The New York Trilogy, by Paul Auster
The New York Trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts, Locked Room), by Paul Auster :
Blue agrees to take the job, and they shake hands on it. To show his good faith, White even gives Blue an advance of ten fifty dollar bills.
That's how it begins, then. The young Blue and a man named White, who is obviously not the man he appears to be. It doesn't matter, Blue says to himself after White has left. I'm sure he has his reasons. And besides, it's not my problem. The only thing I have to worry about is doing my job.
It is February 3, 1947. Little does Blue know, of course, that this case will go on for years. But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next. There are certain things that Blue cannot possibly know at this point. For knowledge comes slowly, and when it comes, it is often at great personal expense.
It’s a good thing I like detective books, or this one would have tested my limits on surreal fiction. It takes the hard boiled private eye genre and cliches and goes with them, into the realm not of crime but of existential nightmare. The first two books involve ordinary men with not much of a life, not even private investigators, who get hired to put someone under surveillance. Both guys spend ridiculous amounts of time-years of their lives-just watching their target, losing what lives they had in the process, doing strange things to relieve the boredom, and finding that both the person who hired them and the person they’re watching speaks a lot of Mad Hatterese. The last one, Locked Room, is almost the opposite. In that one, the protagonist with not much of a life pretty much has someone else’s life dropped on him when he inherits the spouse and unpublished profitable manuscripts of an old friend who had abruptly disappeared, and becomes obsessed with tracking down the old friend before he becomes him entirely.
Blurbs tell me that Paul Auster is some sort of literary wunderkind, or at least that he was in the 1980s when he wrote the trilogy. Seemed to me, he spent a lot of time trying to be clever and profound and little time being actually interesting. In City of Glass, a large part of just about every chapter consists of a digression-a stream of consciousness monologue from a Kaspar Hauser figure; an article read by the protagonist; a memory of baseball; theological insights on the Tower of Babel. If he was trying to make a point about modern NY life being as alienating and uncommunicative as the Tower of Babel, I was too tired to explore the point much. Some of the atmosphere and technique reminded me of The Singing Detective, which I saw on TV once when I was too young to understand what it was about, and another time when I was older and found it weird, but interesting. Give me Chandler and MacDonald over Auster any day.
Blue agrees to take the job, and they shake hands on it. To show his good faith, White even gives Blue an advance of ten fifty dollar bills.
That's how it begins, then. The young Blue and a man named White, who is obviously not the man he appears to be. It doesn't matter, Blue says to himself after White has left. I'm sure he has his reasons. And besides, it's not my problem. The only thing I have to worry about is doing my job.
It is February 3, 1947. Little does Blue know, of course, that this case will go on for years. But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next. There are certain things that Blue cannot possibly know at this point. For knowledge comes slowly, and when it comes, it is often at great personal expense.
It’s a good thing I like detective books, or this one would have tested my limits on surreal fiction. It takes the hard boiled private eye genre and cliches and goes with them, into the realm not of crime but of existential nightmare. The first two books involve ordinary men with not much of a life, not even private investigators, who get hired to put someone under surveillance. Both guys spend ridiculous amounts of time-years of their lives-just watching their target, losing what lives they had in the process, doing strange things to relieve the boredom, and finding that both the person who hired them and the person they’re watching speaks a lot of Mad Hatterese. The last one, Locked Room, is almost the opposite. In that one, the protagonist with not much of a life pretty much has someone else’s life dropped on him when he inherits the spouse and unpublished profitable manuscripts of an old friend who had abruptly disappeared, and becomes obsessed with tracking down the old friend before he becomes him entirely.
Blurbs tell me that Paul Auster is some sort of literary wunderkind, or at least that he was in the 1980s when he wrote the trilogy. Seemed to me, he spent a lot of time trying to be clever and profound and little time being actually interesting. In City of Glass, a large part of just about every chapter consists of a digression-a stream of consciousness monologue from a Kaspar Hauser figure; an article read by the protagonist; a memory of baseball; theological insights on the Tower of Babel. If he was trying to make a point about modern NY life being as alienating and uncommunicative as the Tower of Babel, I was too tired to explore the point much. Some of the atmosphere and technique reminded me of The Singing Detective, which I saw on TV once when I was too young to understand what it was about, and another time when I was older and found it weird, but interesting. Give me Chandler and MacDonald over Auster any day.