The New York Trilogy

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One of the more startling examples of how the postmodernist structure connects firmly with the themes of identity is the not exactly coincidental appearance of a character named Paul Auster who is a writer. Then there is the significant contextual connection between great American writers of the 1800s like Poe, Melville and Hawthorne and the even more direct intertextual relationship between City of Glass and Don Quixote. IBS: I’m not suggesting The New York Trilogy is your best book but that, generally speaking, it may be your most important work. Those series of coincidences that mark the narrative of the stories that make up The New York Trilogy are interconnected to one way or another with yet another piece of threat tying the stories together: the Double. The real mystery at the heart of the quest of the detectives in this book is how identity of the self is inextricably intertwined with the legitimacy of the self and how those unexpected yet hardly ever surprising “mechanics of reality” serve to interfere with the processes of apprehending identity and establishing legitimacy.

Russell, Alison. 1990. Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster’s Anti-Detective Fiction. Critique 31 (2): 71–84. l’intera poetica di Auster per come ho imparato a percepirla, temi che si ritrovano anche nelle sue opere seguenti. Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth. In The Aleph and Other Stories, 95–104. New York: Penguin Books. Original edition, 1949. All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other out. Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible. Knabb, Ken, ed. 2006. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets. Original edition, 1981.

Vaneigem, Raoul. 2003. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Rebel Press. Original edition, 1967. If Virginia Stillman had appeared to be forward, Sophie was even more enthusiastic. She walked into the bedroom, turned on a bedside light and started to remove her blouse. Then she looked out the window, through which it was quite possible that she could see me and my binoculars. She didn’t seem overly alarmed, although she walked over and closed the bedroom curtains.

PA: The New York Trilogy is always going to be attached to my name, no matter where I go, no matter how many other things I write. There’s nothing I can do about it. 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. 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."

City of Glass has an intertextual relationship with Miguel de 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. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.... In 2009, Audible.com produced an audio version of The New York Trilogy, narrated by Joe Barrett, as part of its Modern Vanguard line of audiobooks.

Negde na polovini Njujorške trilogije piše da je primarni cilj svake knjige da zabavi čitaoca. Ako je to Oster hteo, u mom slučaju je potpunosti ispunio cilj: silno sam se zabavljala sve vreme, malo i na bis. A kako i ne bih, kad je unutra strpao sve i svašta: detektivske priče od vrste misterioznih, književne aluzije, svakovrsne anegdote i zabavne pričice (kako je Servantes sve hteo da nas zezne zamenom identiteta, kako je obdukciju Volta Vitmena radio jedan smotanko forenzičar, kako glavni projektant Bruklin bridža nikad nogom nije kročio na svoj most), maskiranja, malo Vavilonske kule, malo Pariza, mnogo Njujorka, mnogo ispisanih svezaka, pisaca, izdavača, seksa, dece i beba, poštanskih fahova, taštine, voajerske ostrašćenosti, zanesenjaštva, hazarderstva,...a između čitaoca i sveg tog zamešateljstva stoji neko ko igra kolariću – paniću sa likovima i imenima, dok je Pol Oster (imenom) epizodista koji obavlja neka svoja posla, pa se zbuni (kao i čitalac) kad čuje kakve se to stvari sve zbivaju na ovome svetu. IBS: Well, if this book is where some of your major realizations concerning knowledge and truth were consolidated, might we not see The New York Trilogy as one of your most important books, if not the most important? The reviewers and critics do. This statement is part of an almost Nabokovian game, because we readers know and understand that the whole novel is make-believe. We encounter the narrator, a writer by profession, navigating the choppy waters of passion and commitment, forever brooding on an entire range of topics: life and death, self and other, childhood and memory, friendship and fatherhood, love and hate, reading and writing, self-definition and self-identity. Little, William G. 1997. Nothing to go on: Paul Auster’s “City of glass”. Contemporary Literature 38 (1): 133–163.

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. Emilsson, Wilhelm. 2002. Iain Sinclair’s Unsound Detectives. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43 (3): 271–288.