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?

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.

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

“The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy



REVIEW 1: City of Glass

An interesting PoMo novella. Auster's first novel/second book/first of his 'New York Trilogy', 'City of Glass' is simultaneously a detective novel, an exploration of the author/narrative dynamic, and a treatise on language. I liked parts, loved parts, and finished the book thinking the author had written something perhaps more interesting than important.

My favorite parts were the chapters where Auster (actual author Auster) through the narrator Quinn acting as the detective Auster explored Stillman's book: 'The Garden and the Tower: Early Visions of the New World'. I also enjoyed the chapter where Auster (character Auster) and Quinn (acting as detective Auster) explored Auster's (character Auster) Don Quixote ideas. Those chapters reminded me obliquely (everything in City of Glass is oblique) of Gaddis.

In the end, however, it all seemed like Auster had read Gaddis wanted to write a PoMo novel to reflect the confusing nature of the author/narrator/translator/editor role(s) of 'Don Quixote', set it all in Manhatten, and wanted to make the prose and story fit within the general framework of a detective novel. He pulled it off and it all kinda worked. I'll say more once I finish the next two of the 'New York Trilogy'.

REVIEW 2: Ghosts

An uncanny valley of Gaddis IMHO. 'Ghosts', the second book in Auster's 'New York Trilogy' reminds me what I both like and don't like about MFA writers. Often clever and grammatically precise but they don't say so much. If they were painters their perspective would be perfect and their posters would sell, but the pigment or texture or something between the edges is just missing that undercurrent of something to give a real shit about.


REVIEW 3: The Locked Room

Not much to add that I haven't already written in my reviews of Auster's first two 'New York Trilogy' novels. In 'The Locked Room' Auster dances with the same themes, with slightly different variations. The novellas are more brothers to each other instead of cousins. In a lot of ways he reminds me of an earlier generations' Dave Eggers. There is definitely a lot of talent latent in the guy. He certainly can write, but unlike Fitzgerald who was able to tell a similar themed story in his novels and still provide weight. I just didn't feel the gravity. It was like Camus couldn't really decide whether to kill the Arab, didn't know if he cared or not, so he just walked around and killed himself but made the Arab watch.

I don't know. That may not be right. I'll probably just delete this review anyway. Only Otis will read it and I've asked him to delete all my reviews he doesn't like anyway. How do I guarantee this? Well, I could talk about Otis. I could tell you that there are things about author Auster, unrelated to his books I just don't like (who lives in NY Anyway?). He is a bad behaving author (untrue). He keeps sending me his manuscripts and wants me to say nice things about his work (untrue). I don't know. Is Auster married? Maybe, I'll go and console his wife now.

This is a true story. Last week, on the night following news of the author's death, I dreamt I met with Paul Auster.

He was sitting across from me. I told him, "I read the news today. They say you're dead". He looked at me silently with those big eyes of his and, with a wry smile, simply whispered, "So they say". Then the dream came to an end.

Of course, this dream was not a product of the music of chance: I have been an avid admirer of Auster's work since my teenage years and he is one of the writers that have influenced me the most. The first book of his I read was The New York Trilogy; I remember being deeply engrossed by it, enticed by its language, its literary references and its New York setting. After that several of his more renowned novels followed: The Moon Palace, Leviathan, The Book of Illusions--all brilliant books. His later works proved to be sometimes frustrating, but consistently engaging save for a few clear duds, culminating in 4 3 2 1, a late career high from him. There is something in Paul Auster that I've always found profoundly compelling and, except for a few books here and there, I have made sure to read everything from him ever since my first encounter with his works, back in 2006.

It only follows, then, that I should honour his passing and go back to where it all started, so I decided to read The New York Trilogy again. This time around, I loved it even more. It helps to read it with adult eyes, of course. But there is something about these three subtly intertwined tales of obsession and, ultimately, madness, that strikes a deep chord with me. In all three, a man searches for meaning and identity while on the chase of another man, trying to look at the world through the eyes of another. While the reader often feels he's on the brink of discovery, there is a constant layer of mystique that somehow keeps him at bay throughout, increasing the book's aura of apparent impenetrability. The New York Trilogy is a beguiling book that I'll be coming back to again and again."No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling".

Thank you for the words, Paul. Rest in peace.

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.

I'm surprised by some of the low and middling ratings this book and its three stories (City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room) have received. Some characterise the stories as boring, derivative, simplistic, pretentious, or pointless. But for me, this is exactly the kind of book I love to stumble upon: one that surprises, and that seeks new and unconventional paths to expression. To me the writing suggests Calvino, Kafka, Borges, perhaps even Beckett and Sartre, without being derivative. This is not to say that The New York Trilogy stands beside Beckett’s trilogy in terms of literary achievement - indeed much of the ground it treads has already been broken - but I believe that novels should be judged on their own merits, on the basis their own peculiar mix of intentions, constraints and products, without necessarily having to justify their existence by comparison to other works. I think this novel stands as an exceptional work in its own right.

The New York Trilogy consists of three stories, which are distinct from each other but interact in direct and indirect, linear and nonlinear ways. There is a lot of thematic overlap between the stories, and even a fair amount of repetition. Each story could be thought of as a parallel retelling of the same story, or perhaps an examination of the same set of questions from a related viewpoint.

At the core of the stories is a questioning of identity. What does it mean to exist as an individual, separate from others? What does it mean to be oneself and not someone else? What, if anything, can it mean to live a meaningful life? There is an examination of the limitations of literature and the written record. The novel compares accounts of real and fictitious lives, and demonstrates more similarity than difference between the two, revealing a reflective quality to what is real and not real, a determination based more on perception than objective truth. It's an interesting perspective.

The stories develop so as to always avoid the next logical narrative step. There is a subversion of purpose, of cause and effect, and loss of natural sequence (which I expect is a cause of frustration for some readers). Yet in this absence of narrative logic, these stories latch on to something else, a more intuitive and direct kind of logic. I would characterise them less as coherent narratives than as meditations. The experience is one of detached observation and interpretation, like allowing one's thoughts to arise and pass, or dropping a pebble into a pond and watching the ways the ripples distort the reflection. The prose is direct and unspectacular, which supports this kind of reading, as do the dark and ambiguous thematic implications; the lack of resolution or redemption.

I was surprised by this novel - it was not at all what I had expected - and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. At the very least it inspired me to finally pick up a copy of Don Quixote and add it to my reading list.

[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

For me, this was a problematic book, fraught with numerous problemats. For one thing I have a grievance with any book that expects the reader to slog halfway through it before any rewarding aspects begin to surface. I sympathize entirely with anyone who quits before getting to that point, since I very nearly did exactly that.

Also, I kept hearing that part I, "City of Glass", was the high point, and that afterward it went downhill. When I was halfway through
"Ghosts" (part II) I would have completely agreed with that sentiment, since I thought "City of Glass" was kind of a drag with some highlights, and "Ghosts" initially did everything in its power to make me want to set the book on fire and drop it into a chasm.

But whoever was saying that either did quit halfway through, or is just plain wrong. The Trilogy improves so dramatically in part III that it might as well be a different book, even as [SPOILER?:] it's built on the ruins of the first two parts and arguably linked to them indelibly.

However, I honestly don't think Auster needed to write it that way, and while you can argue that the third part's power is cumulative, that you've got to pound through the first two wondering whether you were being mind-fucked or just pointlessly bored in order to win the prize at the end, I absolutely do not agree. After all that I do believe Auster is a great writer, but he needs to cut out this cutesy-poo monkeyfart "meta" crap and just make a damn story.

CRITIQUE:

Consummate Metafiction

If you’re interested in reading just one example of metafiction, I can’t think of any better work than "The New York Trilogy" (except perhaps Thomas Pynchon’s n  "The Crying of Lot 49").n

Paul Auster mightn’t get the same accolades as other writers of post-modern fiction, if only because he has built a loyal readership that doesn’t depend on post-modern academics and spin merchants:

n"This recognition by a non-academic community may account for the lack of critical attention given to The New York Trilogy." ("Paul Auster: Bloom's Modern Critical Views")

Paul Auster’s fiction is innovative without making ostentatious claims to either inordinate length or gratuitous experimentalism. In fact, he seems to regard experiment as a mere transitional step on the way to perfection:

n  "I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing."n  
n  
n  "When you become aware of what your limits have been so far, then you’re able to expand them. And every artist has limits. No one can do everything. It’s impossible. What’s beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos. Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about."n

A Sense of Plenitude and Economy

By these standards, the Trilogy is both beautiful and highly structured. At 314 pages, it’s totally focussed (it’s quite the opposite of chaotic maximalism or excessivism), yet, like the detective fiction or mysteries adored by the character Daniel Quinn, what appeals so much is its "sense of plenitude and economy":

n  "In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant...The world of the book comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions."n

An Organic Part of the Written Word

The Trilogy is also a highly philosophical work. However, unlike most post-modern fiction, the philosophy is tightly wound into the structure or narrative of the novel. The philosophy is almost inseparable from the fiction itself. It’s no mere gratuitous insertion designed to contribute to either length or literary pretension. In other words, it’s both relevant and essential to the fiction:

n  "Over the years, I’ve been intensely interested in the artificiality of books as well. I mean, who’s kidding whom, after all. We know when we open up a book of fiction that we’re reading something that is imaginary, and I’ve always been interested in exploiting that fact, using it, making it part of the work itself. Not in some dry, academic, metafictional way, but simply as an organic part of the written word."n

The Triple Meaning of the Private Eye

This applies equally to the manner in which Auster co-opts elements of detective fiction to pursue his goals. In contrast to Robert Coover, he doesn’t just exploit genre conventions to house a story or myth he has invented.

Auster sees detective fiction as related to the role of both the author and the reader. In the words of Quinn:

n  "The detective is the one who looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable. The reader sees the world through the detective’s eye, experiencing the proliferation of its details as if for the first time. He has become awake to the things around him, as if they might speak to him, as if, because of the attentiveness he now brings to them, they might begin to carry a meaning other than the simple fact of their existence. Private eye. The word held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was it the letter ‘i’, standing for ‘investigator’, it was ‘I’ in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him. For five years now, Quinn had been living in the grip of this pun."n

Each of the three novellas is a mirror image of a private eye novel (not to mention the works of Cervantes, Sterne, Poe and Hawthorne), only, this being Paul Auster, there is a "deft little twist" or reversal in the image. It can’t be and isn’t a perfect analogue of the real object. In the first story, the private eye is a crime writer who pretends to be the fictive detective Paul Auster, in order to accept an assignment. In the third story, a writer very much like the real Paul Auster becomes the literary executor of another writer who has disappeared, so the writer sets out to discover his whereabouts and for a while to write his biography. In the second novella, the real detective, Blue, progressively takes on the role of an author during the process of speculating about the reports he’s required to write for his client, White.

The Perils of Invention and Make-Believe

A detective (particularly in the police force) is a vital part of a legal process that aims to successfully prosecute the perpetrator of a crime. Thus, they must be concerned with the collection of facts that can be used to prove guilt. Paradoxically, fiction is a work of the imagination that does its best to appear real. It strives for verisimilitude and credibility:

n  "Since this story is based entirely on facts, the author feels it his duty not to overstep the bounds of the verifiable, to resist at all costs the perils of invention."n

This statement is part of an almost Nabokovian game, because we readers know and understand that the whole novel is make-believe.

Auster builds his metaphysics on the foundation of facts and empiricism, before embracing the challenge of metafiction.

Speculating on the Other

The author, the reader and the private eye alike take it upon themselves to peer into the world of the other:

n  "If thinking is perhaps too strong a word at this point, a slightly more modest term - speculation, for example - would not be far from the mark. To speculate, from the Latin speculatus, meaning mirror or looking glass. For in spying out at Black across the street, it is as though Blue were looking into a mirror, and instead of merely watching another, he finds that he is also watching himself."n

Fiction is therefore a reflective process.

Blue has previously thought of his own inner life in terms of darkness. Yet his pursuit of Black (no matter how confusing) has allowed him to channel some reflected light on his own self. Nevertheless, Blue gets caught up in the persona of an other (namely Black).

Observed by Another

So we have a scene in which Black is reading a book, and Blue is watching Black reading it. Inevitably, Blue speculates:

n  "It seems perfectly plausible to him that he is also being watched, observed by another in the same way he has been observing Black."n

This other other might be another character in the fiction, or it might be us the readers (who begin and end outside the realm of fiction).

Fiction entangles and ensnares the reader in a hall of mirrors, in which everybody is both watcher and watched:

n  "They have trapped Blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life."n

The Severity of Inwardness and Solitude

Auster also approaches this dilemma from the perspective of the author, who turns their back on the real world in order to create a fictional world. A writer must learn to live with "the severity of his inwardness" and the consequences of his isolation. Perhaps the author doesn’t really exist outside the work of fiction, in that they vanish and become someone else when they’re not writing. They might also die when their writing is done:

n  "What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?"n

In the third novella, the author Fanshawe disappears, leaving behind a beautiful wife and child (Daniel), allowing his childhood friend (also a budding author) to take his place as loving husband and attentive father.

Traditionally, detective fiction has reinforced the reader’s confidence in the power of logical analysis to solve a crime or understand the world (including the world within the book). Here, Auster uses the genre to create a work of fiction that questions the ability of logic and language to convey and understand the outside world and the other, not to mention oneself.

The Trilogy is a book that constantly stimulated me while I was reading it, and already beckons me toward a re-reading.



An image from the graphic novel "City of Glass" by Paul Auster, Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli

SOUNDTRACK:

Robyn Hitchcock - "Beautiful Girl"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYfB4...

Robyn Hitchcock - "Glass Hotel"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlxcH...

Robyn Hitchcock - "Linctus House"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X4Sh...

Robyn Hitchcock - "I Saw Nick Drake"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2tHV...




HOMAGE:

Virginia Stillman and the Two Misses Fanshawe
[An Homage]

Let me tell you a little about myself, so I can then move on and start this story at the beginning.

When I first moved to Manhattan in 1985, I gravitated to Chelsea. This was a natural consequence of the fact that I had stayed in the Chelsea Hotel for two weeks in 1982 and had got familiar with the area.

I found a small apartment in a three-storey brownstone walk-up that didn’t eat up too much of my savings. I sub-let it from Mrs. Jane Fanshawe, an attractive widow in her early 50’s, who lived in the building. Her daughter-in-law, Sophie Fanshawe, lived in her own apartment on the same floor as me. Her husband, Jane’s son, was a writer who had recently disappeared and was believed to have died. The only other tenant in the building was a woman in her late twenties called Virginia Stillman.

Sophie had originally lived in my apartment, but moved to a larger one, when it became available, which left a vacancy that I agreed to fill.

One night, soon after I moved in, I was just about to go to bed, when the phone rang. The person on the other end of the line asked, “Paul Auster?” The name wasn’t familiar to me. I responded, “No, Marvin Graye.”

This happened a further three nights in a row, until finally I surrendered and said, “Yes.”

“Good, Paul. The board has approved your fee. It wants you to keep the man across the road under surveillance. You will receive a weekly payment of $350, upon submission of a weekly report. Do you have a pen?”

I did, and then wrote down the P.O. box number he gave me.

Despite the late hour, I opened the curtain in my lounge, and used my new binoculars to spot the dark-haired man in the apartment on the third floor of the house across the road. He was sitting at a desk illuminated by an old anglepoise lamp. Unlike the previous nights I had seen him, he wasn’t writing in a red notebook. He was reading a book. When he turned the page, I could just make out that it was “Don Quixote”.

My job was to document the man’s activities each week. For the first week, there was nothing much to report. I haven’t read it since school, but “Don Quixote” is a pretty long book. Besides, he didn’t seem to be reading it from cover to cover. He jumped around within the book, as if he was trying to find a particular passage or was trying to check something he had remembered.

During the week, he received no visitors, nor, as far as I could tell, any phone calls. However, about 8pm on Friday night, there was a knock on the door, and an attractive woman I recognised as Virginia Stillman walked in, holding a bottle of champagne. When she handed it to him, he went to kiss her on the cheek. She moved her head, so that their lips collided in what seemed to start a passionate kiss. She nudged him towards the couch, where he spread out full-length on his back. Meanwhile, she walked over to the window and drew the curtains. I have no other verifiable facts about what happened this evening.

The next Friday, when it was still light, I was surprised to see Sophie Fanshawe visit the man, who by now I inferred was a writer, despite how little writing he seemed to be doing, even compared with the amount entailed in the reports I had committed to.

If Virginia Stillman had appeared to be forward, Sophie was even more enthusiastic. She walked into the bedroom, turned on a bedside light and started to remove her blouse. Then she looked out the window, through which it was quite possible that she could see me and my binoculars. She didn’t seem overly alarmed, although she walked over and closed the bedroom curtains.

Sophie arrived at the writer’s apartment each night until the following Thursday, when she seemed to have an argument with him. Nobody drew the curtains this time, because Sophie left the apartment and slammed the front door, leaving the writer to resume his reading.

I took this opportunity to go downstairs in the hope that I would cross paths with Sophie and see what condition she was in. I caught her just as she was entering our building. Although we hadn’t spoken much up to that point, I said I was going out for a drink at the local bar and asked if she was interested. She smiled courteously and replied that she would like to have, but she had to settle some business or other with her mother-in-law.

The following night, Friday, I was surprised to see Mrs. Fanshawe (Jane) enter the writer’s apartment with a bottle of wine and what appeared to be a book wrapped in brown paper.

The writer had set the dining table for a meal for two. He brought out a salad bowl, placed it on the table and opened the wine. It was a white, and Mrs Fanshawe seemed to drink it more voraciously than the writer, as if it was her favourite or something. As they consumed the salad, I could see that Mrs Fanshawe had placed her hand on the writer’s leg, and he had taken no steps to object, which was understandable from my point of view. Pretty soon, they too moved to the couch and drew the curtains, so that I was unable to witness what happened next, though I could and did imagine.

By this time, I had written two reports and received two payments, which I banked in my account. The cheques were drawn by a well-known publishing company. I noticed that the writer had changed his reading matter. He had received some mail, and was now busy apparently transcribing what he had read into his red notebook. A year later, when I met him at a party hosted by Mrs Fanshawe, he gave me a copy of his latest novel. I had never met a novelist before, so I devoured the book quickly, stopping only to note the resemblance of some parts to the reports I had written. But then I suppose it was his life after all (if not his fiction as well).

I have encountered a great many reviews that start with "I don't know how to begin this review". By this claim the reviewer expresses doubt, but the expression of these doubts is the immediate solution to the reviewer's predicament, making both the doubts and the claim kind of moot. I was thinking of starting off this review the same way, given that this book leaves you wondering about everything, but thinking about that as an option makes it also dishonest, because I would know where to start with this review. Luckily I found a way around it so ta-da, here we go, smooth sailing, no over-explanation there at all!

This book is a particular kind of great. It's unique in my view, but that's not saying much because my basis for comparison is rather small, so let me elaborate.

"The New York Trilogy" is comprised of three stories. This is not surprising. It makes sense. This is also the point where the "sense" stops. That big box of "sense" you're so comfortable in, all snug and cosy and warm? This book is a bucket of cold water poured all over that adorable situation, making you jump out of the box, into a beautiful realm of wild and wondrous thoughts.

The book starts with the quirky idea of the first story's protagonist being called up by a person looking for "Paul Auster". Hmmm, where have I seen that name? Daniel Quinn, a writer, the guy who has picked up the phone, decides to pretend he is in fact Paul Auster, a private investigator. A rather cute idea which is only the beginning of the story, and of a trilogy that becomes a very intricate riddle, with questions of identity and purpose pervading it. The author, the characters, the reader are all embroiled in these stories of stake-outs, shadowing, minicious observations and carefully planned investigations and what starts out as a seemingly cute gimmick of having the author's name as part of the story turns into an adventure you yourself become part of. You as a reader become the investigator. You'll get clues, but without the guarantee you'll get all of them. You'll get answers, but you'll have to find more by yourself.


Paul Auster in bed, reading Paul Auster's novel, "The New York Trilogy", in New York City, New York. It's a book by Paul Auster, for Paul Auster, about several Paul Austers, including himself, Paul Auster, author otherwise known for rather austere writings.

This book is immensely readable: the prose employed makes this novel a page-turner, the plot is always intriguing enough to keep one on his toes (understatement of the year). But it's difficult. It's like a Rubic's cube, only without the guarantee that it's actually solvable.

To some readers, this is frustrating. To me, the beauty of this book is that I couldn't solve its mystery, despite convincing myself I have identified some parts of answers and some threads that connect everything. Paul Auster created one of literature's most beautiful riddles. It's a bit of a magic trick and any kind of reveal "given" to you would ruin it, so I'm not going to scour the Internet for solutions. What I am going to do, is try and solve it upon a re-read, but frankly I think I'll be a bit disappointed if I can.

The only reason I didn't give this five stars is because of the slight headache it gave me. This was probably a bit self-inflicted. I always want everything to fit. This book is like a puzzle box, but the pieces inside are from several different puzzles, none of them matching the picture on the box, and none of the puzzle-sets being complete. I tried stomping the pieces together, hence the headache. I'm planning to return to it and see if I can fill in the blanks somehow, this time without stomping on the pieces and without any headaches. I know I'll enjoy it all over again, but probably a bit differently, knowing what I think I know. This riddle-nature of the book is what makes it so unique: uniquely readable, uniquely challenging, uniquely re-readable, uniquely enjoyable. And very recommendable.

All that having been said, I really don't know how to finish this review.

n  Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.n

Qué gran libro. Mi primero de Auster y sin dudas no será el último. En ocasiones un poco pesado, en muchas otras se estanca, pero es innegable que esta obra es brillante. Personajes excelsamente desarrollados, vívidas descripciones y tramas desbordantes de locura y mentes extraviadas buscando un hogar.

Con una prosa soberbia, este autor me llevó de recorrido por tres historias sobre personas solitarias que están tan vacías que ya no sienten el peso de la vida. Tan huecas que sus identidades están desdibujadas por un juego de fragmentadas realidades. Y Auster, para experimentar un poco con esas almas perdidas, como un dios que todo lo puede, interrumpe la vacua cotidianidad de los protagonistas con hechos extraordinarios que terminarán por borrar cualquier residuo de identidad propia para reemplazarla con una nueva, que no podrán sostener.