World Famous Comics: The New York Trilogy (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
The New York Trilogy (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
By: Paul Auster Publisher: Penguin Classics Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Penguin Classics Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 320 Publication Date: March 28, 2006
Product Description: Paul Auster’s signature work, The New York Trilogy, consists of three interlocking novels: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room—haunting and mysterious tales that move at the breathless pace of a thriller.
Long Live the Novel! The Novel is Dead!: Postmodern Postmortem When I was an English grad-student in the 90's, there was a certain kind of guy I observed who loved language passionately, a word-geek, you know? Pale, fastidious, carrying his fountain pen or carafe of espresso with him everywhere he went, along with his worn copy of "Ulysses," he either went the Ph.D. route or decided to write, in which case he went from MFA workshop to writing fellowship, bouncing from place to place every year or so, aspiring to semi-permanence as an instructor somewhere. Sensitive, intelligent, aware of his lack of machismo, he relied on words as a weapon, and as his 20's turned to 30's, his troubles increased, for now he was the impoverished writer/student type, while the extroverted, less-idealistic types had the wives and homes and you get the picture. For the aspiring male writer, in my opinion, the subconscious sense of suspended adulthood and marginalized masculinity could sometimes be acute; pushing 40 in an elite fellowship, where he was paid a stipend to finish his novel, the one he'd started in his 20's about a boy saddened by his parents' divorce, say, he was in a dangerous place: rootless, essentially without life experience and family responsibilities, without knowledge of work or craft beyond academia, coddled yet deprived by its protective culture, his work ironically de-potentated by its paternalism.
Very often, this type of guy showed certain preferences in his work: his stories might have "tough" male types, like those from noir films, expressions of his desire to be active in the world and streetwise and tough; very often his stories would begin with a male character who'd lost his wife and child, conveniently making the character sympathetic, by giving him a back story, an explanation for his current state of almost autistic insularity, while also protecting the writer from having to write about such things. The writer now had to compensate for many weaknesses in his work due to his lack of life experience, compounded perhaps by his innate introversion, love of words, sensitivities, etc., and so, in lieu of real human interaction, his main character might spend a lot of time smoking cigarettes, visiting "blowsy tarts" or doing something shocking (!) like sitting on the toilette. (Oh, I'm sure Auster spawned "Fight Club" at the very least.) A story could be written in such a way that if, for example, the setting was New York, someone who'd never been there and was only referencing a map, could do it. Then he'd display his one true strength in a bit of aggressive word-play, going philosophical with puns and ideas about language and its limits. Professors of creative writing, jaded in appetite, likewise insulated, seemed to especially approve of violence or sexual perversion to spice-up those intellectual interludes.
Any of this ring a bell? Auster's work here jogged my memory of this smart yet developmentally-delayed male type, so aware of his sensitivity that he resorts to images of violent masculinity and portrayals of women as mommies. Mommy, the desire to return to infancy. The death instinct. All of which is not to say that his work is not compulsively readable here; it is a test-case for the effectiveness of suspense as a device within plot, carrying the reader along against her will. But I feel cheated, and I don't like to be so tightly controlled by a writer's agenda. I prefer a messier aesthetic, an excess of consciousness and life, as one gets in Proust or Shakespeare, spilling over the edges, as one gets in much good non-fiction, the letters of Van Gogh, for example. The coolest thing about these novellas, I think, is how Auster came up with an analogy to describe the writer's paradox, the writer's problem, in his angry deconstruction of the mystery genre--how someone temperamentally a writer, who craves solitude necessary to write, who believes that real life is the internal life of thoughts and emotions, can somehow perform the alchemy necessary to create fiction with its demands for action in the physical world, for plot, for drama. That's what I love best about this schizoid, paranoid, hermetic, manipulative, redundant and disingenuous trilogy. But I still want more life------!
book I havn't read the book yet but I did receive it in the amount of time stated and in good condition.
The Existential Dashiell Hammett This is the first book that I read by Paul Auster. I had heard of him for years, but I always assumed that he was another New York Writer. In order words, stuffy and primarily writing for "intellectuals" and the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award. I could not have been more wrong. These three loosely connected short works contain some of the most gut-wrenching emotional writing that I have laid eyes on. It hit me almost as hard as John Steinbecks "East of Eden". Don't get me wrong, these books have nothing in common other than a willingness on the part of both authors to let dark things come to the surface and then not just explain them away. (Actually, there is a bit of self reference in Steinbeck's book as well, but it is merely a mention and not the intense existential experience that Auster's book is. Anyway, this is merely an aside.) Auster's Trilogy takes the form of detective stories, but this is only the most rudimentary framework for these incredibly powerful explorations into the nature of identity and the disappearance of one's self or the many selves that one man possesses. I'm not going to tell anything about the plot, but suffice it to say that this stuff is pretty dark. Don't be fooled by the cartoonish cover (done by Art Spiegelman of "Maus" fame), this is not a fun genre exercise. It is art.
painless way into postmodernist metafiction This is a series of subtle interlocking novellas set in New York published over 85 and 86: City of Glass, "Ghosts" and "Locked Room with the first set in the period, the 2nd in the 40's and the last one in the 70's. They use mystery conventions of the gumshoe detective (think Humphrey Bogart) but in a subversive way as an existentialist reflection on writing, and story creation and communication but at the pace of a thriller; it more Kafka then Chandler with haunting imagery and surreal coincidences. But it also has deep emotional and psychological depths.
To give you a flavour of the book, in the City of Glass the main Character is Daniel Quinn a writer who has abandoned writing except for mystery writing owing to the death of his wife and child. He is successful enough to only need to write one novel a year which he has just done and then he drifts. He is clearly depressed and only feels alive when he is the private eye of his novels. One night he receives a midnight phone call asking for a detective called Paul Auster( yes the real author is also a later character in the story) and after several rejections he decides to act as if were his private eye character. His clients are a child-man who is a survivor of a dreadful abuse by his father (he was deprived of language as part of an experiment in discovering the natural language of man before the fall of the Tower of Babel) and his wife a nurse who had married him so that he could leave the hospital. The father now elderly is being released from Mental hospital and they fear that the son will be killed and want protection.
The story then takes many twists and turns and ends with the author as character being criticised by a final narrator who may be one of the characters from the other stories for what happens to Daniel Quinn during the course of the story.
In the Locked Room all the characters are named after colours and it's a classical stake-out story but is it? Or is it a reflection on the lives of characters once that have been created and written about?
The final story is of two friends who have drifted apart, one wanted to be a writer and is now a critic unable to create works of his own imagination. He discovers that his friend has disappeared leaving a wife and baby and a locked room of manuscripts. These turn out to be masterpieces of novels, plays, and poems far beyond his capability of writing. In preparing those for publishing he re-enters and re-evaluates his life long friendship and what it meant but at a cost as he faces a secret that tests him and his relationships to destruction.
Paul Auster's draws on his own colourful work life in his struggle to become a writer so the stories have a grain of gritty realism. But they are interlinked by an interest in the impact of coincidences and lives lived in minimalist even ascetic ways against a background of a loss, failure and absent fathers and reflections on writing and storytelling. If you want a painless way into postmodernist metafiction then this is the book for you. Highly recommended
"The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell." "He had always imagined that the key to good detective work was a close observation of details. The more accurate the scrutiny, the more successful the results. The implication was that human behavior could be understood, that beneath the infinite façade of gestures, tics, and silences, there was finally a coherence, an order, a source of motivation."
Paul Auster's "New York Trilogy," consisting of the novellas "City of Glass," "Ghosts," and "The Locked Room," is an intriguing blend of post-modern fiction, metaphysical philosophy, and detective novels. Through his reliance on the themes and structure of pulp/noir mysteries, Auster delves deeply into questions regarding identity, purpose, obsession, what is real, and examines the often tenuous grip that most people have on their sanity. His exploration is quite compelling and makes for a fascinating read, but it is unfortunate that the quality of the novellas is slightly uneven. The first, "City of Glass," is far too impenetrable and abstruse to be much more than frustrating. While it is clear that its protagonist, Quinn, is desperate to shed his identity in order to escape from the painful loss that has left him paralyzed, it is unclear why he becomes so obsessed with the case that he takes on after doing so. "Ghosts" is a marked improvement, but it is only in the final novella, "The Locked Room," that this trilogy really comes to life. "The Locked Room" is eloquent where its predecessors are vague, pointed when the others are intentionally blurry, and poignant rather than murky. Auster is certainly a great writer, and I will be interested to read more of his works, but "The New York Trilogy" requires a willingness to stick with it in order to get to its heart. But I recommend hanging in there, because that final novella is a true gem, and makes the ride worth your while.
Here's the grade breakdown: "City of Glass": C+, "Ghosts": B, "The Locked Room": A Average grade: B
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