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Summary: a modern classic
Review: Although I haven't been thrilled with Auster's past few books, he remains one of my favorite authors and "New York Trilogy" is one of his best works. "City of Glass" is particularly excellent, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. "Ghosts" is weaker than the other components of the trilogy, but given the nature of the comparison, this doesn't diminish the overall power of the story. You definitely don't want to miss this one.
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Summary: i was captivated from beginning to end.
Review: the moment that i escaped into this novel i was drug around by the tangled words and tantilizing tales... auster writes in a way that not many others can, he lets it flow out from his heart stright into yor eyes. it is wonderful, and inspiring. this tale is even more twisted than other work i have read by auster, he drives a lot of his work by the oddity of coincidences. at one moment in time i wanted it all to connect, and as if he had dreamt that this moment would come into exsistence, and he prepared for it. he tricked you into believeing that it all would tie together, then tricked you into thinking that it didn't. and not until the end did you figure out the reality of it all, and the character seemed to be just as confused and scared as you.the characters knew the reality of love, they knew how it felt to hurt, they knew all of it.. they experienced the pain that we all know too well... and they experienced while exposed in front of your viewing eyes. this one kept me captivated from beginning to end.
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Summary: Further spooky and convoluted details on City of Glass
Review: Now that the academic and critic types have found Paul Auster, I guess he'll be lifted out of the general readership and stashed with the rest of the classics on some hoity-toity shelf. Once that "postmodern" labelling starts, it's goodbye accessibility, hello pretension.... Anyway: City of Glass is one of the best constructed stories I've ever read. There is an incredibly complex concentric circle of narrators: there's the author, then the narrator, then his pen name, then his detective character, then his pose as Paul Auster. Then there's the real Paul Auster he meets, not to be confused with the one who's writing the book. Kind of spooky. Also, an English woman once showed me more disturbing information about City of Glass. If you take a city map of New York and mark out the well-described twisting journey of the characters, a picture emerges. What does it mean? With so much description of the streets they travelled, it can't be accidental. I was actually spooked. Unfortunately, I think everything Auster's written since this trilogy has been sliding downhill in quality, and this opinion seems to be shared by friends all around.
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Summary: American strangeness
Review: There's a very weird moment near the beginning of The Locked Room, the last book in this short trilogy. The narrator takes the manuscript of a missing friend's fiction to a literary editor he knows and calls back a few days later to see what the editor thinks. The editor says that while the book is perfectly okay (typical bet-hedging), there's something mysterious about it that he can't put his finger on, that he can't get the book out of his mind, and so on. Which is exactly what the perplexed reader has been telling him or herself for the previous 200 pages. They tell me that these books use the model of detective fiction - apart from the middle book, you could have fooled me. The diction is like no thriller ever written; Auster's style is utterly clean, clear and neutral, almost as if English isn't his first language, yet when you gaze into the pool of his style it shows you nothing but the reflection of your own face. This book is so clever that it should be boring and sterile, but it's not; it's filled with panic, dread and the terror of loneliness. (Beautifully pointed up when, in the first book, the hero Quinn meets Paul Auster and his beautiful wife and son; Auster has said that he wrote City of Glass as a sort of inverted autobiography of what his life would have been like if he hadn't met his current wife.) Auster's more recent work occasionally lapses into an irritatingly faux-naif style (he's one of the only serious writers I can think of who'll use a sentence like "Nothing would ever be the same again" without irony) but he's still got the same storytelling magic he first exercised in the New York Trilogy. A friend of mine calls him Paul Austere. I quite like the sound of that.
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Summary: A highly original and brilliant post-modern thriller
Review: Paul Auster's "New York Trilogy" consists of three seemingly unconnected novellas which though complete in themselves should be read as integral parts of a total literary experience. Unlike a conventional mystery thriller which focuses on the "who done what to whom" aspect of the storyline, Auster turns the table on the reader by taking him on a journey of self discovery past a hall of mirrors which reflect and expose by stages the psyche of the pursuer, not the pursued. The effect is so spooky you want to scream in your head as you encounter the next slice of reality about yourself. Readers familiar with the music of rock star David Bowie will find the reading experience similar to that of listening to his 1977 album "Low", a dark and creepy introspective piece of work. All three vignettes deal with questions of identity, reality and illusion, the meaning of words and language and explores the fine line between commitment and obsession. Both Quinn in "City of Glass" and the anonymous narrator in "Ghosts" are trapped in their own circumstances and forced to make human choices which lead to their mental breakdown. There is also a noir-like cinematic feel about the trilogy that just begs for this masterful piece of work to be brought to the screen. Auster has produced a highly original post-modern thriller that will mesmerise and enthrall readers for years to come. It is simply superb and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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Summary: The Master Hypnotizes
Review: Paul Auster is my favorite American novelist and TRIOLOGY is the most masterful and hypnotizing thriller-literature I have ever read.
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Summary: Austers postmodernist fiction transcends genre definitions.
Review: I am writing my final thesis for my masters degree on Paul Austers New York Trilogy and I would love to hear from anyone interested in his work (The Locked Room is of special interest to me). At the time N.Y. Trilogy was published it had a great impact on me. Now almost 15 years later I can still read the book with great pleasure. One of Austers best books yet. Compares easily with "Leaviathan" and is without doubt a more thorougly thougt thought book than his latest work of fiction "Timbuktu". I can recomend it to anyone who likes a kafkesque atmosphere in their reading.
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Summary: Deserving all the praise it gets, read it!
Review: These three works, though predicated upon unconventional metaphysics, seemed very real to me. Auster uses a great deal of literary liscense with regards to the nature of reality. I think it is a creative feet that Auster gets away with conveying this sort of reality without making the reader feel detached. This may be one of the reasons he uses the conventional "low art" plot device of a detective story in his works. New York Trilogy is profound in complexity without losing its flow as a novel readable to people who do not have a PhD in Comparative Literature. It is complex and worthy of drawn-out analytic discertation yet remains a compelling story. I would recomend it to anyone remotely interested in masterful contemporary fiction, regardless of the intensity of that interest.
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Summary: a multitude of confusion and interrelation
Review: The new york trilogy goes beyond the thoughts of one individual and begins to think about what would happen if......? Paths cross and nothing is ever as it seems. As you read this book the true feelings of each character are conveyed in a subtle manner and these develop over the three stories. Very individual in its writing, the new york trilogy the the eptione of all post-modern thrillers
Rating:
Summary: A metaphysical conundrum
Review: This trilogy of novels, or two novellas and a short story, as it should rightly be called, should be made essential reading for 1. Anyone travelling to New York in the near future, and 2. Anyone who would like to feel free of the realist grip that most literary fiction has been in, with some periods of upheaval, for far too long now. Auster makes the term 'post-modern' reader-friendly; after all, what is wrong with the author referring to himself as a fictitious character within his or her own work (even when he goes as far as introducing you to his home and meeting his wife)? This Auster does on various occasions in these loosely linked pseudo detective fictions, cramming in themes and obsessions such as the impulse to tell stories (within stories) and to get away from modern life, Hamsun-like, to go back to the roots of nature and language. But it's not done in any way that could be called pretentious. Auster is not interested in describing human features or writing two paragraphs (or six) on how a room looks; he is more interested in drawing parallels and trying to fix why something is where it is. Identity is his main concern, and within the parabola of his narrow range of reference points (Paris, the native American legacy, working on ships, New York, coincidences) he twists and turns with it as dexterously as Borges. Suffice to say that the three stories involve coincidence and searches passim. The initial story, City of Glass, about a writer who becomes a detective on an infuriating mission to find a man for a woman after a misdialled telephone call, appears again in the other stories both as himself and as a reflection of other characters engaged in looking for other mysterious characters. The point of the middle story, Ghosts, only becomes clear when you get to the end of the last, The Locked Room, by which time you have to go back and read the whole thing again (with pleasure). In the meantime you've been taken on the kind of existential, mythical journey that dignifies detective fiction well beyond its seeming limitations. It's fascinating to read how Auster has consistently used his real-life experiences (not all that exceptional on the face of it), to create such compulsive fiction, and you can get a lot of this from his autobiography, Hand To Mouth. It was inevitable that he would move into film-making one day, and his Lulu On The Bridge, has not disappointed (Smoke and Blue in The Face were worthy apprenticeships which he mainly scripted and had some directorial involvment in).Probably even better than NYT are Moon Palace and Leviathan.
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