The New York Trilogy

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In such a town the situation of a rebel, an American patriot, say, spying on the enemy forces occupying the city and carrying intelligence across the Hudson to General Washington in New Jersey, where he was encamped with his ragged citizen army, might provide good drama. If that patriot spy was a woman, the stakes would be higher still, and if she were then betrayed, say, by her son - and so it began.

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. This statement is part of an almost Nabokovian game, because we readers know and understand that the whole novel is make-believe. IBS: Well, they’re in their fourth or fifth year. Just before they finish their MA. I’ve had several students with similar reactions over the years. City of Glass was adapted in 1994 into a critically acclaimed experimental graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli. It was published as City of Glass: A Graphic Mystery in 2004. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. One of the most beautiful and shattering novels I’ve read in my life.Reading the novel, you almost begin to suspect that you were meant to be a character, that Auster probably viewed our world as identical (or at least isomorphic) to the one inhabited by Quinn, Stillman, et. al. And if that's not cool enough: by the end of the novel, Auster turns the tables again, and you finish feeling like every symbol of the story has to be reinterpreted, like the entire piece has undergone a semantic shift. IBS: It is innovative. Very much so, and, for one reason or another, what’s new about it concurs with the ideas that emerged in French theory and hit the literary scene round about the time you published The New York Trilogy. Chapman, Siobhan, and Christopher Routledge. 1999. The pragmatics of detection: Paul Auster’s “City of glass”. Language and Literature 8 (3): 241–253. The writer had set the dining table for a meal for two. He brought out a salad bowl, placed it on the table and opened the wine. It was a white, and Mrs Fanshawe seemed to drink it more voraciously than the writer, as if it was her favourite or something. As they consumed the salad, I could see that Mrs Fanshawe had placed her hand on the writer’s leg, and he had taken no steps to object, which was understandable from my point of view. Pretty soon, they too moved to the couch and drew the curtains, so that I was unable to witness what happened next, though I could and did imagine.

Toţi vrem să ni se spună poveşti, pe care le ascultăm la fel ca atunci cînd eram copii. Ne imaginăm adevărata poveste în vîrtejul cuvintelor şi pentru a face asta ne punem în locul personajelor din poveste, prefăcîndu-ne că putem să-l înţelegem pentru că ne înţelegem pe noi înşine. Asta e o amăgire. Poate că existăm pentru noi înşine, iar uneori chiar reuşim să întrezărim cine sîntem, dar la urma urmei nu putem fi niciodată siguri, şi pe măsură ce vieţile noastre merg mai departe, devenim din ce în ce mai opaci faţă de noi înşine, din ce în ce mai conştienţi de propria noastră incoerenţă” (p.264). PA: In the second part of The Invention of Solitude, I explore many of the same questions, but more from a historical perspective than from a purely philosophical one. Fanshawe’s and then the narrator’s experience in an isolated house in the south of France echoes not only the life of Thoreau at Walden

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.

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. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1975. William Wilson. In The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 626–641. New York: Vintage Books. Original edition, 1839. Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography. In Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb, 8–12. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets. Original edition, 1981.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: Let me tell you a little about myself, so I can then move on and start this story at the beginning. 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! Vaneigem, Raoul. 2003. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Rebel Press. Original edition, 1967.

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. Over the years, I’ve been intensely interested in the artificiality of books as well. I mean, who’s kidding whom, after all. We know when we open up a book of fiction that we’re reading something that is imaginary, and I’ve always been interested in exploiting that fact, using it, making it part of the work itself. Not in some dry, academic, metafictional way, but simply as an organic part of the written word."was defined in the following terms: “A mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. The term The Question Is the Story Itself’: Postmodernism and Intertextuality in Auster’s New York Trilogy. In Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, 135–153. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. un gioco di incastri e scatole cinesi e specchi e matrioske, dove per esempio, il primo detective è uno scrittore di romanzi polizieschi e un altro personaggio centrale si chiama guarda caso proprio Paul Auster. Che anche nel romanzo è uno scrittore di romanzi, ma invece lo becchiamo che sta scrivendo un saggio su don Quixote, le cui iniziali, D e Q, sono le stesse del protagonista, Daniel Quinn. The detective is the one who looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable. The reader sees the world through the detective’s eye, experiencing the proliferation of its details as if for the first time. He has become awake to the things around him, as if they might speak to him, as if, because of the attentiveness he now brings to them, they might begin to carry a meaning other than the simple fact of their existence. Private eye. The word held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was it the letter ‘i’, standing for ‘investigator’, it was ‘I’ in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him. For five years now, Quinn had been living in the grip of this pun." Dimovitz, Scott A. 2006. Public personae and the private I: De-compositional ontology in Paul Auster’s “The New York trilogy”. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52 (3): 613–633.