The New York Trilogy

Product Information

The first story, City of Glass, features a detective-fiction writer become private investigator who descends into madness as he becomes embroiled in a case. It explores layers of identity and reality, from Paul Auster the writer of the novel to the unnamed "author" who reports the events as reality to "Paul Auster the writer", a character in the story, to "Paul Auster the detective", who may or may not exist in the novel, to Peter Stillman the younger, to Peter Stillman the elder and, finally, to Daniel Quinn, protagonist. "City of Glass" has an intertextual relationship with Cervantes' Don Quixote. Not only does the protagonist Daniel Quinn share his initials with the knight, but when Quinn finds "Paul Auster the writer," Auster is in the midst of writing an article about the authorship of Don Quixote. Auster calls his article an "imaginative reading," and in it he examines possible identities of Cide Hamete Benengeli, the narrator of the Quixote. For Hofstadter, this means the ability to interpret a system in a way that isn't explicitly contained within that system, which is a crucial tool for any mathematician (or more specifically, any meta-mathematician). And it's a crucial tool for Paul Auster the writer too. In "City of Glass," he creates a "strange loop" (Hofstadter's term) between the world captured by the narrative and the one inhabited by the reader, with no clear line between them: the boundaries between what's real and what's fiction are masterfully blurred. PA: The fact is that I don’t even know if I think The New York Trilogy is very good. To me, it seems rather crude. I think I’ve become a better writer. These are youthful texts that mark the end of a certain phase of my life.

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: IBS: Both The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy have captivated audiences all over the world. My students absolutely love them. I taught them again (probably for the tenth time) last week and after the lecture one of my students came up to me and asked me to give you this letter. It says that your work has changed his life and now he wants to become a writer!Rushdie, though, is sceptical: "I'm not sure if I agree that Paul's technique has changed that much. There is always a strong element of fantasy in his stories. In the early works it's probably more elliptical than fantastical, but just look at Lulu on the Bridge , for example, which has a strong element of fantasy." Paul Auster: They come out of material I’d been thinking about and working on for many years. In The Red Notebook, I describe the phone call I received from the person who wanted to talk to the Pinkerton Agency. It triggered the first novel, City of Glass. The idea of a wrong number intrigued me and, because it happened to concern a detective agency, it somehow seemed inevitable that my story should have a detective element to it. It’s not in any way a crucial part of the story, and it was always irritating to me to hear these books described as detective novels. They’re not that in the least.

Nije Pol Oster kriv što je došao na red malo posle Havijera Marijasa, pa sad ne može i on da dobije peticu jer nema dovoljno ležernosti da padnem u nesvest. Da ne bude samo to, zameriću mu što insistira na izlizanom receptu da se do samoosvešćenja može doći samo preko mostića na smrt ugrožene egzistencije. Ne kažem da to nije put, možda čak jeste i najkraći, al' dobro više s tim. IBS: Well, if this book is where some of your major realizations concerning knowledge and truth were consolidated, might we not see The New York Trilogy as one of your most important books, if not the most important? The reviewers and critics do. Auster's first major success, the extraordinary New York Trilogy (1987), a thoughtful, at times terrifying, tripartite novel, must be one of the few books you can buy in airport bookshops about the annihilation of identity in the urban world. This first tale follows a writer-turned-detective whose interest in detective fiction eventually was so overwhelming that he became a detective himself. He finds a case and is overwhelmed by it. As he considers the odds and ends of it, he feels he might be going crazy. In this story, the detective works closely with the author, Paul Auster, who may or may not be real; the character has a hard time remembering where the lines of reality are. The protagonist is revealed to be Daniel Quinn who wonders extensively about Don Quixote throughout the prose. In three variants on the classic detective story, Paul Auster makes the well-traversed terrain of New York city his own, as it becomes a strange, compelling landscape in which identities merge or fade and questions serve only to further obscure the truth.'

Success!

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. In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant...The world of the book comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions." Bloom, Harold (ed.) Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Paul Auster (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publisher, 2004) ISBN 0791076628. Several essays on The New York Trilogy.

PA: Most writers are perfectly satisfied with traditional literary models and happy to produce works they feel are beautiful and true and good. I’ve always wanted to write what to me is beautiful, true, and good, but I’m also interested in inventing new ways to tell stories. I wanted to turn everything inside out. I suppose it’s a tremendously ambitious stance: not to be satisfied with conventions, to play with them sometimes, then to expose traditional norms and stretch them beyond their limits.PA: It’s about uncertainty, and the fact that there are no eternal givens in the world. Somehow, we have to make room for the things we don’t understand. We have to live with obscurity. I’m not talking about a passive, quietistic acceptance of things, but rather the realization that there are things we’re not going to know. 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. La stanza chiusa" --> L'ultimo racconto rientra un po' più nei canoni di un racconto tradizionale. C'e' una trama appena piu' sviluppata, un racconto in cui c'e' pure un amore, c'è pure una presunto abbandono di un uomo della moglie, c'è pure un accenno di sviluppo amoroso, c'è una indagine, c'è sempre uno scrittore, c'è sempre un detective, c'è sempre una ricerca di identificazione tra chi insegue e chi è inseguito che porta a frustrazione per presa consapevolezza che la vita non That is allto say that, yes, Lauren Weisberg's uber successfulnovel about Andrea Sachs, a Brown University graduate who moves to New York City in the hopes of pursuing a career in publishing, deserves a spot in the local literary canon.

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. Najpre ću se malo čuditi nad nemalim brojem komentara da su ovo tri nezavisne priče među kojima je teško pronaći vezu. Smislenije bi mi bilo shvatanje da su ovo tri varijacije jedne teme i da je upravo zato Geopoetika angažovala troje dobrih prevodilaca (o Zoranu i Ivani Paunović se već sve zna, a i Zorana Spaić ih u stopu prati). U tom smislu, naravno da se većini najviše dopada poslednji deo celine u kome se sve raspliće, ako ovde ima mesta za priču o klasičnom raspletu. 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. 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. Fantasmas (1986): esta es la más extraña de las tres, la m��s desconcertante. Eso no significa que sea mala, sino todo lo contrario: Auster parece redoblar el juego de las identidades y, para colmo, los personajes tienen nombres de colores. El estilo es parco, pero efectivo. También es de género policial y no termina como uno lo espera. La explicación esclarecedora que todos buscamos en el último capítulo de una novela del género no se sirve en bandeja y resulta extraño. No estoy contando el final. Simplemente, estoy señalando su particularidad. No sé si me gustó más que Ciudad de cristal, pero la amé (otra vez) porque toca la literatura como tema secundario, pero pone especial foco en el proceso de escritura.The New York Trilogy consists of three stories, which are distinct from each other but interact in direct and indirect, linear and nonlinear ways. There is a lot of thematic overlap between the stories, and even a fair amount of repetition. Each story could be thought of as a parallel retelling of the same story, or perhaps an examination of the same set of questions from a related viewpoint. 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. Qué lectura tan amena, tan rápida (estoy sacando los días en que tuve que dejarlo por los estudios) y tan conflictiva. Estas tres novelas me parecieron más una forma de problematizar la identidad y la literatura antes que un homenaje a New York a través de la escritura. Si la ciudad puede considerarse como un espacio inquietante y en movimiento, entonces New York es un claro ejemplo. Y Paul Auster aprovecha esa vorágine para mostrar también cómo allí nadie es quien dice ser: las personas roban identidades ajenas, las absorben, las transforman, las viven. Haré un breve comentario sin spoilers de las tres novelas.