Customer Reviews

The New York Trilogy

5 star:		(50)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I liked this novel. And I would recommend it to my friends. Which is the real test to determine if a novel is any good - at least in my opinion.

So what did I enjoy about this book? Hard to say. The stories were dark and not overly cheery. The characters were real and gritty and flawed. The setting for the stories was New York, and the descriptions Auster gave to the surroundings were credible. and believable.

My only criticism of the book is that I failed to see how the three stories tied together. So when I had finished the novel, I had this disjointed feeling. But that could be me and my inability to understand the underlying context of each of the three stories.

But that is my issue, and not an issue with the book itself. In short, I highly recommend this book.

We were suposed to read "City of Glass" out of Auster's NEW YORK TRILOGY in our English advanced class. I believe the mystery of chance and the multiple personalities of the protagonist are crucial for Austers first detective story. The well chosen setting fits perfectly into the plot. Auster writes about an isolated , lonely writer at the mid-thirty, who has pleasant success in writing detective stories. Just by accident the protagonist gets the opportunity to solve an obscure case as an pseudo-detetective. It is easy to follow the plot, but somehow the reader happens to mix up the charachters. But you will never be bored while reading it, even though there are parts of the story wiht not much suspense.

I like to give you a little impression of my opinion about Paul Auster's book "City of Glass". We were supposed to read it in the 13.form as a part of our main topic "detective stories".
It took us some time but it was more interesting than the other books we read in this year(Macbeth, Of Mice and Men). When you have read this book you get a closer look into the world's different identities and those of its citizen.
In Paul Auster's clever piece of work "City of Glass" fiction and reality is mixed up. The theme of chance is like in other works of Auster seen as the main topic of the story. Daniel Quinn, normally an author, who lost his family, is mixed up with Paul Auster and so starts to become a detective. During the story it is not obvious which identity the protagonist uses and who he will be next. The order of actions is unpredictable.
Paul Auster created a novel which is extraordinary and which will be kept in mind by every one who read it.
I would everybody give the advice to read this book because of its postmodernist style which suits very well to our time.

Hi I'm a german highschool studend. In class we were supposed to read "the city of glass". Today we all write a review on it.
Honestly it is not to much of a story for me. The fact I liked, was the fall of the protagonist. After all it is just an everyday story about the facts of life. I feel people deerve to be what they are, not more not less. And that's what happens. After getting a job the detectiv gets lost in his task. Eventually he loses almost evrything he ownes but what he always thought he would be. Altough one could be of the opinion that everything in our lifes is pales and therefor chance does not exist the reader is only confronted with chance. In the end you feel that you really should not do anyhing, just because chance can probably do better than you.

In my advanced english course at school we were supposed to read Paul Auster's "City of Glass" the first of Paul Auster's detective stories from his book "The New York Triology". With no expectations i began to read the story about Daniel Quinn while thinking that it certainly would be one of those boring books we are often to read in school. But my first impression was wrong. With every line i read the story got more and more interesting. Paul Auster achieves it to build up an exciting story in which Daniel Quinn, a detective story writer, recieves a phone call with whom the story turns into a curios way. The main protagonist has to protect a man whose psychotic father wants to kill him. Quinn loses track of the mystery so that he loses everything he has. Almost the whole story is based on chance and gets interesting by curving the story of Don Quiote or the history of the Paradies. Paul Auster also succeeds in connecting themes like "identities","isolaton","hunger" and "poverty".

We read City of Glass for our book club and 8 out of 9 of us could not bear to read the last two stories of the Trilogy. Though we all agreed it was well written, it was a story that carried the reader all over the place without actually ever arriving anywhere. Was Paul Auster trying to be clever or was he trying to write a good story? I believe cleverness was his intent, and in this case it is a shame because I missed a potentially good narrative.

When you read a book and whatever you are reading doesn't say anything is a waist of time, half of this book is written that way, maybe the stories are good, but when you read and read and nothing happen or explain things that you already know (Like all the names of the streets in NY city) I said that the grass is to green, why? Because everybody knows that the grass is green, you don't have to read it in a book, reading these kind of "grass" makes the story boring and you don't want to know what will happen in the real story of the book, this is a really waste of time, paper and money for this book.