The New York Trilogy

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Sorapure, Madeleine. 1995. The Detective and the Author: City of Glass. In Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster, ed. Dennis Barone, 71–87. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Ciudad de cristal (1985): un escritor de novelas policíacas que se apellida Quinn recibe un llamado por equivocación. El escritor usa seudónimo y, extrañamente, quien lo busca lo confunde con otro escritor. Acepta el caso ¿Le servirá su experiencia como creador de un detective? Eso, tal vez, es lo menos importante. Porque cuando Quinn empieza a trabajar en el caso, no hay nada que indique una normalidad en el asunto. Lo cierto es que esta novela atrapa por la forma en que ahoga al personaje en su propia red, en sus obsesiones y en el hecho de “creerse otro”. Muy, muy buena y con varias referencias literarias. Las primeras páginas son las mejores y revelan un estilo fluido y complicado a la vez. Il detective indaga sì, ma all'interno, nella stanza privata che è il suo cervello, alla ricerca di un senso della vita dell'uomo che non riesce a trovare. E un roman artificios, în linia povestirilor lui Henry James. Un personaj pornește în căutarea altuia, al doilea se ascunde atît de bine încît nu poate fi găsit, fiindcă nu vrea decît să-l chinuie pe primul (e un pervers, așadar). Amîndoi sînt excesiv de nervoși. Primul face o obsesie, cade în alcoolism și erotomanie, ajunge în preajma nebuniei și doar un noroc îl ferește de disoluția nervilor. Dar, în realitate, se poate presupune că personajul cu adevărat nebun și cu psihicul în descompunere e al doilea. Nu știm foarte sigur (și nci nu ne-ar folosi la nimic) dacă primul nu e cumva al doilea și nici dacă al doilea nu e cumva primul. Și nu e deloc limpede nici dacă nu cumva întreaga anchetă se petrece doar în mintea unuia dintre cei doi, nu știm care, dar asta nu mai contează. Precum scrie în acest pasaj: Kayser, Wolfgang. 1963. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Trans. Ulrich Weisstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Original edition, 1957.Chance in Contemporary Narrative: The Example of Paul Auster. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 11 (1): 59–83. 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. 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. Spaced-Out: Signification and Space in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. Contemporary Literature 36 (winter): 613–632. 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.

Nu mai trebuie să spun că am găsit digresiunile eseistice mult mai interesante decît acțiunea „polițistă”. Astfel, o ipoteză cu privire la adevăratul autor al romanului Don Quijote puteți citi la pp.104-105. IBS: Well, they’re in their fourth or fifth year. Just before they finish their MA. I’ve had several students with similar reactions over the years. Dimovitz, Scott A. 2006. Public personae and the private I: De-compositional ontology in Paul Auster’s “The New York trilogy”. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52 (3): 613–633.IBS: Even so, you experimented with literary convention, opened new possibilities in fiction, explored ideas. These early books, especially The New York Trilogy, raised very important questions about truth, about language, about being in the world. They prompt reflection about issues that were absolutely pivotal in contemporary literary theory. Attali, Jacques. 1999. The Labyrinth in Culture and Society: Pathways to Wisdom. Trans. Joseph Rowe. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Original edition, 1996. What does it mean, then, when someone calls a book "pretentious"? Let's dissect it. What they really seem to be saying is this: "I didn't find meaning in this book, therefore anyone who claims to have found meaning is not telling the truth." And this boils down to the following syllogism: "I am an intelligent reader; therefore anyone who is also an intelligent reader will share my opinion of this book; anyone who doesn't share my opinion, therefore, isn't an intelligent reader." A valid inference, no doubt, but hardly sound. This is because the whole argument hinges on one unavoidable fact: that by using the word "pretentious," one is implicitly assuming that they themselves are intelligent. And everyone knows that only dumb people think they're smart.

PA: I have a feeling that, as the years go by and as French theory diminishes in importance, people will stop reading my books in that way. At least I hope they will. 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 19th century saw New York ascendant. It was Whitman's "mettlesome, mad, extravagant city", the city of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Stanford White. Powerful merchants, vast fortunes, immense volumes of trade. The city expanding rapidly. Immigrants flooding in. Take a prosperous merchant, give him a son - but one son only - have him groom the boy to take over the business. But the boy has no head for business. The boy wants to be, of all things, an artist. What's worse, he has fallen in love with an artist's model! And she's Irish! Negde na polovini Njujorške trilogije piše da je primarni cilj svake knjige da zabavi čitaoca. Ako je to Oster hteo, u mom slučaju je potpunosti ispunio cilj: silno sam se zabavljala sve vreme, malo i na bis. A kako i ne bih, kad je unutra strpao sve i svašta: detektivske priče od vrste misterioznih, književne aluzije, svakovrsne anegdote i zabavne pričice (kako je Servantes sve hteo da nas zezne zamenom identiteta, kako je obdukciju Volta Vitmena radio jedan smotanko forenzičar, kako glavni projektant Bruklin bridža nikad nogom nije kročio na svoj most), maskiranja, malo Vavilonske kule, malo Pariza, mnogo Njujorka, mnogo ispisanih svezaka, pisaca, izdavača, seksa, dece i beba, poštanskih fahova, taštine, voajerske ostrašćenosti, zanesenjaštva, hazarderstva,...a između čitaoca i sveg tog zamešateljstva stoji neko ko igra kolariću – paniću sa likovima i imenima, dok je Pol Oster (imenom) epizodista koji obavlja neka svoja posla, pa se zbuni (kao i čitalac) kad čuje kakve se to stvari sve zbivaju na ovome svetu. Auster, Paul. 1997. The art of hunger. Essays, prefaces, interviews, and the red notebook. London: Faber and Faber. Ancora Harvey Keitel, qui insieme a Mira Sorvino, in “Lulu on the Bridge”, scritto e diretto da Paul Auster, 1998.

In such a town the situation of a rebel, an American patriot, say, spying on the enemy forces occupying the city and carrying intelligence across the Hudson to General Washington in New Jersey, where he was encamped with his ragged citizen army, might provide good drama. If that patriot spy was a woman, the stakes would be higher still, and if she were then betrayed, say, by her son - and so it began.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. Fanshawe’s and then the narrator’s experience in an isolated house in the south of France echoes not only the life of Thoreau at Walden 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." Those series of coincidences that mark the narrative of the stories that make up The New York Trilogy are interconnected to one way or another with yet another piece of threat tying the stories together: the Double. The real mystery at the heart of the quest of the detectives in this book is how identity of the self is inextricably intertwined with the legitimacy of the self and how those unexpected yet hardly ever surprising “mechanics of reality” serve to interfere with the processes of apprehending identity and establishing legitimacy. I think this was my first encounter with Paul Auster, a man who I met through the cult of the 1001 books to read before you die list. Prior to that I was vaguely aware of Auster and his peculiar brand of love/loath inciting literature which had friends alternatively raging or swooning, but had never bothered my arse to go and see what all the fuss was about.