- Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Penguin USA (P) (June 1990)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0140169636
- ISBN-13: 978-0140169638
- Product Dimensions: 18 x 10.9 x 2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 181 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (73 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Book Description
Three stories on the nature of identity. In the first a detective writer is drawn into a curious and baffling investigation, in the second a man is set up in an apartment to spy on someone, and the third concerns the disappearance of a man whose childhood friend is left as his literary executor.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
Paul Auster’s novels include Brooklyn Follies, Oracle Night, and In the Country of Last Things, as well as two memoirs, a collection of essays, a volume of poems, and the screenplays for several films. His work has been translated into over 30 languages.
Art Spiegelman is a cartoonist who first came to attention in the early 1980s as editor of the magazine Raw. His books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust story Maus, Maus II, and In the Shadow of No Towers. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Luc Sante teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College. His books include Low Life, Evidence, and The Factory of Facts.
Art Spiegelman is a cartoonist who first came to attention in the early 1980s as editor of the magazine Raw. His books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust story Maus, Maus II, and In the Shadow of No Towers. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
IT was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
IT was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Read the first page
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Concordance
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
ONE OF A KIND!,
By Scott Chiddister (Elmhurst, IL) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The New York Trilogy (Paperback)
The novels that make up Paul Auster's New York Trilogy are notable for their brevity, inclusion of relatively extraneous material, and chronicling the main character's disintegration. In each of the three, the detector (a mystery writer enrolled as a detective, a detective watching a writer, and a writer trying to find his childhood friend who has made him his literary executor) becomes obsessed, his previous life cracking up. In the last (The Locked Room) he recovers. In the middle one (Ghosts) he perhaps kills his quarry. In the first (City of Glass) he is cared for after his dissolution (suggesting that in all three, the detector is engaged by his quarry, though in the first one it remains unclear whether the wife is an agent for her father-in-law who is tailed by Quinn). Auster's detective's remorseless quest for answers destroys their lives: All the questioning makes them implode. Auster's detectives (and, surely, Auster himself) are very concerned with inscription: the notebook of the first, both the reports of surveillance and what Black is writing in the second, the texts Fanshawe left behind and the biography of him that never gets written in the third. Auster seems to be a postmodernist who believes in the lives of authors -- unraveling Don Quixote, recalling incidents in the life of Walt Whitman, disquisitions on Hawthorne and an unliterary reader's reading of Walden; the characters of The Locked Room have names from Hawthorne and enact a variant of the Hawthorne story related in Ghosts. (He also manages to tell the story of "Out of the past" and work in a Brooklyn Dodger game from Jackie Robinson's first season and to use many names of former New York Mets players for his characters.) Is it metafiction? (Metamystery?) Or a very literature-obsessed writer playing with the mystery genre? Probably some of both. Epistemological mysteries. The most explicit statement of ultimate unknowability is: "We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times, even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our incoherence." (p. 368). Ghosts irritated me and I almost didn't read the last and best of the three novels as a result. Its aftertaste is better than its taste while chewing (reading) it. The Locked Room seems less coolly stylized, with less abstract characters. Fanshawe has many experiences from Auster's life (as revealed in his recent account of making money to write). The super boy idealized by all, he is eventually indicted for lacking heart. Inhuman is not how even the coolest Auster prose strikes me. I don't think that he lacks compassion, but I have to think that he is concerned about lacking feeling. Not just in cannibalizing life in writing but in being incapable of love. Admittedly, this is reading a lot into the book. A fear of cracking up from observing too closely would be a more obvious moral of all three. Anyway, as you can see I became totally absorbed in this book. Buy a copy of New York Trilogy -- you'll be happy. Another book I need to recommend -- completely unrelated to Auster, but very much on my mind since I purchased a "used" copy off Amazon is "The Losers' Club: Complete Restored Edition," a funny, highly entertaining little novel I can't stop thinking about.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
the emperor has no clothes,
By
This review is from: The New York Trilogy (Paperback)
Somewhere along the way Paul Auster was decreed a "literary author," so if you dare to say he's boring, pretentious, and not really all that good with words, you are simply one of the great unwashed who don't get it. The first two novels in this book book are flat our lousy, no two ways about it (I lost the book after the I slogged through the second novel and didn't much miss it. The concluding story looked better than the other two but that ain't saying much). Auster's characters are wan bloodless abstractions. You can have abstractions in your stories and still write engaging stuff, look at Kafka, but make us feel for your abstractions; that's the secret. Auster doesn't come close to managing this feat. Auster writes "literature" for philosophy students who never got literature or maybe "philosophy" for English students who never understood philosophy. At any rate it's boring and self important drivel, worse when you get down to it Mr. Auster's great insights are really rather insipid. They're the kinds of things fifteen year olds happen on and feel really, really deep and special for thinking of, for a year or two anyway. James Ellroy and Dashiell Hammett have written much better books, but unfortunately they're crime authors so we can't take them seriously now can we? But Mr. Auster, talentless though he may be, is a literary author, deigning to write crime albeit in an oh so clever postmodern way so we can't not him serioulsly at risk of looking dumb. If you read to actually enjoy a book pick up Ellroy or Hammett, but if you want to impress the grad student crowd at parties then go for Auster. But you'll always wonder just how many of them actually like him, and how many are just saying they do are because they're too afraid of looking stupid to say differently.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Existential gumshoes,
By
This review is from: The New York Trilogy (Paperback)
A mind-bending journey through a tapestry of loosely-connected images, themes, and experiences. Detectives who are themselves lost, trying to solve their own cases and...failing? I've started carrying around a red notebook myself. Delicious intertexts are peppered throughout the novel, buried treasures waiting for the reader to unlock them, perhaps encouraging some detective work of our own? Paul Auster is a brilliant madman.
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