Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2144 in Books
• Published on: 1988-10-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Synopsis
Three stories on the nature of identity. In the first a detective writer is drawn into a curious and baffling investigation, in the second a man is set up in an apartment to spy on someone, and the third concerns the disappearance of a man whose childhood friend is left as his literary executor.

Customer Reviews

painless way into postmodernist metafiction
This is a series of subtle interlocking novellas set in New York published over 85 and 86: City of Glass, "Ghosts" and "Locked Room with the first set in the period, the 2nd in the 40's and the last one in the 70's. They use mystery conventions of the gumshoe detective (think Humphrey Bogart) but in a subversive way as an existentialist reflection on writing, and story creation and communication but at the pace of a thriller; it more Kafka then Chandler with haunting imagery and surreal coincidences. But it also has deep emotional and psychological depths.

To give you a flavour of the book, in the City of Glass the main Character is Daniel Quinn a writer who has abandoned writing except for mystery writing owing to the death of his wife and child. He is successful enough to only need to write one novel a year which he has just done and then he drifts. He is clearly depressed and only feels alive when he is the private eye of his novels. One night he receives a midnight phone call asking for a detective called Paul Auster( yes the real author is also a later character in the story) and after several rejections he decides to act as if were his private eye character. His clients are a child-man who is a survivor of a dreadful abuse by his father (he was deprived of language as part of an experiment in discovering the natural language of man before the fall of the Tower of Babel) and his wife a nurse who had married him so that he could leave the hospital. The father now elderly is being released from Mental hospital and they fear that the son will be killed and want protection.

The story then takes many twists and turns and ends with the author as character being criticised by a final narrator who may be one of the characters from the other stories for what happens to Daniel Quinn during the course of the story.

In the Locked Room all the characters are named after colours and it's a classical stake-out story but is it? Or is it a reflection on the lives of characters once that have been created and written about?

The final story is of two friends who have drifted apart, one wanted to be a writer and is now a critic unable to create works of his own imagination. He discovers that his friend has disappeared leaving a wife and baby and a locked room of manuscripts. These turn out to be masterpieces of novels, plays, and poems far beyond his capability of writing. In preparing those for publishing he re-enters and re-evaluates his life long friendship and what it meant but at a cost as he faces a secret that tests him and his relationships to destruction.

Paul Auster's draws on his own colourful work life in his struggle to become a writer so the stories have a grain of gritty realism. But they are interlinked by an interest in the impact of coincidences and lives lived in minimalist even ascetic ways against a background of a loss, failure and absent fathers and reflections on writing and storytelling. If you want a painless way into postmodernist metafiction then this is the book for you. Highly recommended

Very Different
Two things I have got out of reading this book. First, this author must be one of the best in breaking down complex characters and take the plot where you don't expect it to go. Second, he never finishes the story, at least not in a normal way. I read his book "Travels in the scriptorium" last month and got the same feeling. Nevertheless a five star rating is the least you can give to such a wonderful read.

Kafka Gets Private-eyesed
Where Kafka's characters find themselves being frustrated and circumscribed by a system (The Castle & The Trial etc), in Auster's world (New York) this task, it seems, has been privatised and has become the job of private detectives, or those hiring them. It's a very strange world and just as in the narrative where, you can't decide who's following who, the reader (in my case) couldn't decide, whether I was reading the author or the author was reading me. As nothing remarkable continues to happen, throughout the book, there emerges a strange feeling that something is being implied about the reader's identity: that we become the thing we pursue.

I am not sure what 'modern' means when it is applied to other art-forms but from this I would gather that it means, when applied to a novel, a form where something is going on in the relationship between the narrator and the reader which is independent of the actual narrative. So a simple story about one human simply observing another, begins to suggest uncomfortable questions about the reader's relationship with other people and how that relationship cannot but form identity. At times in the depths of these stories, there seems to be some kind of hidden koan at work on the problem of individual identity: this can be slightly disconcerting.

It is a very strange reading experience, which some will find slightly unpleasant or simply bewildering, but as a psychological experiment it really is fascinating.

So, I wouldn't recommend it to everyone but for those willing to try out a rather different sort of reading experience, it is well worth a try.