Paul Auster ☆ 1 CHARACTERS
Casi desde el principio de la lectura de “Ciudad de cristal” percibí un cierto aire de familia que me estaba gustando mucho (estoy seguro de que Auster será mi nuevo redescubrimiento tras un tortuoso pasado juntos). Como esta sensación persistía, busqué en Google por si había más gente que hubiera sentido la misma cercanía literaria con Vila-Matas que yo estaba observando (y que después no noté tanto o no noté en absoluto en sus otras dos novelas que conforman la trilogía). Inmediatamente olvidé mi propósito pues lo que encontré fue sorprendente.
No solo Vila-Matas había descubierto a Auster con esta novela, no solo había escrito un ensayo titulado “No soy Paul Auster”, no solo mantiene con él una admiración mutua y una relación más o menos estrecha, sino que además parece ser que fue él quien le dio al autor americano el motivo para escribir esta novela.
En su “Cuaderno Rojo”, Auster cuenta que la idea de “Trilogía de Nueva York” surgió gracias a dos llamadas de teléfono equivocadas que recibió en dos días consecutivos. Parece ser, y esto pudiera ser solo una de esas maravillosas anécdotas que solo tienen el antipático defecto de no ser reales, que fue Vila-Matas, antes de conocer al autor, por quién por puro azar se hicieron esas llamadas después de que, confundiéndolo con Salinger, le persiguiera por Nueva York, tal y como el protagonista de la novela de Auster, un escritor llamado Quinn, hace con Peter Stillman.
“Nada era real excepto el azar.”
Mi comentario a toda la trilogía se puede leer aquí. Fiction, Memoir (Book 219 From 1001 Books) - The New York Trilogy: City of Glass (New York Trilogy #1), Paul Auster
City of Glass, features a detective-fiction writer become private investigator who descends into madness as he becomes embroiled in a case.
The first story, City of Glass, features a detective fiction writer-become-private investigator who descends into madness as he becomes embroiled in a case. It explores layers of identity and reality, from Paul Auster the writer of the novel to the unnamed author who reports the events as reality to Paul Auster the writer, a character in the story, to Paul Auster the detective, who may or may not exist in the novel, to Peter Stillman the younger, to Peter Stillman the elder and, finally, to Daniel Quinn, protagonist.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: ماه اکتبر سال2010میلادی
عنوان: شهر شیشه ای؛ پل آستر، مترجم: خجسته کیهان؛ تهران، کتابهای ارغوانی، سال1380، در160ص؛ شابک ایکس-964920637؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، افق، سال1394، در203ص؛ شابک9789643698768؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20م
عنوان: شهر شیشه ای؛ پل آستر، مترجم: شهرزاد لولاچی؛ تهران، افق، سال1383؛ در203ص، مصور، شابک9643691314؛ چاپ دوم سال1384؛ سوم سال1386؛ چهارم سال1388؛
مترجم: مهتاب کلانتری؛ تهران، بن گاه؛ سال1395؛ در155ص؛ شابک786005268324؛
شهر شیشه ای، کتاب نخست از سری «سه گانه نیویورک» است؛ شخصیت اصلی رمان «شهر شیشه ای»، «دانیل کوئین» نام دارد؛ ایشان نویسنده ای هستند که با نام مستعار «ویلیام ویلسون»، داستانهای پلیسی، و کارآگاهی مینویسند؛ «کوئین»، به واسطه کارگزار خود، داستانهایش را به چاپ میرساند، در نتیجه کسی از هویت (نام کوئین) ایشان، آگاهی ندارد؛ شخصیت اصلی رمانهای «کوئین»، «ورک» نام دارد؛ در حقیقت، «دانیل کوئین»، فردی با سه هویت («کوئین»، «ویلسون» و «ورک») شده بود، و هرکدام از این سه شخصیت، بخشی از هویت ایشان را، شکل میدادند؛ روزی یکی با خانه ی «کوئین» تماس میگیرد، و به دنبال کارآگاه خصوصی با نام «استر» میگردد؛ «کوئین» تصمیم میگیرد، برای مسخره کردن، و دست انداختن فرد پشت خط، خود را به جای «استر» جا بزند؛ از اینجا به بعد است، که هویتی دیگر، بر ایشان افزوده میشود، و او وادار میگردد، نقش کارآگاهی خصوصی را، بازی یا ایفا کند
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 18/12/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 06/10/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی Fiction, Memoir Paul Auster, a guy who ushers you into the silky interior of his brand new Nissan Infiniti, makes sure you've got your seatbelt on, proffers bonbons, then drives you to distraction.
This book is in contravention of TWO of PB's commandments:
- Thou shalt not have a character in thy book with thy own name
- Thou shalt not portray the writing of a novel within thy novel such that the novel within the novel turns out to be the novel the reader is reading
Fiction, Memoir
Paul Auster's City of Glass reads like Raymond Chandler on Derrida, that is, a hard-boiled detective novel seasoned with a healthy dose of postmodernist themes, a novel about main character Daniel Quinn as he walks the streets of uptown New York City.
I found the story and writing as compelling as Chandler's The Big Sleep or Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and as thought-provoking as reading an essay by Foucault or Barthes. By way of example, here are three quotes from the novel coupled with key concepts from the postmodern tradition along with my brief commentary.
On the first pages of the novel, the narrator conveys mystery writer Quinn's reflections on William Wilson, his literary pseudonym and Max Work, the detective in his novels. We read, Over the years, Work had become very close to Quinn. Whereas William Wilson remained an abstract figure for him Work had increasingly come to life. In the triad of selves that Quinn had become, Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist, Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise. ---------- Michel Foucault completely rejected the idea that a person has one fixed inner self or essence serving them as their individual personal identity. Rather, he saw personal identity as defined by a process of on-going, ever changing dialogue with oneself and others. ---------- And Quinn's interior dialogue with Work and Wilson is just the beginning. As the novels progresses, Quinn takes on a number of other identities.
In his role as hired detective (quite an ironic role since Quinn is a fiction writer and has zero experience as a detective), he goes to Grand Central Station to locate a man by the name of Peter Stillman, the man he will have to tail. This is what we read after Quinn spots his man, At that moment Quinn allowed himself a glance to Stillman's right, surveying the rest of the crowd to make doubly sure he made no mistakes. What happened then defined explanation. Directly behind Stillman, heaving into view just inches behind his right shoulder, another man stopped . . . His face was the exact twin of Stillman's. ---------- The double, the original and the copy, occupies the postmodernists on a number of levels, including a double reading of any work of literature. Much technical language is employed, but the general idea is we should read a work of fiction the first time through in the conventional, traditional way, enjoying the characters and the story.
Our second reading should be more critical than the first reading we constructed; to be good postmodernists, we should `deconstruct' the text to observe and critically evaluate such things as cultural and social biases and underlying philosophic assumptions. And such a second reading should not only be applied to works of literature but to all our encounters with facets of contemporary mass-duplicated society.
As for Quinn, it is impossible for me to say where he is now. I have followed the red notebook as closely as I could, and any inaccuracies in the story should be blamed on me. ---------- One key postmodern idea is that a book isn't so much about the world as it is about joining the conversation with other books. ---------- Turns out, the entire story here is a construction/deconstruction/reconstruction of a book: Quinn's red notebook. Life and literature living at the intersection of an ongoing conversation - Quinn's red notebook contains references to many, many other books, including the Diary of Marco Polo, Robinson Caruso, the Bible, Don Quixote and Baudelaire. And the story the narrator relates from Quinn's red notebook is City of Glass by Paul Auster. Again, Raymond Chandler on Derrida.
One final observation. Although no details are given, Quinn tells us right at the outset he has lost his wife and son. Quinn's tragedy coats every page like a kind of film. No matter what form a story takes, modern or postmodern or anything else, tragedy is tragedy and if we empathize with Quinn at all, we feel his pain. Some things never change.
New York City author Paul Auster, Born 1947
“Would it be possible, he wondered, to stand up before the world and with the utmost conviction spew out lies and nonsense? To say that windmills were knights, that a barber’s basin was a helmet, that puppets were real people? Would it be possible to persuade others to agree with what he said, even though they did not believe him? In other words, to what extent would people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement? The answer is obvious, isn’t it? To any extent. For the proof is that we still read the book. It remains highly amusing to us. And that’s finally all anyone wants out of a book—to be amused.”
― Paul Auster, City of Glass Fiction, Memoir The novel is apparently written under the impression of Death and the Compass by Jorge Luis Borges and there are many allusions to the other tales by that wizard of modern literature. Both City of Glass and Death and the Compass are the most original postmodern mysteries I ever read.
Whatever he knew about these things, he had learned from books, films, and newspapers. He did not, however, consider this to be a handicap. What interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories.
City of Glass is a game – an intellectual game of a private eye and a criminal. But it’s a game of madmen – a paranoid writer pretends to be a private detective and attempts to save the paranoid son from his paranoid father.
In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.
We all play some roles – we play ourselves and impersonate the others and in the end personifications substitute our true selves. Fiction, Memoir
Nominated for an Edgar award for best mystery of the year, City of Glass inaugurates an intriguing New York Trilogy of novels that The Washington Post Book World has classified as post-existentialist private eye... It's as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version. As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. Written with hallucinatory clarity, City of Glass combines dark humor with Hitchcock-like suspense.
Ghosts and The Locked Room are the next two brilliant installments in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy.
City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, #1) 'For if you do not consider the man before you to be human, there are few restraints of conscience on your behaviour towards him.'
It’s very hard to put the novel under the thriller-crime genre. I wouldn’t even have thought of doing that perhaps unless the book wasn’t marketed that way. Because, even when the story relates to that sub-plot, the thriller elements have the least emphasis for most of the story. I mean, of course, it is thrilling in the way it unfolds, but that’s way too unconventional for this genre. The unfolding is in a Lynchian format but the synchronization appeared to me almost like a combination of Kafka’s The Trial with two of Martin Scorsese’s movies, After Hours and (obviously) Taxi Driver. More of the former than the latter, because it definitely has a Kafkaesque quality even when the existentialism is almost like a retelling from Albert Camus’ novels.
Now, I won’t tell anything about the story here, because the less you know about the plot, the better. Besides, it’s not about the plot, but more about the experience with this novella. But there are some things that I can’t keep within me. #Take a deep breath.
First of all, the pragmatic yet semi-abstract tonality at the very first of the novel, through which the entire life of our protagonist up to the point of the story’s beginning is summarized. The manner can almost be called stoical for the philosophical tone, and basically warns you about how different this story is going to be from just a traditional hard-boiled detective fiction. Not that it doesn’t have the usual traits. Even there’s a glimpse of sensuality in parts, which I didn’t expect in the ways they were presented.
Secondly, the Tarantinoesque conversations, that can simultaneously be criticized for drifting away from the topic yet admired for the concepts that shed light on, like Genesis or the actual importance of language in describing the functionality of everyday objects. I genuinely loved the Humpty Dumpty reference, amongst all. And the crime about which the novel talks, is absolutely unique in its originality as well. At least for me. But as I said at the start of this paragraph, the constant phase-ins and outs may turn out to be tiresome for the majority of the readers so be warned- this is really not everyone’s cup of tea.
It’s almost frightening as to how many works of literature were paid homage to throughout the pages, even at 133 pages, it is really dense. Firstly, Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, in one of the character’s monologues. Maybe it’s all in my mind, but Benjamin’s inability to maintain a linear structure in his thinking process is the first thing that does come to mind when you hear Peter Stillman jr. speak.
I am Peter Stillman. That is not my real name. my real name is peter rabbit. In the winter I am Mr White, in the summer I am Mr Green. Think what you like of this. I say it of my own free will. Wimble click crumblechaw beloo. It is beautiful, is it not?
And also, there’s a very fascinating homage to both Ellery Queen, and outlandish as it may seem, Cervantes in his Don Quixote. The style of using the author’s name as one of the pivotal characters definitely goes back to Ellery Queen, and the reference to Cervantes is directly stated in the novel. Not only that, but the author also got past his single complaint on Don Quixote that the character Cid Hamete Benengeli, who was supposed to be the chronicler, didn’t appear once in the course of the massive novel. I mean, this one is worth reading for the weird yet fascinating stylizations (like this one) alone.
“But why did Quixote go to such lengths?”
“He wanted to test the gullibility of man. To what extent would people tolerate blasphemies, lies, and nonsense if they gave them amusement? The answer: to any extent. For the book is still amusing us today. That’s finally all anyone wants out of a book. To be amused.”
The metaphysical aspects are absolutely fabulous in the same way too. The entire novel is based in New York with accurate depictions of the city and the streets and its people, but all of that is layered with a surreal cover, (just like Kafka’s The Trial, or more appropriately in Scorsese’s After Hours, where the protagonist roams across the city streets throughout the night but the city isn’t just the same) and the city seems to have developed a very absurd yet beguiling trance that swallows our characters. Probably that’s why the name is because the city is a significant character in the story as well. I wonder if this is where Michael Mann had got his inspiration for Heat or Collateral?
“I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap.”
Actually, I’m quite glad that I’m reading it now, not the first time I have heard of it. Had I read it four or five years back I would honestly have wondered what the hell was going on, and would probably have never finished it.
“Time makes us grow old, but it also gives us the day and the night...Lying is a bad thing. It makes you sorry you were ever born. And not to have been born is a curse. You are condemned to live outside time. And when you live outside time, there is no day and night. You don't get a chance to die.” Fiction, Memoir What a disaster. This is like a vastly inferior The Crying of Lot 49. People who like it presumably call it a brilliant subversion of traditional mystery-genre expectations. I call it bullshit.
Basically there's this writer, Quinn, who gets a mysterious call looking for a detective called Paul Auster (Auster, the author, is apparently the sort of author who includes himself as a character in his books...sigh). Quinn of course takes on both the case and Auster's identity. The only good parts of the book, I think, are when Quinn tries to act hard-boiled with the stereotypical femme, which works because he's read so many hard-boiled mystery novels. Haha.
This quickly gets old as he follows a senile old man aimlessly around New York. But is this old man's wandering aimless? No! It turns out if you plot his movements on a map, they spell letters, which in turn spell words! But then those words turn out to have no bearing on the plot of this shitshow of a book. Auster abandons the heretofore somewhat interesting case, getting rid of all its characters in singularly unspectacular fashion, in favor of an identity crisis for the narrator. Quinn/Auster is so confused about his identities that he is driven insane. I've seen this before, this idea that a man with two identities or secret lives will inevitably go crazy. Whence this ridiculous notion? Actors do it with no problem, for the most part. Writers can do it, too. Clearly Auster does it himself, to no detrimental psychic effect. The whole conceit seems not only flawed but pointless, especially since the execution of the identity crisis itself is so lackluster. It's less like watching someone lose their mind and more like watching someone's grocery bag slowly rip.
I briefly had hopes that some of the threads Auster so unceremoniously dropped would be picked up in the rest of the New York Trilogy, but it looks like the novels are only linked thematically, which means I certainly will not be reading them. Seriously, fuck Paul Auster. Fiction, Memoir Bu kitabın en etkileyici yanı; suç, felsefe ve teolojik sorgulamaları bir araya getirip garip bir dedektiflik hikayesi üzerinden bir insanın düşüşüne bağlaması ve buna rağmen çok rahat okunan bir metin olması. Teslis metaforu, Don Kişot çıkmazı ve “yumurtalar” alegorisi eşliğinde bir polisiye . Çok acayip ve çok iyi. Fiction, Memoir A very intriguing exploration of the power of language to make (and unmake) the borders of our existence and the reality we experience.
The main character, Quinn, is a writer of detective stories. One day, he decides to take on a serious detective job. His decision to do so, prompted by a mere phone call, seemingly represents the enthralling power of suggestion.
Quinn's willing engagement with the caller, and the events that unfold from there, convey a heavily slanted view of language-experience praxis. Quinn becomes helplessly swept up in the lives of his interlocutors. He is held in thrall to the extent that he becomes a blank vehicle for their tragedies and mysterious lives.
Why is this so? Auster has chosen a detective writer as a main character, whose sole means of support - as far as the reader can determine - comes from royalties from the sale of mystery books. Quinn begins the story with a knowledge of the chase, but no experience as a real detective. His real-life case, far from being an extreme case of text-to-self transference, seems to illustrate a larger truth about a dark power inherent in language, wherein word-reality has a supernatural ability to leap over cognitive barriers to create and destroy human experience.
If you're still reading this review, you may wonder if the story is really just about a guy who has a pretty straightforward psychotic break. This is entirely possible but the rest of the story makes it seem unlikely.
Context clues indicate that the story really is an allegory, representing the fragility of the human condition as portrayed in the downfall and disappearance of the book's characters. Language, in this case, is the agent of the Fall. Auster explicitly refers to the biblical Tower of Babel, mirroring the anomic results of that story with Quinn's own descent into confusion.
The characters grope with the unknown limits of their lives, including their identity, their survival, and the peace of mind they all struggle to obtain.
How does this play out in the story? The lightning rod of language is given a central agent, an insane professor (now a harmless codger) whose release from prison triggers Quinn's descent. He is summoned to protect the professor's victimized son, at which time he begins to unravel a sordid tale that eventually proves to be a gigantic McGuffin.
Behold the facts: that the professor, in his heyday, attempted to abolish language and raise his son in isolation from it. This child abuse, and the linguistic hubris from which it was born, creates a legacy of suffering which ultimately destroys all it touches. Consider also that each character affected by the professor seems afflicted by a curse: they wind up broke, insane, dead, or missing. Even the main character is powerless to stop his own descent into indigence as he continues his quixotic pursuit of the word-abolisher.
Yet what does the Professor actually do? He roams Manhattan, collecting junk, muttering nonsense.
Meanwhile, the professor's son and his wife disappear, leaving a trail of bounced checks. But Quinn is unaware or unwilling to explore these new developments. Instead he lays in wait, hoping to catch the professor before he can do any harm.
Again, unbeknownst to him, the professor commits suicide, leaving the detective in the absurd position of waiting for a dead man, sleeping in a dumpster and losing everything.
Finally, Quinn gives up. He returns to his apartment, his quarry lost, his paychecks bounced, and finds that a new tenant has taken his place. In search of some redemption - anything at all - he returns to the professor's son's empty apartment. His job is now meaningless, his role irrelevant. The professor and his son left him to his own vacuity, their hysterics all but sick jokes at Quinn's expense.
Now, the doors to the empty place are unlocked, seemingly in silent assent to Quinn's condition and fate. He removes his clothes and begins scribbling inane phrases in his notebook. Food appears before him as he writes, but soon he disappears. Later, we are led to understand, his notebooks serve to inform the narrator of the above events.
Now Auster's vision becomes clear. We may see a significant pattern in the impotence of the characters to prevent their demise, articulated here through an assent to participate in language games. In this absurd menage-a-trois, Auster seems to point to an innate human desire - an instinct - to interpret reality on a level of verbal/linguistic constructions, regardless of the larger implications of this praxis. Each character accepts their tragedy without question, first acceding the roles of detective, madman, and victim, then bum, corpse, and missing person. As this fatal flaw unravels the protagonist's author-life, the reader recalls the mysterious deaths described by Auster at the beginning of the story. In a prior life, Quinn had a family, which also disappeared. Between the end of this life and the beginning of City, the main character developed a hunger: for companionship, for another life, for a new role to play.
Yet his hunger impelled him toward another end altogether, an inner death in the form of an overreaching projection of words on reality, the absurd City of Glass. In becoming his own detective character, Quinn paid his final homage to the power of words, a mistake for which he paid with his home, his identity, and his mind. Babel, indeed. Fiction, Memoir نمیشود آنقدر از چیزی متنفر بود مگر آنکه قسمتی از روحمان آن را بسیار دوست داشته باشد.
به شدت از این کتاب خوشم اومد(جوری که به روزه تمومش کردم) از برخی لحاظ شبیه عامه پسند بود، ولی این کتاب خیلی جذاب تر بود Fiction, Memoir