The New York Trilogy [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Not Shakespeare but Kafka waves and smiles at the readers, as Auster takes them into his New York, a City of Glass, filled with Colors and containing the secrets of Locked Rooms.
But Auster's world is not the world of tourists and stock brokers. It is the world of knowledge, the intimate conscience of literature, philosophy and the psyche of man. He carefully builds up a card-house of themes and expectations - only to turn it all around the next instance and to make the reader understand that it is not a card-house at all, but a mirror into which he made the reader stare. To relate the details and incidents would be a waste of time, that is best left to Auster.
But to those who are not afraid of the unexpected, those who enjoy elaborate weirdness at times and who have the willpower to triumph over the novel by finishing this book that at times almost comes alive and seems to fight the reader's intention...to those of you I can promise a really good time!

P. Auster's "NYT" is one of the most gripping and fascinating books I've ever read. It's such af different novel compared to "normal" detective stories, puzzling and mysterious from the moment you start reading until you've finished. You just cannot stop thinking about it! It's a book that demands the attention and imagination of its readers- like P. Auster himself once mentioned: "The book is not a mathematical equation to be solved, it's rather a springboard for your imagination." Isn't imagination one of the most vital things we have? Isn't a book which provokes imagination one of the most precious literary pieces of work we have? However, P. Auster's book has many more layers. In "City of Glass" the author shows brillianty how easily we can be subject to obedience without even noticing. But he doesn't leave us alone with this fact, but shows us a way to liberate ourselves from this state of ignorance: By solitude and reflection, questioning and experiencing ourselves, he claims, we can put an end to our ignorance and be truly ourselves. And Auster's book is a start: He really almost forces us not to just accept his story, not to accept the nearly godlike powers an autor has over his novel, but to fill his story with our own ideas, to think for ourselves and not to just let ourselves get lost and suppressed by the course of the story. - "City of Glass" is a wonderful piece about the relationship between authors and his readers. I believe, the reason for making his novels so confusing, is to show us that the author has the power to lead us anywhere he wants to and even to tell us lies as long as we the readers don't start to use our owen mind and start to object. There'd be so much more to say about "City of Glass", but let me just mention only one more aspect- the title. What does it provoke in our minds? Maybe a city where everyone can see everyone and think that they are free to do anything, but in fact are not for being confined to "Locked Rooms" and not being able to communicate with others. However, it might also provoke the image of a room of mirrors with the person inside it thinking he or she is surrounded by infinity of space and dozen of people, while in fact he or she sees only mere images of his or her own- sees "Ghosts". The titles of the thress stories are very much intertwined and they all are somehow connected. "Ghosts" the second part of the trilogy, for instance, also takes up the idea of a person being trapped in a locked room, being subject to manipulation of others. But apart from that I believe, it's very much about failure of communication: Blue (the protagonist) mentions that the words he's written down don't express what he's actually feeling - the limits of words. Words, our sole attempt to communicate with each other, can reveal and obscure so much, an so in some sense we are all ghosts, able to see each other, but because of the fallibility of words, unable to genuinely communicate with each other, so in fact the writer is writing about and for ghosts. Another thing which struck me, was Blue's statement that he had read something and felt like having done nothing: This is what Auster critises: People who merely read books to claim they've read them in fact haven't done anything at all. Reading a book passively without questioning is like doing nothing! However, "Ghosts", even more than "CofG" provokes you to project yourself into the story, like in a fairytale there a scarcely any details, but by creating them in your mind you get totally involved in the story - again Auster stipulates imagination. "The locked room" treats (much stronger than the first to parts of the trilogy) on the theme of being commanded by another person/ power- and on tearing oneself away from the foreign control. I believe these moments, when the characters realize who and what they are, and take action to change their condition by escaping from the Locked Room, are the most essential moments of the trilogy for they remind the readers that they, too, have a part in creating the book. Works of fiction, which demand the readers to imagine the scenes and protagonists of a book, have too often become locked rooms with the author dictating the course of the story. But the readers themselves can- like the characters of Auster's story- escape from these locked rooms. In other words, if we, are conscious of the ways in which we are being manipulated, then we too can take control of the text and make it our own. And in that way we can fill the text with our own emotions and imaginations, making it a story whcih can teach us a lot- because it's a story about our own feelings and sensations. To actively questioning readers this text becomes a reflecting pool that shows us our own souls.

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.