About this title: Paul Auster's noirish trilogy emphasizes the fragility and mysteriousness of identity. In each short novel, a detective figure haunts a man caught up in a web of strange events which he may or may not have orchestrated himself.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics), Toronto, ON, Canada
Date Published: 1990
ISBN-13:9780140131550ISBN:0140131558
Description: Very Good. 0140131558 Previously read trade paperback book in very good condition, some very minor shelf wear, no rips or tears. 03335064 _ read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Book, New York, NY, USA
Date Published: 1990
ISBN-13:9780140131550ISBN:0140131558
Description: GOOD. NO writing or highlighting or dog-eared corners, but the closed outside page edges have light red thumbing splotches. Uncreased, straight spine. Cover has a crease down the back, minor edge bumping, and light soiling; no tears. 022109 (pva33) read more
"Comparable to (although considerably predating) Martin Amis's Night Train - a fascination with procedural detective stories and mystery novels leads the modernist writer to try his hand at them. Confronted with the most determinist of all genres (and the fear of being labeled a genre writer, maybe), our high-brow writers veer off somewhere near the last minute into indeterminacy. Four pages into the first volume of this trilogy, City of Glass, the narrator outlines the aesthetic scope against which he ultimately rebels, extolling his enthusiasm for mystery novels - "...their sense of...economy...nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so...". Eventually, though, existentialist despair (perhaps more Sartre than Camus) is all the protagonists get for their trouble. Having read more of Siri Hustvedt's books than Auster's may put me in a delightful minority but he has a lot for me to catch up on, and it is tempting to get started right away. Part of the appeal, of course, for those who've spent the last couple of decades in Manhattan and Brooklyn, is the specificity of his places - I can envision that westward turn from Broadway onto West 107th St or the churchyard on Orange Street in Brooklyn Heights with a clarity that many but surely not the majority of his readers have. Yet that is almost why I've avoided him - let Anthony Trollope make me envision London in 1860 and I can admit to being impressed."
"After departing Bombay by ship, Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes are en route to the bustling modern city of San Francisco. There, Mary will settle some legal affairs surrounding the inheritance of her family's old estate. But the closer they get to port, the more Mary finds herself prey to troubling dreams and irrational behavior-a point not lost on Holmes, much to Russell's annoyance.
In 1906, when Mary was six, San Francisco was devastated by an earthquake and a raging fire that reduced the city to rubble. For years, Mary has denied any memory of the catastrophe that for days turned the fabled streets into hell on earth. But Holmes suspects that some hidden trauma connected with the "unforgettable" catastrophe may be the real culprit responsible for Mary's memory lapse. And no sooner do they begin to familiarize themselves with the particulars of the Russell estate than it becomes apparent that whatever unpleasantness Mary has forgotten, it hasn't forgotten her. Why does her father's will forbid access to the house except in the presence of immediate family? Why did someone break in, then take nothing of any value? And why is Russell herself targeted for assassination?
The more questions they ask of Mary's past, the more people from that past turn out to have died violent, unexplained deaths. Now, with the aid of a hard-boiled young detective and crime writer named Hammett, Russell and Holmes find themselves embroiled in a mystery that leads them through the winding streets of Chinatown to the unspoken secrets of a parent's marriage and the tragic car "accident" that a fourteen-year-old Mary alone survived-an accident that may not have been an accident at all. What Russell is about to discover is that even a forgotten past never dies...and it can kill again. A great series. I would suggest starting with book one: The Beekeeper's Apprentice."
"This is the first Paul Auster I've read and I can't wait to read more (cheesy). All three stories embody what post-modernist writing can feel like when it borrows traits from the detective novel genre (I created a pretty awesome spy kit for myself as a child, complete with a MAD magazine with two viewing holes cut through the pages and a large magnifying glass, so this definitely appealed to me). The twisting/twisted recurring themes found throughout all three will have you wrecking your mind trying to tie things together...in a really pleasurable way (Disclaimer: Only pleasurable if you're someone who likes to think about things that may, in fact, have no real answer in the end. If you absolutely need answers, then may I suggest Nancy Drew. Also good.).
There are also interesting tidbits relating to the Tower of Babel (which piqued my interest in this Bible story I knew little about), feral children, issues of identity and identity confusion, the philosophies of human nature as it relates to the writing of men like Emerson and Thoreau and other elements that make for a very good read."
"Yay, postmodern literature! I absolutely loved The New York Trilogy, especially City of Glass. I think that calling Auster's style that of anti-detective fiction is quite an apt way of putting things, precisely because we have solved absolutely nothing at the ends of his stories, and that is exactly his intention. Any meaning we might find in his work only serves to prove that meaning is endless and should not be sought too hard. Indeed, Quinn himself literally disappears into his words, his notebook, at the close of City of Glass, even as he works through some meaning-finding process. I think Auster raises numerous (shall I call them clichéd?) postmodern existentialist questions with his characters, their situations, their identities, their meta-identities, and underlying it all, the city in which the story is set, with its potential for completely swallowing up all who live there. Quinn might be confused at Peter Stillman Jr.'s articulation that Peter Stillman is his name, but not his name, but Quinn himself has taken on multiple identities within himself: William Wilson, Max Work, Paul Auster, and Daniel Quinn. Detective fiction lends itself well these kinds of postmodern questions about identity and meaning and selfhood simply in the way that it traditionally poses such a question; who did this, why did they do it, how can we catch them, etc. But Auster seems to only use the modes of detective fiction as far as they will carry his questions; he stops short of any solution or attempt at articulating what is real or true. There are caveats throughout the stories to warn the reader that they oughtn't take anything for granted, as if his slippery language and confusion tactics didn't already relay that perfectly well. I like that about postmodern literature...it's not trying to be the truth. That's more enjoyable."
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