The New York Trilogy

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Vaneigem, Raoul. 2003. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Rebel Press. Original edition, 1967. 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. 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. was defined in the following terms: “A mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. The term

His Trilogy is a fugue on the collapsing of personalities into identities, of identities into a single uncertain, shifting identity base, and of that, in turn, into the game or play of the postmodernist text, a process first adumbrated a century and a half ago in Poe’s always-already postmodernist hermeneutic allegory of the inaccessibility of the dark secrets in our hearts. ( 1999, 112) Kayser, Wolfgang. 1963. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Trans. Ulrich Weisstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Original edition, 1957. Auster builds his metaphysics on the foundation of facts and empiricism, before embracing the challenge of metafiction.

De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Original edition, 1984.

Bloom, Harold (ed.) Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Paul Auster (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publisher, 2004) ISBN 0791076628. Several essays on The New York Trilogy.

Jim Jarmush recita insieme a Harvey Keitel nel film scritto e diretto da Paula Auster “Blue in the Face”, 1995. Now, it is not my aim to create a sort of synchronicity between any two books I have on the go at any certain time. In this case, my non-fiction choice was based solely on the fact that the book was immediately available. Sophie arrived at the writer’s apartment each night until the following Thursday, when she seemed to have an argument with him. Nobody drew the curtains this time, because Sophie left the apartment and slammed the front door, leaving the writer to resume his reading. I took this opportunity to go downstairs in the hope that I would cross paths with Sophie and see what condition she was in. I caught her just as she was entering our building. Although we hadn’t spoken much up to that point, I said I was going out for a drink at the local bar and asked if she was interested. She smiled courteously and replied that she would like to have, but she had to settle some business or other with her mother-in-law. Na filmovima se često dešava da vispreni zlikovac, pošto ispuca sve kvarnjačke trikove, namami heroja u nekakvu sobu sa ogledalima, kako bi ga ošamutio sopstvenom (herojevom) sposobnošću zapažanja i napokon ga sebi skinuo s vrata. Tako se protagonista nađe u sasvim neprirodnom haosu: pošto je vizualno bombardovan svojim iskrivljenim odrazima, mora da prebaci oslonac na auditivna opažanja, te osluškuje tišinu, zaustavlja disanje, pažljivo hoda kroz srču, sve vreme kalkulišući koliko mu još municije ostalo u šaržeru, gde će i kad da opali. Tako mnogobrojni efekti napnu gledaoca do ivice stolice, ali se pravi uzrok dramatičnosti krije u, napokon, pravednoj situaciji: zlikovac je – obrni, okreni – u istom sosu kao junak, te će pobediti bolji. Tuče na ferku su visoko cenjene u svim krugovima, pa niko ne zamera što je to malo bajata fora.

The New York Trilogy is perhaps the most astonishing work by one of America's most consistently astonishing writers. The Trilogy is three cleverly interconnected novels that exploit the elements of standard detective fiction and achieve a new genre that is all the more gripping for its starkness. It is a riveting work of detective fiction worthy of Raymond Chandler, and at the same time a profound and unsettling existentialist enquiry in the tradition of Kafka or Borges. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of what it means to be human. The New York Trilogy is the modern novel at its finest: a truly bold and arresting work of fiction with something to transfix and astound every reader. Little, William G. 1997. Nothing to go on: Paul Auster’s “City of glass”. Contemporary Literature 38 (1): 133–163. 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. Mă înşelasem. Fanshawe era exact unde eram şi eu şi fusese acolo încă de la bun început. Din momentul în care sosise scrisoarea lui, eu mă străduisem să mi-l închipui, să-l văd aşa cum ar fi putut să fie, dar mintea mea vizualiza întotdeauna un vid imens, în cel mai bun caz, reuşeam să creez o imagine destul de săracă: uşa unei camere încuiate. Asta era tot: Fanshawe se afla singur în acea cameră, condamnat la o singurătate mitică, poate în viaţă, poate respirînd, visînd la Dumnezeu ştie ce. Acea cameră, mi-am dat eu seama atunci, se afla înăuntrul craniului meu” (p.311).For Hofstadter, this means the ability to interpret a system in a way that isn't explicitly contained within that system, which is a crucial tool for any mathematician (or more specifically, any meta-mathematician). And it's a crucial tool for Paul Auster the writer too. In "City of Glass," he creates a "strange loop" (Hofstadter's term) between the world captured by the narrative and the one inhabited by the reader, with no clear line between them: the boundaries between what's real and what's fiction are masterfully blurred.