Status
Available
Publication
London, Penguin books, c1990
Description
City of glass: A writer of a detective stories becomes embroiled in a complex and puzzling series of events, beginning with a call from a stranger in the middle of the night asking for the author. Ghosts: Introduces Blue, a private dectective hired to watch a man named Black, who, as he becomes intermeshed into a haunting and claustrophobic game of hide-and-seek is lured into the very trap he created. The locked room: The nameless hero journeys into the unkown as he attemps to reconstruct the past which he has experienced almost as a dream.
Media reviews
Lecturalia
Una llamada telefónica equivocada introduce a un escritor de novelas policiacas en una extraña historia de complejas relaciones paternofiliales y locura; un detective sigue a un hombre por un claustrofóbico universo urbano; la misteriosa desaparición de un amigo de la infancia confronta a un
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hombre con sus recuerdos. Tres novelas que proponen una relectura posmoderna del género policiaco y que supusieron la revelación de uno de los más interesantes novelistas de nuestro tiempo.
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User reviews
LibraryThing member fieldnotes
It is not because of “City of Glass” that I am continuing into the second book of this trilogy; it is because the second installments are contained between the same covers and I neglected to bring an alternate book to the office. It takes hard work to make detective stories dull and to suck the
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intrigue out of mystery; but Auster seems to know how it’s done. It seems like he had just finished grad school and was filled with the conviction that contriving a book around concepts masquerading as characters who stumble around in symbolic relationship to each other would give readers a wonderful chance to engage with his totally unoriginal thinking on millennia old matters such as chance and free will. His digressions into the age of exploration and the origins of language are entirely forgettable. I hate books that hinge on cleverness; but I pity books that aspire (how ambitious) towards cleverness and fail, ever, to arrive there. Show Less
LibraryThing member BayardUS
Looking at the reviews here on Goodreads it’s clear that Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy is a divisive book, and really that’s no surprise. Those who go into it expecting an actual trilogy of mystery stories will almost certainly be disappointed, as will those who want a book that reaches any
The atmosphere Auster creates is one of perpetual uncertainty, where many of the things we rely upon to make sense of life have eroded without much explanation. Identities are constantly shifting, with people adopting new names and patterns of behavior or else getting those names and actions forced upon them. Disguises are worn, or masks, and characters disappear suddenly or perhaps reappear down the road (or is it just someone with the same name? We’ve no way of knowing). Auster repeatedly explores the idea that names are inadequate means of identification, as names are mutable, and aren’t even unique to begin with. Furthermore identity isn’t something that exists inherently, as again and again characters find their identities subsumed by the identities of others. In addition to the shifting identities the actions of the many characters are also divorced from reality. Again and again we read as a character lets himself fall deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole, restraining himself from doing something he wants or forcing himself to do something he hates or doesn’t understand for no discernable reason. Men of means degenerate into crazy homeless people, throw away relationships, put their lives and livelihoods on the line because of forces or motivations they don’t discuss, or perhaps they themselves are ignorant of what’s pushing them. Men hire private detectives for reasons that make a kind of sense, but which nevertheless feels like it’s logic from another world. Finally each of the three stories ends, but doesn’t resolve. The characters fade away, or go on the run, or some threshold is crossed, but almost no answers or explanation is given, either to the reader or to the characters.
This lack of solution is sure to frustrate some readers, as these stories are couched in the world of dime-store mysteries, with private eyes tracking down suspects and investigating leads. Such stories typically end with some answer being reached, but such is not the case here. In a way, however, this has to be the way in which the stories end. You can’t explore the lack of identity if you let a character reaffirm their identity by solving a problem, you can’t discuss the meaninglessness and irrationality of life by revealing a logical reason for the events of the story occurring, you can’t present the idea that characters are creations subsumed and consumed by their stories if you give those characters a happily-ever-after ending, or even any type of ending. The final story explicitly references the other two stories, and it makes a claim that the stories are all the same story told in different ways, for the purpose of illustrating how characters can’t let go of the story they’re assigned to tell, but this eleventh-hour explanation doesn’t ring true. There is no resolution or message here, except for perhaps an extratextual one that you invent for yourself, and the ideas of identity and the nature of fiction presented aren’t likely things you’ve never thought of before, but that wasn’t enough to sink the book for me.
Does the above description sound appealing to you? If so then definitely pick this book up, as the other aspects of the book won’t give you reason to regret your decision. The stories are well written, and the feeling of New York City pseudo-noir is pulled off impressively well. Characters often feel very similar, but that’s part of the theme of the book after all. Overall because I was in the mood for something like this I enjoyed Auster’s New York Trilogy, despite the lack of resolution or fresh ideas, because the atmosphere was so masterfully done. If you’re on the fence give it a try, and if you’re not feeling it by the end of sixty or seventy pages (or certainly by the end of the first story) don’t feel bad about dropping it, since if you stuck with it you’d be exploring the same labyrinth passages for the rest of the book- although you might be walking on the maze’s ceiling the next time around instead of the floor.
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form of resolution or delivers any concrete message. Instead the New York Trilogy will be loved by those willing to let the experience wash over them, and by those who enjoy noticing connections and themes repeated between the three works but who don’t mind the fact that these connections don’t really amount to anything in the end. It’s a book where the atmosphere is the main draw, and as the same atmosphere pervades all three stories you’re likely to either quite like this work or else very much despise it.The atmosphere Auster creates is one of perpetual uncertainty, where many of the things we rely upon to make sense of life have eroded without much explanation. Identities are constantly shifting, with people adopting new names and patterns of behavior or else getting those names and actions forced upon them. Disguises are worn, or masks, and characters disappear suddenly or perhaps reappear down the road (or is it just someone with the same name? We’ve no way of knowing). Auster repeatedly explores the idea that names are inadequate means of identification, as names are mutable, and aren’t even unique to begin with. Furthermore identity isn’t something that exists inherently, as again and again characters find their identities subsumed by the identities of others. In addition to the shifting identities the actions of the many characters are also divorced from reality. Again and again we read as a character lets himself fall deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole, restraining himself from doing something he wants or forcing himself to do something he hates or doesn’t understand for no discernable reason. Men of means degenerate into crazy homeless people, throw away relationships, put their lives and livelihoods on the line because of forces or motivations they don’t discuss, or perhaps they themselves are ignorant of what’s pushing them. Men hire private detectives for reasons that make a kind of sense, but which nevertheless feels like it’s logic from another world. Finally each of the three stories ends, but doesn’t resolve. The characters fade away, or go on the run, or some threshold is crossed, but almost no answers or explanation is given, either to the reader or to the characters.
This lack of solution is sure to frustrate some readers, as these stories are couched in the world of dime-store mysteries, with private eyes tracking down suspects and investigating leads. Such stories typically end with some answer being reached, but such is not the case here. In a way, however, this has to be the way in which the stories end. You can’t explore the lack of identity if you let a character reaffirm their identity by solving a problem, you can’t discuss the meaninglessness and irrationality of life by revealing a logical reason for the events of the story occurring, you can’t present the idea that characters are creations subsumed and consumed by their stories if you give those characters a happily-ever-after ending, or even any type of ending. The final story explicitly references the other two stories, and it makes a claim that the stories are all the same story told in different ways, for the purpose of illustrating how characters can’t let go of the story they’re assigned to tell, but this eleventh-hour explanation doesn’t ring true. There is no resolution or message here, except for perhaps an extratextual one that you invent for yourself, and the ideas of identity and the nature of fiction presented aren’t likely things you’ve never thought of before, but that wasn’t enough to sink the book for me.
Does the above description sound appealing to you? If so then definitely pick this book up, as the other aspects of the book won’t give you reason to regret your decision. The stories are well written, and the feeling of New York City pseudo-noir is pulled off impressively well. Characters often feel very similar, but that’s part of the theme of the book after all. Overall because I was in the mood for something like this I enjoyed Auster’s New York Trilogy, despite the lack of resolution or fresh ideas, because the atmosphere was so masterfully done. If you’re on the fence give it a try, and if you’re not feeling it by the end of sixty or seventy pages (or certainly by the end of the first story) don’t feel bad about dropping it, since if you stuck with it you’d be exploring the same labyrinth passages for the rest of the book- although you might be walking on the maze’s ceiling the next time around instead of the floor.
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LibraryThing member KTPrymus
The three stories that make up Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy feel like alternate retellings of the same tale, despite their having different characters and plotlines. This cohesiveness of intention – an exploration of the ways we, and in particular New Yorkers, are physically and emotionally
Each of the stories takes place in present day (that is 1980s) New York City, though one of them, Ghosts, is primarily a flashback to the 1940s. Another similarity is that each protagonist is placed in the role of private investigator, either by vocation or by chance, and in so doing comes to the realization that though you may investigate a person’s habits and behavior you can get no closer to understanding who they really are. In the first and probably most famous tale, City of Glass, an author named Quinn is mistaken for a private detective named, interestingly, Paul Auster. Out of a sense of boredom with his current situation he decides to pretend to be this detective and involve himself in a case to prevent a confrontation between his client and the client’s father. Utterly incapable of understanding his mark, Quinn settles for surveillance of his client’s home, a lengthy endeavor that forces him to reevaluate whether he can even know himself, much less another. Despite a lengthy conversation with the real Paul Auster, the author who has written himself into his own work, about the concept of an author writing himself into his own work, this thread which makes for the most interesting part of the story is unfortunately and somewhat frustratingly dropped early on.
Ghosts is probably the strongest piece albeit the shortest as well as the most straightforward piece of detective fiction. Occurring in the 1940s with a cast of characters named after colors, the protagonist, Blue, is hired by a man named White to follow and record the movements of a third man, Black. He is given no details as to why White wishes him to follow Black but does not really care and takes the charge. He watches Black for more than a year, dutifully recording his mundane actions and in the process doing a great deal of self-reflection. Ultimately he grows weary of having a task without meaning and endeavors to find some answers. Blue’s climactic confrontation with Black is a powerful reflection on human psychology and our need for others.
It seems that Auster desired for Fanshawe, the antagonist of The Locked Room, to be remembered as one of the most enigmatic characters in American literature. This tactic feels too contrived, however, and the resulting tale of Fanshawe’s disappearance followed by his childhood friend, our narrator, becoming the executor of his apparently brilliant writings and eventual husband to Fanshawe’s wife fails to keep the reader overly interested in discovering who Fanshawe is. If Auster’s goal throughout the trilogy is to show us how difficult it is to really know anyone, the inadvertent moral he tells here is that sometimes we really just don’t care to know another. While undoubtedly the weakest part of the trilogy, The Locked Room manages to put some closure on the recurring objects and people introduced in the earlier stories. The final two pages are quite fascinating and make the story worth reading of for no other reason than their obvious influence on the ending of House of Leaves.
What The New York Trilogy accomplishes brilliantly is its constant recycling of objects and people (the red notebook, Quinn) that are not directly identical to their counterparts in the other stories but manage to keep the reader aware of significant themes. While the similarities of the stories may feel a bit tedious I would consider The New York Trilogy and all or nothing work that should be read together or not at all, as each story serves to deepen the meaning of the others.
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separated from each other – is its strongest point, though it may be done a little too well. By making distinct stories that echo and mirror each other and compiling them into one book the reader may feel like they are getting beat over the head with Auster’s particular philosophy. Still it is an enjoyable read and offers a cornucopia of material for thought and discussion.Each of the stories takes place in present day (that is 1980s) New York City, though one of them, Ghosts, is primarily a flashback to the 1940s. Another similarity is that each protagonist is placed in the role of private investigator, either by vocation or by chance, and in so doing comes to the realization that though you may investigate a person’s habits and behavior you can get no closer to understanding who they really are. In the first and probably most famous tale, City of Glass, an author named Quinn is mistaken for a private detective named, interestingly, Paul Auster. Out of a sense of boredom with his current situation he decides to pretend to be this detective and involve himself in a case to prevent a confrontation between his client and the client’s father. Utterly incapable of understanding his mark, Quinn settles for surveillance of his client’s home, a lengthy endeavor that forces him to reevaluate whether he can even know himself, much less another. Despite a lengthy conversation with the real Paul Auster, the author who has written himself into his own work, about the concept of an author writing himself into his own work, this thread which makes for the most interesting part of the story is unfortunately and somewhat frustratingly dropped early on.
Ghosts is probably the strongest piece albeit the shortest as well as the most straightforward piece of detective fiction. Occurring in the 1940s with a cast of characters named after colors, the protagonist, Blue, is hired by a man named White to follow and record the movements of a third man, Black. He is given no details as to why White wishes him to follow Black but does not really care and takes the charge. He watches Black for more than a year, dutifully recording his mundane actions and in the process doing a great deal of self-reflection. Ultimately he grows weary of having a task without meaning and endeavors to find some answers. Blue’s climactic confrontation with Black is a powerful reflection on human psychology and our need for others.
It seems that Auster desired for Fanshawe, the antagonist of The Locked Room, to be remembered as one of the most enigmatic characters in American literature. This tactic feels too contrived, however, and the resulting tale of Fanshawe’s disappearance followed by his childhood friend, our narrator, becoming the executor of his apparently brilliant writings and eventual husband to Fanshawe’s wife fails to keep the reader overly interested in discovering who Fanshawe is. If Auster’s goal throughout the trilogy is to show us how difficult it is to really know anyone, the inadvertent moral he tells here is that sometimes we really just don’t care to know another. While undoubtedly the weakest part of the trilogy, The Locked Room manages to put some closure on the recurring objects and people introduced in the earlier stories. The final two pages are quite fascinating and make the story worth reading of for no other reason than their obvious influence on the ending of House of Leaves.
What The New York Trilogy accomplishes brilliantly is its constant recycling of objects and people (the red notebook, Quinn) that are not directly identical to their counterparts in the other stories but manage to keep the reader aware of significant themes. While the similarities of the stories may feel a bit tedious I would consider The New York Trilogy and all or nothing work that should be read together or not at all, as each story serves to deepen the meaning of the others.
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LibraryThing member wendyrey
Three early novellas, all set in New York and vaguely similar , metaphorical, supernatural and self referental .
After having enjoyed some of Auster's later work I was looking forward to this but was sadly disappointed, particularily by the lack of any sort of end to any of the stories and the
Ok but not as good as I had hoped (isn't that always the way)
After having enjoyed some of Auster's later work I was looking forward to this but was sadly disappointed, particularily by the lack of any sort of end to any of the stories and the
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inward looking nature of the writing was a bit trying.Ok but not as good as I had hoped (isn't that always the way)
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LibraryThing member emily_morine
As I could feel myself coming down with my partner's cold on Wednesday afternoon, I rushed into the bookstore to pick up a birthday present for my dad, and there was the beautiful Penguin Classics edition of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, marked down a tempting thirty percent. It was the right
All three of these novellas are detective novels concerned with books, writing, and writers: writers mistaken for detectives, detectives staking out writers, writers of detective novels impersonating detectives, writers who disappear under mysterious circumstances that lead other writers into investigating their disappearances. Auster reminds me irresistibly of Roberto Bolaño in the way that discussions of literature, and of the acts of reading and writing, are seamlessly incorporated into his text in ways that are delicious fun to read. In most cases, too, literary conversations between characters come to be mirrored in the structure of the book itself: never does Auster forget that what his reader is holding in her hands is an artifact, an object capable of explaining and referring to its own existence. The first novella, City of Glass, for example, begins with a triple-screen: the novelist Daniel Quinn, writing detective fiction under the nom de plume William Wilson. Wilson's private-eye investigator is named Max Work, and Quinn is starting to feel that the detective Work is taking up more and more of his consciousness. Then Quinn starts getting mysterious calls in the middle of the night, and the caller is looking for a private detective named...Paul Auster. I think, at this point, you are either tickled by the novelty or disgusted by the cleverness.
It's always a daring move for an author to insert himself into his own fiction. Sometimes it's a total turnoff for me, but I thought Auster handled it well: he had already built up such a self-reflexive series of identities for Quinn/Wilson/Work that doubling all the way back around and having Quinn be mistaken for his own author is, I think, delightful. He's constructed a situation where we have an author writing a detective novel about an author of detective novels, who is mistaken for a detective who is, in actuality, not a detective but an author. For Quinn later tracks Auster down, and he's not a private eye; he can't explain why he should have been taken for one. He does sit Quinn down, though, offer him an omelette, and regale him with a complex, circular theory about the novel Don Quixote. The book we take for a novel by Cervantes is, argues Auster-the-character, a legitimate artifact: Cervantes really was approached (as the text claims) by someone in a bazaar, ostensibly an Arab who was the real author of the work. In reality, Auster-the-character goes on, this person was Don Quixote himself in disguise: he had feigned madness and concocted an elaborate con on Sancho, the barber, and Samson Carrasco, basically orchestrating the events in the novel and manipulating his three friends into creating the manuscript in order to ensure his reputation would live on in perpetuity. Quinn and Auster-the-character begin this conversation by narrowing in on Cervantes's preoccupation with verifiability:
"It's quite simple. Cervantes, if you remember, goes to great lengths to convince the reader that he is not the author. The book, he says, was written in Arabic by Cid Hamete Benengeli. Cervantes describes how he discovered the manuscript by chance one day in the market at Toledo. He hires someone to translate it for him into Spanish, and thereafter he presents himself as no more than the editor of the translation. In fact, he cannot even vouch for the accuracy of the translation itself."
"And yet he goes on to say," Quinn added, "that Cid Hamete Benengeli's is the only true version of Don Quixote's story. All the other versions are frauds, written by imposters. He makes a great point of insisting that everything in the book really happened in the world."
"Exactly. Because the book after all is an attack on the dangers of the make-believe. He couldn't very well offer a work of the imagination to do that, could he? He had to claim that it was real."
"Still, I've always suspected that Cervantes devoured those old romances. You can't hate something so violently unless a part of you also loves it. In some sense, Don Quixote was just a stand-in for himself."
"I agree with you. What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?"
By the end of the conversation, then, Auster-the-character is arguing that Cervantes is offered a faked manuscript by a person who is, in some way, a stand-in for himself, and going on to insist on this story in order to prove that the faked manuscript is, in fact, real. Which turns out to be unnecessary, since the events in the book actually did take place, just not for the reasons that the writers (and Cervantes) believed. Which in turn means nothing, because even though the events took place, they were intentionally manipulated, so that Cervantes inherits a faked manuscript (faked by Sancho et al) which is a genuine chronicle of faked events (faked by Don Quixote), from a man who may or may not be just another version of himself. Not only that, but by the end of City of Glass we find out that the text we have been reading is similarly an artifact, similarly at many removes, and similarly preoccupied with obsessive adherence to "verifiable" facts that, nevertheless, were sketchy to begin with.
This kind of game delights me, although I can understand if it doesn't delight you.
I found Ghosts to be the weakest of the three novellas (although still quite enjoyable), with The Locked Room reminding me, unexpectedly, less of Bolaño and more of Kazuo Ishiguro's typical detail-obsessed narrator, haunted by demons from his past. All three books really should be read together in one unit, as The Locked Room ends up shedding new light on the events of the first two books, twisting their context and making the reader double back on herself to figure out what exactly happened. True to postmodern form, it all almost makes sense in the end...but not quite. For someone like me, who dislikes any mystery whose ends are tied up any tighter than those in, say, Chinatown, this was just right.
I have to say, though, that as much as Auster's sparkling literary cleverness and smoky retro atmosphere reminded me of Bolaño and Ishiguro, I didn't find in this trilogy the same greatness of soul possessed by the other two writers. Despite the darkness in both their works, Bolaño and Ishiguro both address the human capacity to continue on and create meaning for themselves in the face of horror. Auster's only comment on the human experience seems to be that we're all a hair's breadth from descending into madness and non-meaning - true as far as it goes, which is not that far. This didn't bother me - I think a certain amount of nihilism is to be expected even from mainstream noir, and that much more from a postmodern deconstruction of the genre - but it means I didn't think Auster's style quite lived up to his content in this particular instance. That's okay, though - not every book needs to present an entire philosophy of being. As I said, the nihilism fits the genre, and there were more than enough compensations to make this a highly enjoyable read.
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time for this book, my friends, and the universe offered it to me as compensation for spending the next two days groaning and snuffling on the couch. The three novellas - City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room - are my definition of perfect home-sick-from-work reading: literary, metafictional takes on the private eye genre, they evoke that familiar noir-ish atmosphere while at the same time weaving in enough off-kilter ambiguity, rejection of plot resolution, and what my friend Alan would call "thinky-ness," to keep things interesting for an inveterate thinky-pants like yours truly. I won't go so far as to say it made me happy to have come down with a nasty head-cold, but it definitely helped me to bear up with good grace.All three of these novellas are detective novels concerned with books, writing, and writers: writers mistaken for detectives, detectives staking out writers, writers of detective novels impersonating detectives, writers who disappear under mysterious circumstances that lead other writers into investigating their disappearances. Auster reminds me irresistibly of Roberto Bolaño in the way that discussions of literature, and of the acts of reading and writing, are seamlessly incorporated into his text in ways that are delicious fun to read. In most cases, too, literary conversations between characters come to be mirrored in the structure of the book itself: never does Auster forget that what his reader is holding in her hands is an artifact, an object capable of explaining and referring to its own existence. The first novella, City of Glass, for example, begins with a triple-screen: the novelist Daniel Quinn, writing detective fiction under the nom de plume William Wilson. Wilson's private-eye investigator is named Max Work, and Quinn is starting to feel that the detective Work is taking up more and more of his consciousness. Then Quinn starts getting mysterious calls in the middle of the night, and the caller is looking for a private detective named...Paul Auster. I think, at this point, you are either tickled by the novelty or disgusted by the cleverness.
It's always a daring move for an author to insert himself into his own fiction. Sometimes it's a total turnoff for me, but I thought Auster handled it well: he had already built up such a self-reflexive series of identities for Quinn/Wilson/Work that doubling all the way back around and having Quinn be mistaken for his own author is, I think, delightful. He's constructed a situation where we have an author writing a detective novel about an author of detective novels, who is mistaken for a detective who is, in actuality, not a detective but an author. For Quinn later tracks Auster down, and he's not a private eye; he can't explain why he should have been taken for one. He does sit Quinn down, though, offer him an omelette, and regale him with a complex, circular theory about the novel Don Quixote. The book we take for a novel by Cervantes is, argues Auster-the-character, a legitimate artifact: Cervantes really was approached (as the text claims) by someone in a bazaar, ostensibly an Arab who was the real author of the work. In reality, Auster-the-character goes on, this person was Don Quixote himself in disguise: he had feigned madness and concocted an elaborate con on Sancho, the barber, and Samson Carrasco, basically orchestrating the events in the novel and manipulating his three friends into creating the manuscript in order to ensure his reputation would live on in perpetuity. Quinn and Auster-the-character begin this conversation by narrowing in on Cervantes's preoccupation with verifiability:
"It's quite simple. Cervantes, if you remember, goes to great lengths to convince the reader that he is not the author. The book, he says, was written in Arabic by Cid Hamete Benengeli. Cervantes describes how he discovered the manuscript by chance one day in the market at Toledo. He hires someone to translate it for him into Spanish, and thereafter he presents himself as no more than the editor of the translation. In fact, he cannot even vouch for the accuracy of the translation itself."
"And yet he goes on to say," Quinn added, "that Cid Hamete Benengeli's is the only true version of Don Quixote's story. All the other versions are frauds, written by imposters. He makes a great point of insisting that everything in the book really happened in the world."
"Exactly. Because the book after all is an attack on the dangers of the make-believe. He couldn't very well offer a work of the imagination to do that, could he? He had to claim that it was real."
"Still, I've always suspected that Cervantes devoured those old romances. You can't hate something so violently unless a part of you also loves it. In some sense, Don Quixote was just a stand-in for himself."
"I agree with you. What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?"
By the end of the conversation, then, Auster-the-character is arguing that Cervantes is offered a faked manuscript by a person who is, in some way, a stand-in for himself, and going on to insist on this story in order to prove that the faked manuscript is, in fact, real. Which turns out to be unnecessary, since the events in the book actually did take place, just not for the reasons that the writers (and Cervantes) believed. Which in turn means nothing, because even though the events took place, they were intentionally manipulated, so that Cervantes inherits a faked manuscript (faked by Sancho et al) which is a genuine chronicle of faked events (faked by Don Quixote), from a man who may or may not be just another version of himself. Not only that, but by the end of City of Glass we find out that the text we have been reading is similarly an artifact, similarly at many removes, and similarly preoccupied with obsessive adherence to "verifiable" facts that, nevertheless, were sketchy to begin with.
This kind of game delights me, although I can understand if it doesn't delight you.
I found Ghosts to be the weakest of the three novellas (although still quite enjoyable), with The Locked Room reminding me, unexpectedly, less of Bolaño and more of Kazuo Ishiguro's typical detail-obsessed narrator, haunted by demons from his past. All three books really should be read together in one unit, as The Locked Room ends up shedding new light on the events of the first two books, twisting their context and making the reader double back on herself to figure out what exactly happened. True to postmodern form, it all almost makes sense in the end...but not quite. For someone like me, who dislikes any mystery whose ends are tied up any tighter than those in, say, Chinatown, this was just right.
I have to say, though, that as much as Auster's sparkling literary cleverness and smoky retro atmosphere reminded me of Bolaño and Ishiguro, I didn't find in this trilogy the same greatness of soul possessed by the other two writers. Despite the darkness in both their works, Bolaño and Ishiguro both address the human capacity to continue on and create meaning for themselves in the face of horror. Auster's only comment on the human experience seems to be that we're all a hair's breadth from descending into madness and non-meaning - true as far as it goes, which is not that far. This didn't bother me - I think a certain amount of nihilism is to be expected even from mainstream noir, and that much more from a postmodern deconstruction of the genre - but it means I didn't think Auster's style quite lived up to his content in this particular instance. That's okay, though - not every book needs to present an entire philosophy of being. As I said, the nihilism fits the genre, and there were more than enough compensations to make this a highly enjoyable read.
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LibraryThing member PilgrimJess
"Writing is a solitary business, it takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he's there, he's not really there."
As the title suggests this book is a collection of three novellas that initially appear to be classic detective stories where identities merge and
In the first City of Glass, a lonely author of detective novels decides to masquerade as a private eye for a strange couple which results in him tailing a crazy man, obsessed with naming things.
In the second Ghosts, the shortest, the plot involves a private eye tailing a recluse living in an apartment across the road from his own for a shady client over a long period of time. Unlike the other two novellas this one offers some sort of a closure at the end however, I struggled to see how this see tied in with other two. Equally I found it hard to imagine that any detective would stay on the tail of a recluse for years, forsaking the woman he intended to marry and making his own life miserable in process, no matter how much he was being paid.
The final novella The Locked room, takes over from where City of Glass left off and like the former deals with a writer whose goal is to hide his own identity behind someone else, on this occasion another writer, even going as far as marrying the other's wife and adopting his child. Whilst the meeting of the two writers at the end gives the tale a certain amount of sense to what has gone before it certainly doesn't answer all the questions that the reader might have. Or at least it didn't for me.
No doubt each reader will see something different in this book but as I said at the beginning of this review for me these novellas are about identity or at least one's own sense of it but as each feature writers they also look at the art of writing itself, in particular how a writer must look inward at themselves for inspiration and ideas, similarly how many use a pseudonym to hide own identities behind that of their creations' identity as the quote right at the top suggests.
In summary, whilst I appreciate that this is an experimental piece of writing I cannot help but think that Auster wrote this more for his own benefit rather than the reader's. Personally I found this just too hard going and a little weird to really enjoy, I just had to concentrate too hard throughout. I can see why this is on the 1001 list and I can imagine that it will be a Marmite novel but personally it is not one that I am likely to revisit or recommend.
As the title suggests this book is a collection of three novellas that initially appear to be classic detective stories where identities merge and
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asks the reader to read between the lines. However, the book is more complicated than that. Each novella deals with a person's identity or more accurately lack of it and loneliness. Each novella deals with a protagonist searching for a closure but often only at the cost of their sanity.In the first City of Glass, a lonely author of detective novels decides to masquerade as a private eye for a strange couple which results in him tailing a crazy man, obsessed with naming things.
In the second Ghosts, the shortest, the plot involves a private eye tailing a recluse living in an apartment across the road from his own for a shady client over a long period of time. Unlike the other two novellas this one offers some sort of a closure at the end however, I struggled to see how this see tied in with other two. Equally I found it hard to imagine that any detective would stay on the tail of a recluse for years, forsaking the woman he intended to marry and making his own life miserable in process, no matter how much he was being paid.
The final novella The Locked room, takes over from where City of Glass left off and like the former deals with a writer whose goal is to hide his own identity behind someone else, on this occasion another writer, even going as far as marrying the other's wife and adopting his child. Whilst the meeting of the two writers at the end gives the tale a certain amount of sense to what has gone before it certainly doesn't answer all the questions that the reader might have. Or at least it didn't for me.
No doubt each reader will see something different in this book but as I said at the beginning of this review for me these novellas are about identity or at least one's own sense of it but as each feature writers they also look at the art of writing itself, in particular how a writer must look inward at themselves for inspiration and ideas, similarly how many use a pseudonym to hide own identities behind that of their creations' identity as the quote right at the top suggests.
In summary, whilst I appreciate that this is an experimental piece of writing I cannot help but think that Auster wrote this more for his own benefit rather than the reader's. Personally I found this just too hard going and a little weird to really enjoy, I just had to concentrate too hard throughout. I can see why this is on the 1001 list and I can imagine that it will be a Marmite novel but personally it is not one that I am likely to revisit or recommend.
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LibraryThing member Smiler69
These three stories set in New York City seem at first unrelated but certain common themes soon emerge; the writer’s relationship with his/her work and characters, the fine line between illusion and reality, between sanity and madness and obsession, questions of identity are a few that come to
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mind. Having read several other Auster books, I immediately felt at home with his familiar voice which isn’t to say that I was able to make head or tails of these stories. One clearly senses Auster is working out his personal issues about writing here but he does so imaginatively and with a sense of mystery that kept me hooked for the ride, and though this book made me think, I felt slightly bewildered, with no idea where I’d ended up by the time it was over. Show Less
LibraryThing member mrtall
Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy is widely hailed as a work of writerly profundity. I finally had a go at it, and may I confess to being just a mite underwhelmed? Yes, Auster is ever so smart, but his frequent need to remind us lowly readers of this unassailable fact is not very attractive. Also,
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although NYT might have seemed terribly hip when it was published in the 1980s, it struck me as already quite dated; Auster’s rapt fascination with The Very Difficult and Demanding Act of Writing and The Mysteries of Being A Writer now seem so drably characteristic of that era’s nascent po-mo style. Show Less
LibraryThing member nohablo
Literary send-up of pure film noir, all dense, smoky atmosphere, femme fatales, and dream logic. With doors opening to doors, and a crazy maze of interwinding plot threads, the NEW YORK TRILOGY can be frustrating: there's no satisfying thud of a finished plot as the trilogy closes, and there's the
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niggling thought that the entire tries to overreach its cleverness, but that's the collateral damage of film noir. It's Chinatown, Jake! Show Less
LibraryThing member Stevil2001
After a number of quick and easy reads, it was time for something more substantial-- and substantial is what this book has in spades. In a class I took last fall, we read the comic book adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchellil, and having thoroughly enjoyed
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it, I picked up a (extraordinarily handsome) omnibus edition of the original novel and the other two installments in the series. There's something about Auster's prose that keeps you reading, even though you have no idea what's happening at times. Well, that's not fair-- I always knew what was happening, but rarely why, as some pretty dang bizarre things happened. But I suspect that's not the point. What links these three pseudo-detective stories together far more than their setting is their ideas-- about identity and about language, primarily, but a lot else, too. (As a side note, I was astounded at how accurate an adaptation the comic book was, despite its length. Very rarely did I come across anything in the novel that I didn't remember from the comic, and if anything, the excellent art in the comic only added to the effect of the story.) (originally written December 2007) Show Less
LibraryThing member stveggy
Fantstic collection of three short stories that knock together
LibraryThing member danimak
This is a great read that gets better as you go along. The New York Trilogy is composed of three at first seemingly unrelated short novels, but which all end up parralleling each other and reinforcing each other's themes. They are all detective mysteries: City of Glass is about an author who
Part III is by far the most interesting in the book and is also what ties all three novels together, giving coherence to the series' themes about identity, the power and limits of language and the nature of story-telling itself. Although all three stories are independent and can be read on their own, the New York Trilogy must be read together as a whole in order to fully appreciate the work.
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through a misunderstanding is hired to track an abusive father after his release from prison; Ghosts follows the story of Blue, hired to track the comings and goings of a man who has not much going on in his life; and The Locked Room is about the mysterious disappearance of man's childhood friend. All of these novels are unconventional in that the lines between the detective and his subject are often blurred. The detective's personality usually undergoes radical changes, having lost himself in the hunt. Sometimes he becomes like his subject or totally invents the subject. With the breakdown of the character usually comes the breakdown of the standard narrative technique -- the NY Trilogy at these moments becomes a work of metafiction. Auster mentions the series itself in part III and is himself a character in part I. Although self-referentiality compromises my interest oftentimes in the storyline, the NY Trilogy is filled with thematic jewels that make it a highly satisfying read. Auster is great at incorporating literary theory and philosophical thoughts into his work, and these, above the story itself, are what make the book.Part III is by far the most interesting in the book and is also what ties all three novels together, giving coherence to the series' themes about identity, the power and limits of language and the nature of story-telling itself. Although all three stories are independent and can be read on their own, the New York Trilogy must be read together as a whole in order to fully appreciate the work.
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LibraryThing member rayski
Cleverly well written stories, but in the end all are very dark and somewhat disturbing. The lead in each story gets sucked into doing detective work that he should not have and ends up losing a great portion of his life and soul. I didn't even bother with the 3rd story.
LibraryThing member arouse77
otherwise a fan of Auster, i was disappointed with this one. but i must shake my head dubiously at any author who writes himself into any story. big no no in my estimation.
a trio of rather strange but persistently uninteresting reflections on the process of writing and detective work. more than one
did not love this one. can't endorse it.
a trio of rather strange but persistently uninteresting reflections on the process of writing and detective work. more than one
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person impersonates a hobo.did not love this one. can't endorse it.
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LibraryThing member Djupstrom
Three seemingly separate novellas that are completely intertwined! Brilliant!
LibraryThing member ablueidol
The New York Trilogy: by Paul Auster
This is a series of subtle interlocking novellas set in New York published over 85 and 86: City of Glass, "Ghosts" and "Locked Room with the first set in the period, the 2nd in the 40’s and the last one in the 70’s. They use mystery conventions of the gumshoe
To give you a flavour of the book, in the City of Glass the main Character is Daniel Quinn a writer who has abandoned writing except for mystery writing owing to the death of his wife and child. He is successful enough to only need to write one novel a year which he has just done and then he drifts. He is clearly depressed and only feels alive when he is the private eye of his novels. One night he receives a midnight phone call asking for a detective called Paul Auster( yes the real author is also a later character in the story) and after several rejections he decides to act as if were his private eye character. His clients are a child-man who is a survivor of a dreadful abuse by his father (he was deprived of language as part of an experiment in discovering the natural language of man before the fall of the Tower of Babel) and his wife a nurse who had married him so that he could leave the hospital. The father now elderly is being released from Mental hospital and they fear that the son will be killed and want protection.
The story then takes many twists and turns and ends with the author as character being criticised by a final narrator who may be one of the characters from the other stories for what happens to Daniel Quinn during the course of the story.
In the Locked Room all the characters are named after colours and it’s a classical stake-out story but is it? Or is it a reflection on the lives of characters once that have been created and written about?
The final story is of two friends who have drifted apart, one wanted to be a writer and is now a critic unable to create works of his own imagination. He discovers that his friend has disappeared leaving a wife and baby and a locked room of manuscripts. These turn out to be masterpieces of novels, plays, and poems far beyond his capability of writing. In preparing those for publishing he re-enters and re-evaluates his life long friendship and what it meant but at a cost as he faces a secret that tests him and his relationships to destruction.
Paul Auster’s draws on his own colourful work life in his struggle to become a writer so the stories have a grain of gritty realism. But they are interlinked by an interest in the impact of coincidences and lives lived in minimalist even ascetic ways against a background of a loss, failure and absent fathers and reflections on writing and storytelling. If you want a painless way into postmodernist metafiction then this is the book for you. Highly recommended.
This is a series of subtle interlocking novellas set in New York published over 85 and 86: City of Glass, "Ghosts" and "Locked Room with the first set in the period, the 2nd in the 40’s and the last one in the 70’s. They use mystery conventions of the gumshoe
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detective (think Humphrey Bogart) but in a subversive way as an existentialist reflection on writing, and story creation and communication but at the pace of a thriller; it more Kafka then Chandler with haunting imagery and surreal coincidences. But it also has deep emotional and psychological depths. To give you a flavour of the book, in the City of Glass the main Character is Daniel Quinn a writer who has abandoned writing except for mystery writing owing to the death of his wife and child. He is successful enough to only need to write one novel a year which he has just done and then he drifts. He is clearly depressed and only feels alive when he is the private eye of his novels. One night he receives a midnight phone call asking for a detective called Paul Auster( yes the real author is also a later character in the story) and after several rejections he decides to act as if were his private eye character. His clients are a child-man who is a survivor of a dreadful abuse by his father (he was deprived of language as part of an experiment in discovering the natural language of man before the fall of the Tower of Babel) and his wife a nurse who had married him so that he could leave the hospital. The father now elderly is being released from Mental hospital and they fear that the son will be killed and want protection.
The story then takes many twists and turns and ends with the author as character being criticised by a final narrator who may be one of the characters from the other stories for what happens to Daniel Quinn during the course of the story.
In the Locked Room all the characters are named after colours and it’s a classical stake-out story but is it? Or is it a reflection on the lives of characters once that have been created and written about?
The final story is of two friends who have drifted apart, one wanted to be a writer and is now a critic unable to create works of his own imagination. He discovers that his friend has disappeared leaving a wife and baby and a locked room of manuscripts. These turn out to be masterpieces of novels, plays, and poems far beyond his capability of writing. In preparing those for publishing he re-enters and re-evaluates his life long friendship and what it meant but at a cost as he faces a secret that tests him and his relationships to destruction.
Paul Auster’s draws on his own colourful work life in his struggle to become a writer so the stories have a grain of gritty realism. But they are interlinked by an interest in the impact of coincidences and lives lived in minimalist even ascetic ways against a background of a loss, failure and absent fathers and reflections on writing and storytelling. If you want a painless way into postmodernist metafiction then this is the book for you. Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member bluebuddhist
Simply the greatest novel I have ever read. Intrigue, mystery, an impending sense of doom.....magical!
LibraryThing member paulharryallen
Splendidly weird, an intriguing novel that compels you to finish it.
LibraryThing member cotto
The New York Trilogy consists of 3 short stories all based in the city with the city itself as an important character in the first story, City of Glass. All 3 stories are about someone seeking out someone else. And these searches become so all consuming for the investigator that he finds his own
Another interlocking theme is identity and how it is easily changed and confused by us all. For example, in City of Glass, Paul Auster is a detective (yes, the author uses his own name which is another play on identity) but a writer Quinn assumes Paul's identity and becomes the detective. Everyone is convinced that Quinn is a detective and he convinces himself as well.
I've come to conclusion that these 3 stories are standalone with only some overlap. They've been put into one collection due to some reoccurring themes and overlaps. After the first read-through, I went back and skimmed a few sections trying to look for some concrete clues to link them all but I don't think that they do really connect. Auster has left a lot of mystery surrounding the stories which is a reflection of his view on life and not to expect all mysteries to have satisfying endings.
A definite thought provoking read and I'm going to check out some of his other works next.
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life up to scrutiny as well. If I were to describe this trilogy in one word it would be engrossing. I was completely engrossed in all 3 stories while reading about another person being completely engrossed in the search being carried out. And so reenforcing Auster's theme brilliantly.Another interlocking theme is identity and how it is easily changed and confused by us all. For example, in City of Glass, Paul Auster is a detective (yes, the author uses his own name which is another play on identity) but a writer Quinn assumes Paul's identity and becomes the detective. Everyone is convinced that Quinn is a detective and he convinces himself as well.
I've come to conclusion that these 3 stories are standalone with only some overlap. They've been put into one collection due to some reoccurring themes and overlaps. After the first read-through, I went back and skimmed a few sections trying to look for some concrete clues to link them all but I don't think that they do really connect. Auster has left a lot of mystery surrounding the stories which is a reflection of his view on life and not to expect all mysteries to have satisfying endings.
A definite thought provoking read and I'm going to check out some of his other works next.
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LibraryThing member AuroraW
Time to fall in love with Auster again .
LibraryThing member tedmahsun
Gumshoe detective story meets Existentialism. This is as good as they say it is. I must reread this one day as I haven't unlocked all the puzzles that are thrown at you in the book. Makes me want to go out and buy all the rest in Auster's oeuvre.
LibraryThing member Cecilturtle
I love Auster's sense of the fine line between reality and surrealism
LibraryThing member iayork
Was not impressed: I read this book because I loved Paul Aster's Brooklyn Follies. This compilation of 3 short stories may have well been written by a completely different author. They are short detective stories that are slightly intertwined. I did not enjoy this book and do not recommend it.
LibraryThing member denina
My favourite book of all time. I actually have no idea why I liked it, but it certainly has affected all my reading from then on. Great narrative that is both mysterious and philosophical.
LibraryThing member helices
Read it again after 15 years. This time in the original language. The gold shimmering memory my mind has embedded it in has got a somewhat less bright glow, but not much.
At times Auster excelles in mysticism. He masterly mixes reality with fiction. Who doesn’t jump when a mysterious voice in the
The author also has skilfully entwines anecdotes into the story, sometimes he elaborates on them, and they really feels like strong small stories inside the story. (He has shown examples of this later, for example in “Oracle Night”.) And the language is very relaxed, but still, you don’t become inactive as reader. No, the stories are interesting enough, and sometimes you get startled, so it is just comforting to be able to rest in the language.
No, I don’t think they are all the same story, but, for sure, they touch each other, in several planes. However, I must say – actually, really – that at times it feels pretentious and speculative, and this pulls down the grade a bit. Still, clearly a four!
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Läste om den efter 15 år. Den här gången på orginalspråket. Det guldglimmande skimret mitt minne har bäddat in den i har väl mattats något, men inte så mycket.
Auster briljerar stundom i mystik. Han blandar verklighet och fiktion mästerligt. Vem studsar inte när en mystisk telefonröst frågar efter privatdetektiven Paul Auster? (Om man låtit bli att läsa baksidestexten förstås!) Och vem är det som skriver dessa tre hostorier egentligen? Är alla samma historia? Eller hur är det?
Författaren kan också konsten att väva in anekdoter i historien, som han ibland broderar ut, och de känns verkligen som starka små historier i historien. (Detta har han ju visat prov på senare, inte minst i "Oraklenatten".) Och språket är mycket avslappnat, men för den skull blir man verkligen inte inaktiv som läsare. Nej, historierna är såpass intressanta, och man hajjar då och då till, att det bara känns skönt att språket är vilsamt.
Nej, det är nog inte samma historia allihop, men visst går de in i varandra, på flera olika nivåer. Dock, måste jag säga att stundom blir det - faktisk, nästan - lite pretentiöst, det drar ner betyget något. Ändå en solklar fyra!
At times Auster excelles in mysticism. He masterly mixes reality with fiction. Who doesn’t jump when a mysterious voice in the
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telephone asks for the private investigator Paul Auster? (If you haven’t read the text on the back of the book, of course.) And who is really writing these three stories? Are they all the same story? Or how is it?The author also has skilfully entwines anecdotes into the story, sometimes he elaborates on them, and they really feels like strong small stories inside the story. (He has shown examples of this later, for example in “Oracle Night”.) And the language is very relaxed, but still, you don’t become inactive as reader. No, the stories are interesting enough, and sometimes you get startled, so it is just comforting to be able to rest in the language.
No, I don’t think they are all the same story, but, for sure, they touch each other, in several planes. However, I must say – actually, really – that at times it feels pretentious and speculative, and this pulls down the grade a bit. Still, clearly a four!
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Läste om den efter 15 år. Den här gången på orginalspråket. Det guldglimmande skimret mitt minne har bäddat in den i har väl mattats något, men inte så mycket.
Auster briljerar stundom i mystik. Han blandar verklighet och fiktion mästerligt. Vem studsar inte när en mystisk telefonröst frågar efter privatdetektiven Paul Auster? (Om man låtit bli att läsa baksidestexten förstås!) Och vem är det som skriver dessa tre hostorier egentligen? Är alla samma historia? Eller hur är det?
Författaren kan också konsten att väva in anekdoter i historien, som han ibland broderar ut, och de känns verkligen som starka små historier i historien. (Detta har han ju visat prov på senare, inte minst i "Oraklenatten".) Och språket är mycket avslappnat, men för den skull blir man verkligen inte inaktiv som läsare. Nej, historierna är såpass intressanta, och man hajjar då och då till, att det bara känns skönt att språket är vilsamt.
Nej, det är nog inte samma historia allihop, men visst går de in i varandra, på flera olika nivåer. Dock, måste jag säga att stundom blir det - faktisk, nästan - lite pretentiöst, det drar ner betyget något. Ändå en solklar fyra!
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Subjects
Awards
V&A Illustration Award (Folio Society -- 2009)