The Trilogy is also a highly philosophical work. However, unlike most post-modern fiction, the philosophy is tightly wound into the structure or narrative of the novel. The philosophy is almost inseparable from the fiction itself. It’s no mere gratuitous insertion designed to contribute to either length or literary pretension. In other words, it’s both relevant and essential to the fiction:

This first tale follows a writer-turned-detective whose interest in detective fiction eventually was so overwhelming that he became a detective himself. He finds a case and is overwhelmed by it. As he considers the odds and ends of it, he feels he might be going crazy. In this story, the detective works closely with the author, Paul Auster, who may or may not be real; the character has a hard time remembering where the lines of reality are. The protagonist is revealed to be Daniel Quinn who wonders extensively about Don Quixote throughout the prose. Fiction entangles and ensnares the reader in a hall of mirrors, in which everybody is both watcher and watched: La habitación cerrada (1986): creo que aquí hay un problema de usurpación de vida, más que nada. Una forma práctica y poco sutil del intercambio de identidad. A un hombre le piden que se encargue de los manuscritos de un escritor desaparecido. Todo lo que viene después sería mucho más emocionante si hubiera menos enredos con mujeres que no salen del interés amoroso y/o del interés sexual. El personaje principal me cansó con sus hormonas (y es un adulto, vale aclarar). La literatura vuelve a ocupar un plano importante, ya que las publicaciones y la escritura mueven las decisiones de un protagonista que desentierra el pasado casi para siempre. La novela está narrada en primera persona, pero el personaje que narra me desagrada.Fiction: 1987 New York Trilogy; '88 In the Country of Last Things; '89 Moon Palace '91 The Music of Chance '92 Leviathan '94 Mr Vertigo '99 Timbuktu 2002 The Book of Illusions 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. Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Old_pallet IA18196 Openlibrary_edition This book is a particular kind of great. It's unique in my view, but that's not saying much because my basis for comparison is rather small, so let me elaborate.

I have this loose policy that whenever I'm reading a book of fiction, I also read something non-fiction; and in this particular instance, "City of Glass" was counterbalanced by David Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. He fled to New York to study at Columbia in 1965, but the sense of isolation went with him. As he had done at home, he hid by "reading like a demon. Really, I think every idea I have came to me in those years. I don't think I've had a new idea since I was 20."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. Alas, isn'tthatexactly what New York is? An amalgamation of stark differences that, with a seeming touch of magic, coalesce to present an oddly uniform image of thecharacter of the city? 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.

IBS: It is innovative. Very much so, and, for one reason or another, what’s new about it concurs with the ideas that emerged in French theory and hit the literary scene round about the time you published The New York Trilogy. Strikingly, Auster, who almost always writes in the first person both in fiction and non-fiction, becomes in the story of his own life, "A". The distance created by slipping from first to third person reads like a quiet sigh of denial and loneliness, of someone who, he writes, was "living to the side of himself". Il mio primo incontro con Paul Auster è stato circa trent’anni fa (1990) quando Guanda pubblicò La musica del caso (e si da il caso che il “caso” ritorna). Fu subito amore. Amore grande.So far so good. I'm about three-quarters through the first story of the trilogy and I'm enjoying it, without actually liking it, if that makes sense. Auster seems to owe a clear debt of influence to Mamet - there's the same predilection for games, puzzles, and the influence of chance. Thankfully, the influence doesn't extend to dialog, which Mamet has always seemed to me to wield clumsily, like a blunt instrument. Auster is more subtle, but he still holds his characters at such a remote distance, it gives his writing a cerebral quality that is offputting at times. Thus, one can enjoy the situations he sets up and the intricacies of the story, without quite liking his fiction. The moment comes when you're formed and you can't be influenced any more," he says. Lauterbach says that, in Auster's case, this is probably true, but not always to his benefit: "The themes in Paul's books haven't changed since when I first met him more than 20 years ago: he's still looking at the nature of fate; he's still looking at how events impact on a person; he's still looking at the effect of chance."