City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, Vol 1)

by Paul Auster

book data

1,236 ratings, 3.87 average rating, 102 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		30%
4		37%
3		23%
2		6%
1		2%

edit

published

April 7th 1987 (first published 1985) by Penguin (Non-Classics)

binding

Paperback, 208 pages

setting

The United States

literary awards

Edgar Awards Best Novel nominee (1986)

isbn

0140097317 (isbn13: 9780140097313)

description

A mystery writer assumes a detective's identity and embarks on a bizzare case: he must protect a man from his criminally insane father, and as he foll...more

find at: Amazon | Half.com | Barnes & Noble | compare prices ($4.99)…

new topic
discuss this book

topics	posts	views	last activity
The Next Best Boo...: OFFICIAL SPRING CHALLENGE - 2009	6462	7311	21 days ago, 02:57PM

friend reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

lists with this book

Favorite Books

823 books | 867 voters

More lists...

other reviews (showing 1-20 of 1,538)

sort: default (?) | date
filters: all | text-only

08/08/07

Sean Duffy rated it:

Something about a guy following an old guy and Humpty Dumpty being profound and then the Tower of Babel and stuff. I guess I'm too dumb. Incomprehensible. Either I have been stricken with the curse of Babel, or this is a pretentious mess. You be the judge. Also, the artwork may have been ahead of its time, but after so many great graphic novels, it looks rather pedestrian. SORRY!

Like this review? yes (2 people liked it)

add a comment

05/13/08

Daniel rated it:

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 vie...more

Like this review? yes (2 people liked it)

add a comment

05/12/08

Esther rated it:

bookshelves: fiction

Read in June, 2008

Just goes to show how good of a writer Paul Auster is. Writers like him and Cormac McCarthy get away with writing stories that I can't imagine writing, let alone understanding how to keep the momentum. The protagonist, Daniel Quinn (mistaken for Paul Auster), even in his most unbelievable moments, stays believable. The metafictional aspect of this book combined with the mystery novel nature was an intriguing cerebral mind fuck that kept me reading frantically. Not a book for plot cravers (not at...more

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

1 comment

06/14/09

WaiThain added it

The quote that strikes me the most is “He was alive, and the stubbornness of this fact had little by little begun to fascinate him” (6) because this description shows that Quinn is beginning to accept himself. In the beginning of the chapter, Quinn seems to be a lonely person and does not like to have company or have connection with the outside world. Also, when he writes a novel, he has to use a substituted name, and it shows that he does not have confident for himself. However, the quote t...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

06/02/09

Indigo rated it:

Read in May, 2009

I didn't like this book very much, because there was too much going on all at once. It's about a man named Quinn who is a writer under the pseudonym William Wilson. He considers Wilson to be sort of another person within himself, and there is also Max Work, yet another personality that he has. One day the phone rings and it is a man who refers to him as Paul Auster, a spy who is supposedly working on a case for him. Quinn decides to take on the role of being a spy and pretending to be Auster,...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

05/21/09

Samantha rated it:

bookshelves: fourth-quarter, new-york-stories

When we first received the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, I thought it was going to be extremely boring, because the last book we read in New York Stories was not one of my favorites. But to my surprise, City of Glass is really interesting. Just above every part of this short story is intriguing. Auster has a great sense in using details and descriptions well. The things he points out using descriptions is entertaining, and it helps the reader think of Quinn, the main character as a real li...more

Like this review? yes

1 comment

06/13/09

Sasha Zaitsev rated it:

Read in May, 2009

I had read this book for my New York Stories class. This was the first book i had read by this renown author, Paul Auster. In general i liked this novella the most out of all the books we read in Ms Stasavages class. The book follows a detective named Quinn who suffers from serious issues such as obsession and alternate realities. The reason i liked this book so much was because of Auster's writing style. the book is written in simple language and seems rather obvious; however, Auster's words an...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

01/26/09

Rinchen rated it:

I really enjoyed this book. This was one my English class books and as usual when i first got the book I was like this book is going to be boring and blah blah but as we started reading this book in class it got really interesting, I love mystery books and this book was like the next step to mystery books because the whole time the story is mysterious and at the end you don't even get a answer it just ends and leaves you thinking. like many others in my class room at first i frustrated that we ...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

05/21/09

Qi Yin rated it:

Read in May, 2009

City of Glass by Paul Auster resembles a detective story. The mani character, Daniel Quinn is a writer. He used to be ambitious about his work, however, after the death of his wife and son, he isolated himself from society. One day, when he is in his apartment, his phone rings and asks for a person named Paul Auster. When it rings for the second time, Daniel Quinn is curious what happened, therefore he said he is Paul Auster. I think that Daniel Quinn is a very weird person because he actually u...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

03/18/09

Carolyn rated it:

Read in March, 2009

Wish I'd been a bit more prepared for the challenge presented by City of Glass. I was expecting a meatier Dashiell Hammett-type detective story, and this was more Kafka-esque with the semblance of a mystery thrown in. It would help to have a working knowledge of NYC geography (I don't). Also, it would be good to have read Don Quixote (I haven't). This will be a great book to re-read one day when I'm in the mood for tackling questions of identity and man's role in an urban environment, but la...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

06/14/09

Benewaa rated it:

This book is the first book from The New York Trilogy. I like the author's style of writing because, he evokes many questions through his literary elements and other writing components. This author creates a well-rounded character but yet; he evokes many questions that make the readers very curious about the character.

In this book, Paul Auster, the protagonist is confuse about his identity therefore, he goes through many life experiences in order to find his real identity. Through hi...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

02/02/09

jaime rated it:

Read in February, 2009

At first I thought this was a crime novel that had a poorly driven plot. I realized midway through that there were no clever antics, just one crazy man following another crazy man neither with any direction. It is the interludes giving lessons on the Tower of Babel, Humpty Dumpty, Locke and Rousseau and Don Quxiote that give the novel substance and drive, although pretentious. Paul Auster poses interesting questions regarding language, society and self identity. These questions are approache...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

02/01/08

Tommy rated it:

Auster does not start his trilogy strongly. Interwoven with multiple themes and lacking a central moving force, City of Glass is a metropolis of many skyscrapers with few people to occupy them. Sparse at two-hundred pages, the novel shows how a good idea tends to sour when the author grabs too many grapes. Auster’s austere style, short sentences and plain imagery seduce the reader into believing that this is a one night read about a detective and a rich, wheelchair-bound client. But Auster...more Auster does not start his trilogy strongly. Interwoven with multiple themes and lacking a central moving force, City of Glass is a metropolis of many skyscrapers with few people to occupy them. Sparse at two-hundred pages, the novel shows how a good idea tends to sour when the author grabs too many grapes. Auster’s austere style, short sentences and plain imagery seduce the reader into believing that this is a one night read about a detective and a rich, wheelchair-bound client. But Auster has us all fooled. Soon we see it is all pretextual, this air of simplicity a cover for Auster’s covert deep endeavors.
Instead of writing the dime novel, Auster has decided to heap some of the more bulky, muscular questions of life, an author’s life in particular, onto this skeleton of a story. This not only heightens the potency of each word to allegorical levels, it leaves Auster little room for error. It’s not so much that Auster blunders, but anyone knows that when one carries a bundle of sticks long enough, even across relatively smooth terrain, some sticks are bound to fall. And some sticks are thornier than others.
Quinn, the novel’s protagonist, becomes embroiled in a relatively simplistic yet engaging gumshoe assignment, but very soon feels that he has become pulled into it as more than a detective. Soon, the case is circling around Quinn, rather than his clients. Then all the sticks begin to show themselves, and suddenly the reader is a bit overwhelmed. Quinn begins to appreciate that man is not divine, a weakness he simply can’t escape. A failed author himself, Quinn shows us plainly that his path in life may lead up or down, up toward the rich life of well-to-do author Paul Auster -- the character, mind you, not (necessarily) the author of this book, who shows Quinn the niceties a better book contract earlier in life may have brought him,– or down, toward the pitiful existence of the destitute madman he has been employed to trace. Quinn becomes obsessed, whether he realizes it or not, with understanding how life functions, by tracking down the Tower of Babel and its zany modern creator.
Images abound of this “up and down” motif: the yo-yo of the Auster character’s son, a toy Quinn can make fall, but not rise; the rise and fall of the Tower of Babel, both the one of the ancient tale and the New World one founded in downtown Manhattan. Still, as the lesson of the Tower taught, man cannot achieve the divine, no matter how tall his skyscraper. Eventually finding himself fallen alongside the homeless, powerless to expand his explorations of the path to the divine, Quinn simply disappears. Either way, up or down, it seems no one has a true sense of the divine. From the philoso-babble of character Auster to his foil, the abusive, fallen-from-grace Stillman, no one has any answers for Quinn.
And that’s fine, both in and of itself and as a theme for a book. And this is not a bad book by any means—it had me thinking about it for hours long after I had finished reading it sprawled out under the Washington Monument on the Fourth of July. But why complicate a perfectly complex book, I wondered, by fumbling in a web of relationships between the main character and both his multiple alter egos and the Auster/Auster character, none of which developed past infancy? We have the failed author Quinn; his pseudonym, William Wilson (a thinly veiled Walt Whitman (Quinn camps out on the block on which the real Whitman penned Leaves of Grass)); detective Max Work, the tough-talking character of the popular beach-reading Wilson novels, who Quinn idolizes; the character author Paul Auster, who is familiar not with Wilson’s Max Work stories but Quinn’s earlier, obscure, truer-to-the-literary-canon poetry he published under his own name. The characters meld together right from the start, when Quinn’s clients hire him believing him to be “Paul Auster.” The interrelationships between these personas, real and assumed, has no room to flourish in what is practically a novella. The reader is left confused, not so much as to who is who, but as to who wants to be whom.
I can’t fault Auster for trying to tackle great enigmas; I can critique him for loading cannons on a canoe. And every time one is fired, the canoe capsizes for a while, and the reader may not have the patience to try to right it, preferring instead to simply float unfulfilled toward the story’s quick end.. I think Auster—the real author, that is – deliberately offers little prescription on how to solve the eternal problems of authorhood (thank god he left the missile launcher on the dock!) but the reader does come away with the idea that all authors really do is live through writing. Just live and write—it’s as simple as that. Maybe a few too many wee morning hours wracking his brain over just how complicated his relations with his characters can become led Auster to set all those troubles down in words, words which any detective novel aficionado could follow. Or maybe Auster is just a sucker for an expanded haiku of a novel: few words, a waterfall of meanings. Either way, it’s only the first book in the trilogy, and sometimes the kinks of overambition work themselves out.
(less)

Like this review? yes

add a comment

10/24/07

Daniel rated it:

(review of isbn 3150090784)

bookshelves: postmodernbadness

Read in October, 2007

recommends it for: pretty much no one

I like post-modernism. I really think I do. I enjoyed the hell out of The Dead Father, I worship everything Vonnegut ever wrote, and not even Pyncheon scares me.

But this! What is this?

I had to go and read a bit of secondary literature just to see if I was too thick to get it. Here's a spoiler warning, even though what I am going to spoil amounts to nothing: nothing happens. N simply becomes mad for no good reason and then disappears. Now I get what Auster is doing here: quest...more

Like this review? yes

1 comment

03/28/07

Max rated it:

Read in March, 2007

Great initial premise, acceptable execution, sloppy and overly self-conscious finish. When Paul Auster is on, he's an excellent writer with a knack for description. It just takes more to make a novelist. Sure, he raises some questions about the Nature of Fiction and of Language, but he never follows through with them, so who cares? His characters start off believable people but by halfway through they lose all semblance of humanity. As a post-modern exercise, the book might succeed if it co...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

01/28/09

Fnouristani rated it:

I have only read the first installment to this trilogy..I liked the writing, but felt that there were alot of holes in the story...for example why didn't Quinn ask Virginia about the second Stillman that he saw at the train station and when Virginia's line was busy why didn't he just go over there...so on and of course the ending was very strange who left him the food??? Maybe I was half spacing out while reading...anyway, I liked it enough to want to read the second installment..

Like this review? yes

add a comment

07/24/08

Daniel menely added it

Priceless. At least when I read it, in college. Would I read it now? I dunno. Would it be as good? Who cares? I like the graphic novel version of it a stoner friend of mine in college let me read. He is a real insider, that kid.

Update, my one GOODREADS friend, Amelia, took issue with the review above. She said it "bled sarcasm." And she is right. Nonetheless, I find Auster's work to be increasingly banal. COG was the first book of his I read, and I loved it - I r...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

01/27/09

Gabrielr rated it:

Read in December, 2008

City of Glass is about Daniel Quinn a lonely man that appears to have a multiple identity crisis pretends to be a detective after receiving a miss call. His case is to protect Peter Stillman from his father. In my opinion City Of Glass was not a very good book because it was pretty uninteresting until it neared the end and the ending it's self was not very good at all and has to many interpretations.

Like this review? yes

add a comment

01/06/09

Kellie rated it:

Read in January, 2009

Overall, I consider this to be a bit of a hollow work. There's all this plot build up and then nothing happens. The mystery doesn't have much resolution -- Quinn ends up on a bizarre stakeout, rather than getting in touch with his clients. In the meantime, the suspect kills himself, and the clients disappear. I found myself annoyed and frustrated with the whole thing.

I read the graphic novel before reading the original work. I found the graphic novel more interesting, probably beca...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

04/17/08

dead letter office rated it:

this kind of self-referential stuff where the author turns up in his own fiction tends to feel contrived and rub me the wrong way. it's also got the onset-of-madness unreliable-narrator thing going, where the same character ("paul auster") shows up under different (or are they!) guises. this worked for beckett in molloy/mallone dies/the unnameable, at the price of making it pretty unreadable in spots. when auster does it, it feels derivative and simplistic. it kind of feels like he's t...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment