Una obra muy poética, rápida, que juega de forma eficiente con los mundos de la ficción. Muy original.

A lot of people have written about City of Glass over the years. I don't know if I have anything much new or insightful to add, but I just wanted to say that I loved the New York Trilogy. Back when I was in the Navy, I remember reading about how a near-homeless man was walking around New York and how his very footsteps were leaving messages with his chosen path. This kind of writing led me to read things like Gravity's Rainbow and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and other fringe literature. This book was pivotal in my becoming a better reader.

Not only a fantastic, engrossing read, but also the most teachable comic I know. My students in a recent 9 week class took a deep dive into the book and found layers of depth even I was unaware of.

It's also an adaptation that's true to the original, but does much more than merely illustrate the text. It uses every tool in the comics toolbox.

the original City of Glass, by paul auster, was a book that i enjoyed greatly when i first read it. i thought it was really unique, a thoughtful, stylish blend of raymond chandler, kafka, and borges. i still like it, but it hasn't aged that well for me. a lot of what i thought was playfulness now seems precious, facile. the prose is polished, but by the same token oddly eroded, flat, sanded down. often it feels like auster doesn't actually inhabit the english language--he reads like he's always already a french translation (which is maybe why he's so popular over there). and anyway, i like exuberence now, headlong run-on rushes and spiky thickets of clauses.

this graphic novel, with art by paul karasik and the amazing david mazzuchelli (one of my all time comic book favorites), is another beast entirely. it takes the fine small bones of auster's narration and clothes it in images. they are, individually, simple--black and white, stylized, deliberately cartoonish. but they flow in and out of each other with the exuberance that auster's prose lacks, and it makes all the difference. in the opening sequence, for example, the protagonist looks out a window and sees a brick wall. the lines of the brick wall turn into a cityscape. the cityscape zooms out, and we see a map of the city, a giant maze. and the maze melts and fragments and abstracts, until we're looking at a fingerprint. and then we see that it's an smudge of ink on a piece of paper... amazing.