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برام خلاصه کتاب ، تو جمع بندی کتاب استیلمن بود.درباره امریکا و بهشت موعود و بابل.دوبار خوندمش بازم میخونم.

I think this was my first encounter with Paul Auster, a man who I met through the cult of the 1001 books to read before you die list. Prior to that I was vaguely aware of Auster and his peculiar brand of love/loath inciting literature which had friends alternatively raging or swooning, but had never bothered my arse to go and see what all the fuss was about.

Turns out I rather loved this - once I had progressed beyond the first forty pages. For the first forty pages I'd already rather rudely pigeon-holed the book as "arty-wank", thinking to myself, Oh dear this looks like it is entering into pretentious toss territory. When I say entering I mean approaching the door marked pretentious toss and busting its way in using a battering ram made out of glued together copies of The Body Artist by Don DeLillo, then stepping over the wreckage of the door and striding to the middle of the room to stand on the podium of arty-toss-bollocks while waving its arms over its head..... but nope, turns out it's all good.

Excellent trilogy, a study on the watched and the watcher in a sort of claustrophobic ever decreasing circles format which made my tiny mind spin, but in a good way, like the literary equivalent of an MC Escher drawing. In a complete about turn I then had to remove the book from the arty-wank pigeon hole and give it a little hug. This was followed by me then going out to purchase pretty much all of Paul Auster's books. Can't think for the life of me why I've not bothered to review more of them on Goodreads either. This one is deserving of a place on the 1001 books to read before you die list - just don't let the first forty pages fool you.

Gave me brain fog in a good way. Detective noir madness. Philosophical, cerebral, puzzling treats.

I will now have to go down the Auster rabbit hole.

Me gustó mucho, pero todavía no estoy segura de qué pensar.
Creo que le faltó muy poco para ser uno de mis favoritos, y no puedo dejar de pensar que Auster chantajeó un poco a sus lectores...
Necesito unos días más para pensar y quizás entonces escriba algo.

Baudelaire cited by Paul Auster in City of Glass: "Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas." In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.

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....

3.5 leaning towards 4... ah, my hate-love relationship with Paul Auster...
I loved some of Auster's books, Brooklyn Follies, Book of Illusions.... but he always keeps me wondering. Like his 'Man in the Dark'. This NY Trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room)... it's a crime noire novel... and it keeps you wondering what's going on. I read ShovelMoney1's review who says, 'a study on the watched and the watcher in a sort of claustrophobic ever decreasing circles format'. Good description. Auster's writing is rather pretentious at times, sort of bothers me, but it is also poetic, mysterious and that is where he draws me in....
City of Glass was a difficult start for me, had trouble getting through, including the rather pretentious pages of theories... I read some reviews here of City of Glass which were rather aggressively negative. Putting it mildly. I even considered stopping after that first one, but decided to read on and then the book got to me.... although I'm still thinking how much I liked it and what the h*** does Auster mean with those three stories that seem to make a full circle...
Read it again maybe? Mmmmmm.... maybe. For now, Auster did get into my head, yet again.

'In three variants on the classic detective story, Paul Auster makes the well-traversed terrain of New York city his own, as it becomes a strange, compelling landscape in which identities merge or fade and questions serve only to further obscure the truth.'

I stayed on in the house for a few more days. My plan was to do nothing for as long as I could, to rest up. I was exhausted, and I need a chance to regroup before going back to Paris. A day or two went by. I walked through the fields, visited the woods, sat out in the sun reading French translations of American detective novels. It should have been the perfect cure: holing up in the middle of nowhere, letting my mind float free. But none of it really helped. The house wouldn't make room for me, and by the third day, I sensed that I was no longer alone, that I could never be alone in that place. Fanshawe was there, and no matter how hard I tried not to think of him, I couldn't escape. This was unexpected, galling. Now that I had stopped looking for him, he was more present to me than ever before. The whole process had been reversed. After all these months of trying to find him, I felt as though I was the one who had been found...

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.

n   “He venido a Nueva York porque es el más desolado de los lugares, el más abyecto. La decrepitud está en todas partes, el desorden es universal. Basta con abrir los ojos para verlo. La gente rota, las cosas rotas, los pensamientos rotos. Toda la ciudad es un montón de basura.” n

En una entrevista se ofreció a la consideración del autor una interpretación de “Trilogía de Nueva York”, esta fue su respuesta:

n   “Lo que sea que digas probablemente será interesante y tal vez no se aleje demasiado de la verdad, pero no significa que sea consciente de ello cuando escribo. Todo surge de un zumbido inconsciente y realmente no sé lo que estoy haciendo. Si suena bien, lo hago, y si suena mal, lo rompo y empiezo de nuevo. Todo tiene que ver con un estado emocional en el que te encuentras, ciertos tipos de imágenes que te atrapan y se sienten poderosas y convincentes.” n

Interpretaciones aparte, ese zumbido inconsciente es lo único que realmente importa, lo tiene que oír el autor pero también lo oye el lector cuando entra en ese estado emocional, cuando consigue esa conexión con el texto, que hace tan especial el encuentro con algunos libros. Un zumbido siempre muy personal, pero que en el caso de libros tan abiertos y sugerentes como este lo hacen aún más propio e intransferible. Como dice un personaje en “La habitación cerrada”:

n   “Las historias sólo suceden a quienes son capaces de contarlas… las experiencias sólo se presentaban a quienes eran capaces de tenerlas.” n

Yo he tenido la suerte de oír el zumbido, de tener una experiencia con “Trilogía de Nueva York”, tres experiencias, de hecho, distintas y parecidas pues las tres historias vienen a decir cosas muy similares y prácticamente con los mismos elementos. Escritores metidos a detectives y detectives que parecen escritores (no es una novela de detectives, sí de escritores) que en un momento de sus vidas se dan cuenta de que no son ellos quienes las dirigen y se rebelan de la mejor forma que pueden. Personas que dejan de vivir para centrarse en la vida de otros, uno para autodisolverse en otros yoes, otro inocentemente y sin pretenderlo, el último para borrar su influjo.

n   “Escribir es una actividad solitaria. Se apodera de tu vida. En cierto sentido, un escritor no tiene vida propia. Incluso cuando está ahí, no está realmente ahí.” n

La identidad, el gran tema de Auster, más relevante para alguien como él que en cada libro tiene que desdoblarse en un sinfín de personajes ¿Quiénes somos? ¿Podemos estar seguros de lo que creemos que somos? ¿Llegamos a conocernos alguna vez o nos vamos haciendo cada día más opacos? ¿Pudimos ser otra cosa, nuestra vida podría haber discurrido por otros caminos, cómo de distintos podríamos haber sido, somos solo fruto del azar? ¿Hasta qué punto podemos rechazar las imposiciones que nos vienen de fuera e imponer nuestra voluntad? ¿Hasta qué punto nuestro propio pasado nos empuja en una dirección?

n   “En general, las vidas parecen virar bruscamente de una cosa a otra, moverse a empellones y trompicones, serpentear. Una persona va en una dirección, gira abruptamente a mitad de camino, da un rodeo, se detiene, echa a andar de nuevo. Nunca se sabe nada, e inevitablemente llegamos a un sitio completamente diferente de aquel al que queríamos llegar.” n

Pero también hay infinidad de otras cuestiones. No pocas tratan sobre el lenguaje, la relación entre las cosas y las palabras que las nombran, una mítica lengua natural, las limitaciones que el lenguaje nos impone… Sobre el escritor y la literatura, sobre el escritor y su oficio, el amor que deben sentir por las palabras, la necesidad que tienen de creer en el poder de los libros, la confusión entre narrador, personaje y autor, la posibilidad o no de retratar la realidad, de representarla, de fijarla, de ser su espejo, la oscuridad como causa y fuente del escritor, la necesidad imperiosa de escribir, la necesidad imperiosa de ser leídos, la forma en la que les gustaría ser leídos… No está la historia en las palabras, sino en la lucha, y…

n   “… si significa algo o no significa nada no es la historia quien ha de decirlo”. n

Sea como sea, la novela es intensa, desconcertante, contradictoria, autodestructiva incluso, y hermosa. Bien puedo hacer mías, para cada una de las novelas y para todas en su conjunto, las palabras de uno de sus personajes:

n   “Todas las palabras me eran conocidas, y sin embargo parecían juntadas de un modo extraño, como si su propósito final fuese anularse unas a otras. No se me ocurre ninguna otra manera de expresarlo. Cada frase borraba la frase anterior, cada párrafo hacía imposible el siguiente. Es extraño, entonces, que la sensación que sobrevive de ese cuaderno sea de gran lucidez.” n

POSTDATA

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.

Sometimes certain books are not meant to be read when you first hear about them. I heard about Auster's "City Of Glass" almost 20 years ago and somehow I never stuck with reading it after starting it. Somehow I knew I should wait to read it. My current life experience has given me the capacity to relate and engage with this subtle story cycle, as the themes and concepts involved are poignant to my own personal struggles. This subjective viewpoint doesn't make this novel great, but it has provided me with spiritual and philosophical guidance at a time in my life where it is greatly needed. Luckily, the writing is done by a master of the craft, and I highly recommend it.

I knew going in that The New York Trilogy offered three very untraditional takes on the detective story.  Given Auster's reputation, this seemed like an interesting ride to take.  It wasn't.  I have never before read a collection where every entry was so uniformly disappointing.  The three stories--all variations on a theme--start fairly well.  But, then each becomes progressively stranger and, even worse, pointless.  I truly wish I could have back the hours I wasted on this book.

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

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