The New York Trilogy

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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. I found a small apartment in a three-storey brownstone walk-up that didn’t eat up too much of my savings. I sub-let it from Mrs. Jane Fanshawe, an attractive widow in her early 50’s, who lived in the building. Her daughter-in-law, Sophie Fanshawe, lived in her own apartment on the same floor as me. Her husband, Jane’s son, was a writer who had recently disappeared and was believed to have died. The only other tenant in the building was a woman in her late twenties called Virginia Stillman. One of the more startling examples of how the postmodernist structure connects firmly with the themes of identity is the not exactly coincidental appearance of a character named Paul Auster who is a writer. Then there is the significant contextual connection between great American writers of the 1800s like Poe, Melville and Hawthorne and the even more direct intertextual relationship between City of Glass and Don Quixote.

Che significa per uno scrittore firmare un libro con il proprio nome? perchè alcuni decidono di nascondersi dietro ad uno pseudonimo? e, in tutti i casi, uno scrittore vive davvero una vita reale?")

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PA: I don’t know. I think there’s a tendency among journalists to regard the work that puts you in the public eye for the first time as your best work. Take Lou Reed. He can’t stand “Walk on the Wild Side.” This song is so famous, it followed him around all his life, and he’ll always be best known for having done that. Similarly, no matter how many movies he made afterward, Godard will always be best known for Breathless. It’s true for novelists; it’s true for poets. Even so, I don’t think in terms of “best” or “worst.” Making art isn’t like competing in the Olympics, after all. The only reason I didn't give this five stars is because of the slight headache it gave me. This was probably a bit self-inflicted. I always want everything to fit. This book is like a puzzle box, but the pieces inside are from several different puzzles, none of them matching the picture on the box, and none of the puzzle-sets being complete. I tried stomping the pieces together, hence the headache. I'm planning to return to it and see if I can fill in the blanks somehow, this time without stomping on the pieces and without any headaches. I know I'll enjoy it all over again, but probably a bit differently, knowing what I think I know. This riddle-nature of the book is what makes it so unique: uniquely readable, uniquely challenging, uniquely re-readable, uniquely enjoyable. And very recommendable. He was doing writing commissions, like translations, for money, but this meant he didn't have time to concentrate on his poetry which caused him enormous frustration." Auster also wrote about this part of his life in The Invention of Solitude and the descriptions of his depression and loss ("He feels himself sliding through events, hovering like a ghost around his own presence"), presage the lonely and dislocated characters he created a few years later, particularly Quinn in New York Trilogy and David in his latest novel, his 10th, The Book of Illusions. 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.

A TV adaptation of the book has been in the works for years and it will finally air on Apple TV some time this year. 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. The Trilogy is also a highly philosophical work. However, unlike most post-modern fiction, the philosophy is tightly wound into the structure or narrative of the novel. The philosophy is almost inseparable from the fiction itself. It’s no mere gratuitous insertion designed to contribute to either length or literary pretension. In other words, it’s both relevant and essential to the fiction: In ogni storia il protagonista è impegnato in una specie di indagine, come se fosse un detective. Ma sono inchieste immerse nell’allucinazione, nel surreale, perfino nell’assurdo, dove tutto è sfocato, sfumato. Ma il senso di mistero e attesa è forte, insistente, serra l’anima. Auster gioca col genere thriller, o forse sarebbe meglio dire col genere giallo, poliziesco, ma è ben altro che gli interessa.In 2009, Audible.com produced an audio version of The New York Trilogy, narrated by Joe Barrett, as part of its Modern Vanguard line of audiobooks. And yet, I was surprised by a number of similarities that arose between the two. First, both books explicitly mention the Tower of Babel (in fact, if you have a copy of the Penguin Deluxe Classics edition of the trilogy, they both even display artistic renderings of it). Both books also focus extensively on language—in particular, its relation to "reality." But perhaps most importantly, both explore the notion of systems (mathematical, artistic, etc.), as well as what it means to operate outside of said system. Fiction: 1987 New York Trilogy; '88 In the Country of Last Things; '89 Moon Palace '91 The Music of Chance '92 Leviathan '94 Mr Vertigo '99 Timbuktu 2002 The Book of Illusions This chronicler of New York was, in fact, born in New Jersey, conceived in a "loveless embrace, a blind, dutiful groping between chilly hotel sheets", as he writes in The Invention of Solitude, on his parents' honeymoon at Niagara Falls. His mother, Queenie, who died earlier this year, was a bright and sparky woman, able to make jokes and tell stories to her son even as her beloved second husband, Auster's step-father, was dying.