media (come “Baumgartner” e “Mr. Vertigo”) e un capolavoro: “Trilogia di New York”.

في منتصف الثمانينات صدرت لأوستر رواية " مدينة الزجاج " و التي قام برفضها سبعة عشر ناشر حتى جازف أحدهم بطباعتها و ذلك لكونها رواية غير مألوفة و غامضة إن صح التعبير. أعقب ذلك صدور روايتين هما " الأشباح " و " الغرفة الموصدة " - غنيّ عن القول أنهما الجزئين المكملين للثلاثية - و بعد سنتين تفرغ أوستر للكتابة بعد أن حقق المجد و الشهرة عبر هذه الثلاثية و أصبحت الكتابة مهنته الأساسية إذ بدأت تنفق عليه و إن لم يكن بالثراء الذي يتصوره البعض - يعلق ضاحكاً -. عوالم أوستر على غرابتها و فرادتها من الممكن التكهن بها فهناك دائماً كاتب و هناك الكثير من حديث الكتب، و يبحث شخوصه بإلحاحٍ جنوني على الدوام عن الهوية و المعنى، و بطبيعة الحال تلعب الصدفة دوراً كبيراً في قصص أوستر. في مدينة الزجاج يتصل أحدهم بالكاتب كوين طالباً النجدة من وكالة التحري! و بالمناسبة يقول أوستر أنه قد تعرض لهذا الموقف شخصياً. الثلاثية مجموعة من الروايات البوليسية - ليست بالنمط المعهود - و فيها ينساق الأبطال بمكالمة أو رسالة لمصيرهم الحادّ و تحتاج الثلاثية إلى جَلَد من نوع خاص. من عبقرية أوستر أنه توقع هذا الحنق ليربت على كتف القاريء بجملة من كتاب " والدن " ترجو من القارئ أن يتهمل في قرائته حتى يستوعبه كاملاً! هناك الكثير من السطور التي سيطل بها أوستر مخاطباً القارئ بشكل غير مباشر. في الرواية الأولى يلعب كوين دور التحري - علماً أنه كاتب عادي لا أقل و لا أكثر - بينما يذهب التحري بلو ليهدر سنة من عمره في مراقبة شخص آخر في " الأشباح " و في الرواية الثالثة تتحول رسالة فانشو صديق الطفولة إلى ديناميت من شأنه أن يدمر كل شيء. عبقرية الثلاثية تتجلى بوضوح بتشابهها مع متاهة كاتدرائية شارتر بفرنسا حيث تبدو الأمور الغامضة موغلة في الوضوح! العمل عبقري و عصيّ على النسيان و يدعو إلى مزيدٍ من هذا الأوستر. لا يفوتني أن أشيد بالترجمة الأمينة.

Words don't change, but books are always changing. Different things change constantly, people change, they find a book at the right time. And that book answers something,a need,a wish.

Paul Auster

In this novel, Paul auster deals with strolling, chaos, straying, and distressing the outer and inner spaces of modern urban life. And that urban life is full of change and man loses himself in these changes.

Common points of the story:
1. In all three stories the main character seeks to solve a riddle. A puzzle that does not exist at all.
2. Chances and random events play a major role in the fate of the characters.
3. Identity (self) and its variations are the main themes of all three stories.

پل استر در این رمان به پرسه زنی،هرج و مرج،گم گشتگی و پریشانی فضای بیرونی و درونی زندگی مدرن شهری می پردازد. و اینکه زندگی شهری پر از تغییرات است و انسان خودش را در این تغییرات گم میکند.

نقاط مشترک داستان:
1.در هر سه داستان شخصیت اصلی به دنبال حل یک معما هستند.معمایی که اصلا وجود ندارد.
2.شانس و رویداد های تصادفی نقش عمده ای در سرنوشت شخصیت ها دارد.
3.بحث هویت(خود) و تغییرات آن درونمایه اصلی هر سه داستان است.

Жила-була й переклала, чи то пак, переклала ще бозна коли, а потім сто років копирсалася з вичиткою, бо це шалено заморочний текст, весь вибудуваний саме на тих дієсловах, які ти зазвичай у перекладі сяк-так оминаєш во ім’я притомної української стилістики (бути, говорити, думати, здаватися – оцей весь блок). Скажімо, перше ж речення: “It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not”. Стилістично адекватний переклад: “А почалося все з невірно набраного номера, трьох телефонних гудків глупої ночі й голосу по той бік слухавки, який звернувся не до нього”. На жаль, сюжетно адекватний переклад звучить таки як гуглтранслейт (“звернувся до того, ким він не був”) - ясно, що вся моя тестова група забанила цю версію з дикими криками, тестова група права, але по суті голос звертається до детектива, оповідач у той момент не був детективом, але стане по ходу внаслідок оцих адресованих не йому слів, і всі його колізії з ідентичністю лежать в основі сюжету. Себто не переклад, суцільна історія втрат і скрежету зубовного.

Це такі галюцинаторні американські витоки постмодерного детектива (де, як пам’ятаємо, питання не в тому, хто вбивця, а в тому, хто детектив) з високої полиці, дуже семіотичні – про дистанцію між знаком і означуваним, себто словом і предметом, який те описує, а також про співвідношення між актом споглядання/спостереження й ідентичністю (і того, хто споглядає, і того, кого споглядають), про нелегкий баланс між зовнішнім і внутрішнім і про все на світі. Читач також довідається чимало про мізки й какашки Волта Вітмена, історію Бруклінського мосту, ранні етапи розвитку американського роману й інтерпретації міфу про Вавилонську вежу через віки. Не можу сказати, що це мій улюблений жанр, країна чи епоха – хоча призма останньої повісті у трилогії таки робить перші дві повісті ретроспективно кумеднішими – але було цікаво.

Вийде в Основах, ну, або не вийде, враховуючи їхній track record. Одне із двох.

Qué lectura tan amena, tan rápida (estoy sacando los días en que tuve que dejarlo por los estudios) y tan conflictiva. Estas tres novelas me parecieron más una forma de problematizar la identidad y la literatura antes que un homenaje a New York a través de la escritura. Si la ciudad puede considerarse como un espacio inquietante y en movimiento, entonces New York es un claro ejemplo. Y Paul Auster aprovecha esa vorágine para mostrar también cómo allí nadie es quien dice ser: las personas roban identidades ajenas, las absorben, las transforman, las viven. Haré un breve comentario sin spoilers de las tres novelas.

Ciudad de cristal (1985): un escritor de novelas policíacas que se apellida Quinn recibe un llamado por equivocación. El escritor usa seudónimo y, extrañamente, quien lo busca lo confunde con otro escritor. Acepta el caso ¿Le servirá su experiencia como creador de un detective? Eso, tal vez, es lo menos importante. Porque cuando Quinn empieza a trabajar en el caso, no hay nada que indique una normalidad en el asunto. Lo cierto es que esta novela atrapa por la forma en que ahoga al personaje en su propia red, en sus obsesiones y en el hecho de “creerse otro”. Muy, muy buena y con varias referencias literarias. Las primeras páginas son las mejores y revelan un estilo fluido y complicado a la vez.

Fantasmas (1986): esta es la más extraña de las tres, la más desconcertante. Eso no significa que sea mala, sino todo lo contrario: Auster parece redoblar el juego de las identidades y, para colmo, los personajes tienen nombres de colores. El estilo es parco, pero efectivo. También es de género policial y no termina como uno lo espera. La explicación esclarecedora que todos buscamos en el último capítulo de una novela del género no se sirve en bandeja y resulta extraño. No estoy contando el final. Simplemente, estoy señalando su particularidad. No sé si me gustó más que Ciudad de cristal, pero la amé (otra vez) porque toca la literatura como tema secundario, pero pone especial foco en el proceso de escritura.

La habitación cerrada (1986): creo que aquí hay un problema de usurpación de vida, más que nada. Una forma práctica y poco sutil del intercambio de identidad. A un hombre le piden que se encargue de los manuscritos de un escritor desaparecido. Todo lo que viene después sería mucho más emocionante si hubiera menos enredos con mujeres que no salen del interés amoroso y/o del interés sexual. El personaje principal me cansó con sus hormonas (y es un adulto, vale aclarar). La literatura vuelve a ocupar un plano importante, ya que las publicaciones y la escritura mueven las decisiones de un protagonista que desentierra el pasado casi para siempre. La novela está narrada en primera persona, pero el personaje que narra me desagrada.

A modo general, diría que Auster se siente muy cómodo con la escritura y la literatura en estas tres novelas, a tal punto que le sirvió para elaborar tres historias policiales y peculiares. Para algunos, quizás, se vuelva cansador. Creo que vale la pena darle una oportunidad y seguramente es el mejor lugar para comenzar a conocer a este autor. Al menos, a mí me funcionó. La trilogía de Nueva York, según mi parecer, apunta a un público lector de clásicos que no se asuste con los spoilers y que le siga la pisada a estos personajes cultos y perdidos en una ciudad que se paraliza con sus conflictos internos.

Reseña en Clásico desorden

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.

My first Auster. Read at the urging of McCaffery's 100.

Very pleased with it. Not blown out of the water nor struck by any particularly new paths for fiction. But nonetheless time well spent.

Will welcome more Auster in the future of course but don't anticipate myself getting carried away and immersed as I often enough do.

I'll describe briefly a reflection. Reading this I had the experience of not anticipating where the next sentence was headed so my eyes and attention remained where they should, word to word ; sentence to sentence. This in stark contrast to my recent experience skim=reading a 400 page novel in a few hours wherein I seemed to see coming exactly what was what appeared next, the next word the next sentence not needing to be read because the previous words and sentences predicted them completely. Also in contrast in the other direction, that experience of reading I deeply treasure and seek out, that experience of utter bafflement, not only not anticipating the next sentence, the next word, but not even anticipating what I've already read, not fully comprehending what the hell is going on and where we're headed and where we've been. Sentences which can be read and reread and which not only don't become easily interpreted into banalities but which on each revisit would or do deepen the bafflement. The art of fiction is not 'complete and full understanding, full grasping and mastering' but rather that experience of deepening the estrangement, befuddlement. This one experiences in texts like Finnegans Wake and Prae and Women & Men and Larva. This is what I want out of fiction, language which moves with the depth and complexity and infinity of a Bach or Beethoven or Wagner.

Auster is a good read.

يحاول أن يقودك الكاتب الى ترهات ومجموعة جمل بأحداث بعيدة عن التناسق فاما أن تقبل ذلك بطوعك أو ترفضه
لست من أولئك الذين يتقبلون الروايات الملغزة التي ترمي لأبعاد في بطن الكاتب محاولا جرك لتجلياته ضمن سياق روائي مبعثر ,,,, عند منتصف الرواية تماما توقفت ولن أكمل

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."

(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.

Aus gegebenem Anlass habe ich mir nochmal die New York Trilogy vorgenommen - zugegeben, beim ersten Versuch vor ein paar Jahren, mir das Buch zu Gemüte zu führen, war ich gescheitert. Auch beim zweiten Anlauf überwog anfangs die Skepsis. Die drei Geschichten („Stadt aus Glas“, „Schlagschatten“, „Hinter verschlossenen Türen“) kommen zunächst als ganz normale Krimis daher, doch konfrontieren sie den Leser dann plötzlich mit literaturtheoretischen Überlegungen zu Themen der Weltliteratur (mit denen man sich allerdings nicht zuvor auseinandergesetzt haben muss). Und dann gibt es noch nicht mal eine klassische Auflösung! Verwirrend ist vor allem, dass sich mitunter die Identitäten der Protagonisten vermischen, und am Ende jeder Geschichte scheint alles verworrener zu sein als zuvor.

Tatsächlich kommt man in diesem Werk mit der bewährten Herangehensweise an einen Kriminalroman nicht weit. Mit der "New York-Trilogie" nimmt Auster die klassische Detektivgeschichte auseinander und entledigt sich ihrer zwingenden Logik, dem traditionellen Grundgerüst des Genres, um es auf das Wesentliche und Atmosphärische zu reduzieren: mysteriöse Anrufe, das Beschatten und Beobachten eines unbekannten Anderen, in eine andere Identität schlüpfen, auf ein Motiv spekulieren.

Was dabei übrig bleibt, ist ein literarischer Grenzgang zwischen dem Selbst und dem Anderen. Unheimlich, entlarvend, erkenntnisreich.
Was passiert beim obessiven Blick auf den Anderen? Man gerät so sehr ins Spekulieren und verliert sich in den Sphären der eigenen Erwartungen, dass man im fremden Gegenüber niemand anderes als sich selbst erkennt. Das abgespaltene Ego. Das verunsicherte Selbst, der eigene Schatten, das Verdrängte in uns. Paul Auster hat dafür sehr eindrückliche Sprachbilder erschaffen.