Despite the fact I remembered original novel (including ending, etc.) by Paul Auster, I enjoyed having one day with this comic and think that it is worth reading. Brilliant from the very beginning to the very last page. The ideas of climbing inside an imaginary skin of someone you don’t know, chasing the ghostly footsteps of unknown man, vanishing into the heart of megalopolis seem still catchy for me. While reading I remembered the first time I read novel ”City of Glass” and I loved the nostalgic feeling I had.
What also should be told is that Art Spiegelman who is a real prodigy in comics’ field tells the introduction story about how this book was created. He also speaks about respectability and reputation of comics (uses term “graphic novel”) and etc. Very interesting and good pages to read. As for the art by David Mazzucchelli, I can only say positive words. It hauntingly follows the narration and combined with the story is so good that you cannot skip any panel.
By the way, I still cannot explain how this brilliant novel is not adapted into feature film by any of the good directors of NY School?! I can imagine how Jim Jarmusch and Paul Auster can create the best NY movie of all time!

started and finished quickly. many thoughts about language and art and authorship. excited to come back to this and see through the graphics for a second time. i almost want to use the word brilliant

The number of comic book adaptations that equals or (even more rare) surpasses the source material is probably less than how many watchable movies there are based on video games.

This is one of them.

It's actually more than that as it's also a bit of a companion piece to the original Auster novella, that's a part of his famed New York Trilogy.

You could argue buying it for the Mazzucchelli (a master cartoonist) work alone but I'd also say if you thumb thru the images and don't like what you see, then you're prob not going to get this at all.

Interesting comics adaptation of Auster's novel is very strong on graphic design. Karasik and Mazzucchelli do some remarkable work with layout and panel design, with mixing representational and symbolic art. It's a pleasure to look at. Narratively, though, this is a highly self-conscious and post-modern take on noir. It includes the expected elements--first-person narrative, femme fatale, long-hidden secrets, etc.--but it's not really interested in telling a story so much as exploring subjectivity and indeterminacy. as a result, what's actually going on is never made clear--if, indeed, Auster even had a clear idea. Mystery is always about finally explaining the inexplicable, so it perhaps lends itself especially well to postmodern subversion of objectivity and determinability. But if you like your mysteries to have resolutions, and your plot points to have payoffs, you would do well to look elsewhere.

Цей комікс має приголомшливу літературну основу яку, втім, не адаптує, а лише ілюструє. Зводити арт-комікс до простого ілюстрування є гріхом, так і запишіть.

Цікавості у нарації тут немає, глибини, як у оригіналі Остера - теж, бо нам одразу подають історію як сюрреалістичну, а не потроху зводять той сюр до його піку. Тим, хто читав "Нью-Йоркську трилогію", зайде ще й як. Тим, хто не читав, то краще спочатку таки оригінал, аби собі ж не спойлерити та провідчувати все якнайліпше, а потім вже цей альбом маццуккелівських ілюстрацій.

Pure masturbation. Lots of build up with no closure. Lazy. Reminded me of the show "Lost", the endless questions keep you going until you realize they have given you no answers. Perfect bookshelf filler for the pseudo-intellectual.

Wow. Simply put, this book was mind-blowing.

There are so many parallels and symbols in this graphic novel that it becomes hard to keep track of them all. Even when you attempt to write down all of the novel's themes, it's difficult to see where one starts and another ends. They're all interrelated in some way; together, they form some philosophical remark about life (I haven't exactly deciphered the novel yet--I just finished it today) and kind of warp the way we perceive reality. The only thing is, this novel is pretty disturbing as well. The plot line was strange, drawings of the people, eyes, and objects were creepy and the connections between the characters were also weird. (How's that for specificity?)

Allow me to elucidate.

Daniel Quinn is a thirty-five year old man whose wife and son had passed away. He wrote poems, plays, and essays when he was young, but suddenly stopped and became a mystery novelist because "a part of him had died and he did not want it haunting him". He called himself William Wilson and named his private-eye narrator Max Work. One day, he picks up the phone, assuming it was someone else... (to be continued)


Themes:

Eye
-Max Work's business card (pg 8) has an eye on it--it's similar to the creepy eye character that appears throughout the book

Ventriloquist/dummy
-Wilson was the ventriloquist and Quinn was the dummy (8)
-Narrator is the dummy and Auster (author) is the ventriloquist
-Peter (young) looks like a dummy...the voice is coming from something within him


Circles
-The number 0 on the phone is a circle.
-Quinn picks up the phone, assuming it was someone else, on his dead parents' anniversary --> Auster (character) rings in Quinn, assuming it was his wife
-

Zooming
(in)
-the telephone (1)
-the drawing (18)
-gate, drain, speaker (19)

(out)
-


Notable Phrases:
-"There is no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not, it has the potential to be so. Everything becomes essence: the center of the book shifts, is everywhere and no circumference can be drawn until the end" (7)
-"If this is really happening, then I must keep my eyes open" (13)
-"This is called speaking. The words come out for a moment and die"(15)
-"I am new every day. I am born when I wake up in the morning, I grow old during the day, and I die at night"(18)
-

Revelations:
-The name "Stillman" sounds like "still man" as in a dead man?
-Peter was in a dark room with not even a window and ate with his hands --> Quinn ends up this way at the end




Conclusion:
The pictures add a whole new dimension to Paul Auster's City of Glass. Some similarities and connections throughout the book are a bit easier to see, while some aspects, such as the weird one-eyed visionary(?) character, still confuse me.

I was a young teenager when I first read the New York Trilogy and it blew my mind. Since then it has come to symbolize a certain period in my life. For this reason I have been cautious of this comic book version of City of Glass. When a friend send me a copy I decided to give it a shot. Boy am I sorry that I waited so long. This is absolutely brilliant. The book manages to keep the essence of the story while adding abstract imagery that compliments and heightens the written word. This is a perfect example of a graphic narrative adaptation of a novel. Highly recommended.

It's a truly wonderful adaptation an also wonderful novel which I'm not sure I "get" but I enjoyed it again in this form immensely. Mesmerizing artwork, evocative, precise, poetic, mysterious - as the novel itself.

I think this is more of a graphic novel than a comic book, but I am so not creating separate shelves for graphic novels and comics, so suck it, invisible fairy advocates for a divide between high art and low entertainment. Anyway Art Spiegelman goes on a bit of a spiel in his introduction to this about graphic novels and how the term is a silly bid for respectability for books with pictures in, so I don't think he'd object.

I read this before I read the text-only version, because a) it wouldn't take as long as reading a whole book, and so would not make me feel guilty about reading instead of working, and b) in light of what I knew of the tastes of the giver (who also gave me The New York Trilogy), I figured a comic book would be more painless to get through if it turned out to be the kind of medium-over-message thing I generally don't enjoy.

I'm not sure reading this first turned out to be the right thing to do. I ended up very impressed with both this and the text-only version of the story, but I like this version better. I think Peter Stillman comes off as a lot creepier and more pathetic in the comic than in the novella, but I can't tell if I think this because I read the comic first, so the effect was diluted by the time I got to the novella. I do think the Peter Stillman monologue is a lot more effective with the pictures added in; reading it and then comparing the scene in the graphic novel with the scene in the novella was really one of those "oh wow, possibilities of the medium!" moments.

Anyway, it is great. I coulda done with more of a resolution, but I get that this is not that kind of book that gives you resolutions. I like that it is about words. I'm not sure what to think about Paul Auster being in it. It is very pointedly clever, which may or may not be why I think of it as being very much a Dude Book -- by which I do not mean that only dudes would want to read it or that the book is solely concerned with dudes, but that it just, um, well, it's a dude book. Possibly it's the whole thing where Auster is taking off the tropes of detective noir. Also the odd bit in the graphic novel where Virginia Stillman is shown naked in (presumably) Quinn's imagination for one panel. That strikes me as a very dude thing to do in a book -- I can't imagine many female writers who would've put in something like that.

n  n

n  n

A mystery about a mystery which experiments with irony, identity and reality for an altogether unique reading experience.

Paul Auster cleverly combines contemporary detective fiction with nouveau roman and American ‘postmodernism’ –for a supremely singular story of philosophical premise and impaction. As the main protagonist descends into madness, being able to see clarity amidst the congested cityscape is imperative if one is to find themselves ‘on their feet’ when reaching the end.


It is the intertextual relationship and the clever way in which the author captures the character’s psychoscape, which ultimately makes this graphic novel stand apart –from its novel counterpart.
n   confounding confusion in illuminating illusions… n

Everything lies within!


n  n

Auster's first novel proves exponentially more risky and rewarding than almost anything he's written since. A tightly-wound postmodern detective story, its subject is language itself.

In short, a wrong number leads to writer Daniel Quinn taking on a case as a private eye. The subject of his investigation is a doddering old man who has threatened to kill his son. The old man, Peter Stillman, Sr., is a philosopher, and impresses Quinn to the point where he gets overly subsumed in the case.

Whether or not the mystery is "solved" depends on the generosity of the reader, as Auster, a constructionist despite his postmodern tendencies, allows too many plot point unanswered, and requires a little too much suspension of disbelief. Also, many of all the principal characters are writers, half are independently wealthy, and many names are too cute. These are some of Auster's bad habits that he practices in nearly all his books.

But this isn't completely an Auster book: this version is a graphic novel--an adaptation brought about thanks to Art Spiegelman, and drawn and edited by Paul Karasik, with David Mazzuchelli. The graphic artists give it so much dimension that the text-only version seems (in my memory) to be no more than a screenplay to this version's fully-realized presentation. (It was named one of the 100 best graphic novels of the 20th century by Comics Journal.)

Karasik's drawing of a key monologue between Peter Stillman (Jr.) and Quinn is breathtaking. In it, his drawings are loosed from the literal dialogue, instead following the sound of the characters voice (a central issue to the plot). Karasik takes the same approach in a key scene in a diner; later in the novel with some images of destitute people (shown at ant-size, about to get crushed by a foot). For some scenes of walking in the city, Karasik provides some gorgeous illustrations with no dialogue at all.

My favorite frame is one of Quinn following the elder Stillman through the city. Both are scribbling in their notebooks. It's a key image, and one which communicates a lot of Auster's drama with an economy of space--itself an Auster-ian trait.

There's more: at an apartment buzzer, a random resident is named "Mark Polo." Again, very Auster, but probably a detail supplied by Karasik or Mazzuchelli. At a certain point, the investigator Quinn visits the real Paul Auster. The author is drawn true-to-life, which gives this little plot trick some added richness.

Auster has always been a novelist of ideas, but the graphic novelists in this case help make this novel stronger by editing the text down and offering so much rich context with the images. Ironically, this provides an answer to Auster's query in the novel about the power and ultimate limits of language.

*

WHY I READ THIS BOOK: THE CITY OF GLASS is the first Auster book I read; I'd eventually read all his novels (except his most recent MAN IN THE DARK), his published poetry, and most of his essays. He used to be my favorite writer, but it has been a while since I felt the kind of excitement from an Auster book (probably since 2002's THE RED NOTEBOOK). This doesn't really qualify as new book from Auster (not least because it was first published in 1994), but I'll take it.

I was prompted to pick it up because (a) I read a review in the New York times of MAN IN THE DARK, then (b) in the bookstore was a copy of Knut Hamsun's HUNGER, for which Auster had written the intro. (I had read Hamsun long ago, precisely because of that glittering intro.) I already had a couple other books, so I kept browsing, until (c) at the "Auster" section of the shelves, I saw the graphic novel version of CITY OF GLASS. (d) I remembered that I had bought that book at a used book store some time back, and when I got home I put aside the three books I was currently reading to take up CITY OF GLASS.