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Aug 24, 2011

Nikki rated it:

I find that I don't know what on earth to say about City of Glass. Perhaps that will resolve itself as I read the rest of this trilogy. I was intrigued by it, at times confused; I found it easy to read, but very quiet, muted. It doesn't spark off the page and leap about, at all. It sounds as if it's going to be very strange and dramatic, and yet it quietly slims down -- in the way the main character does -- to something else entirely. And what that thing is, I haven't figured out.

Lik More...

4 comments like (5 people liked it)

May 31, 2010

Paul rated it:

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

12 comments like (14 people liked it)

Jan 24, 2011

Tim rated it:

I picked City of Glass off the bookcase because I heard Paul Auster interviewed on Radiolab. In the interview he described getting a phone call, after the novel was published, by a man asking for Quinn (the character in City of Glass who takes on the identity of Paul Auster). It sounded like an intriguing novel, and I decided to give it a chance.

It's no secret that I'm not a Paul Auster fan. At times, it seems like he is more interested in exploring identity, whether it is that of More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 30, 2007

Sean 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!

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Dec 29, 2011

Bob rated it:

In my review of Paul Karasik and David Mazuchelli's graphic novel version of CITY OF GLASS, I wrote: "The graphic artists give it so much dimension that the text-only version seems (in my memory) to be no more than a screenplay to this version's fully-realized presentation."

My memory was wrong. I re-read the original and found it as multi-dimensional as the graphic novel version. Or perhaps the two versions together compounded the book into something greater. Or perhaps More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Sep 22, 2008

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...

0 comments like (9 people liked it)

Jun 04, 2008

Esther rated it:

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...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Dec 29, 2011

Daniel rated it:

I told the guy in the bookstore (whose name is also Daniel) that I wanted a book that would open my brain up. He didn't think too long before he pointed me towards this short weird book.

Imagine that David Lynch and Haruki Murakami got punchy one night and decided to write a noir detective novel together. And Samuel Beckett stopped by to contribute a chapter or two? I recognize this sounds crazy, but it's hard to imagine that this book was written by a single person. There are so ma More...

0 comments like

Nov 29, 2011

Drew rated it:

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 More...

4 comments like (4 people liked it)

Oct 28, 2011

Bill rated it:

What makes a storyteller an artist? My answer is that an artist is concerned not just with a story's movement and how it transports and affects an audience -- creating an action story that thrills, for example -- but with why an audience desires particular story experiences. The artistic storyteller uses a story to create an experience that illuminates some aspect of the artist's world.

A question I'm asked is, are the principles that an artist uses to create a story the same as those t More...

0 comments like

Jan 10, 2011

Sophie rated it:

If I wanted to be simplistic, I would call this a weird book. Also pretentious. It's the sort of book that I feel has been written to be dissected (for example, for people to work out which bits he's intended as homage to other writers, who has influenced him etc). Daniel Quinn (same initials as Don Quixote) is a writer of detective stories (the hero of his books is called William Wilson - referencing Edgar Allan Poe's short story about doppelgangers) who is mistaken for a real detective called More...

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Mar 23, 2010

john rated it:

City of Glass Paul Auster

Another one in the series of 'people who aren't dead yet.' The book 'came to me' as gift, so despite little interest I started reading it. Plus it's short. I remember one of my Literature professor back at the University of Michigan telling me, “this is one of the most important short stories of all times.” He was referring to a Kafka story that was literally 200 words long, which is about a paragraph and a half. The story went something like—if A left th More...

1 comment like

Aug 16, 2009

Mary added it

Post-modern, metafictional identity crisis. Who is this protagonist? Is he Daniel Quinn (who shares initials with Don Quixote), bereaved father and widower, or is he William Wilson, and which Wilson - Mets ballplayer or mystery writer? Does he channel the fictional detective, Max Work, or the real author, Paul Auster, who is mistaken for a detective in his own book? And all those father-son duos with mix-and-match names - the two Peter Stillmans, Sr and Jr, Daniel and Peter Quinn, Paul and Danie More...

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Jun 14, 2009

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 that More...

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Jun 02, 2009

Indigo rated it:

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...

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Jan 14, 2012

Jim rated it:

In the best tradition of detective mysteries, every word is a clue. However in Auster's hands, this is not a small matter, for he really means it. We are in the land of the postmodern detective novel, where the "author" is a character and the detective is an author who barely works at a detective series whose main character is called Max Work. Things are not what they seem, but sometimes a word means exactly what Auster wants it to mean, except when he doesn't. It's a Humpty Dumpty, Le More...

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Oct 20, 2010

Secret Bookshelf rated it:

City of Glass by Paul Auster is another book I read because of the monthly book club meetings I am attending. I never read anything by Paul Auster before but I can honestly say that I really enjoyed it. I actually read it in just one afternoon. It is a short story and belongs to the New York Trilogy but even though I read only the first one, it was compelling and I couldn‘t stop reading until the last page. The story of of the book is about a writer who becomes a detective by accident and tries More...

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Jan 03, 2011

Donnie rated it:

This was a neat little book that certainly has me interested in reading the entire New York Trilogy, of which it is the first novel. I think it is fair to say that many of the literary references were wasted on me; however, I was deeply engaged by the meta aspects of the book. "Who is following who?" was a question that often entered my mind while reading.

I believe that the main questions Auster asks us in this piece is about the act of creating worlds through writing. W More...

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Jan 23, 2012

Andrew rated it:

I read this for my family's book club (I feel weird saying that since my family are the only ones who will probably read this review) and I liked it much more than I expected to, but admittedly, I had no legitimate expectations. The only thing I had experienced of Paul Auster before this was the movie Smoke, about which I had mixed feelings.

The book touched on a lot of themes that related to philosophy that I have studied. Specifically, the problem of personal identity, the incongr More...

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Jan 22, 2011

David rated it:

City of Glass is an interesting take on the traditional detective novel. I was interested in this book after hearing Paul Auster, the author, describe his inspiration for the book on the radio show "Radiolab". He had received a wrong number phone call for the Pinkerton Detective Agency on two consecutive nights and began thinking about what would have happened if he said yes, he resolved to talk to the guy if he called back, but he never did. A year later as he began writing thi More...

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Sep 02, 2010

Seth rated it:

City of Glass was not what I expected. Which is not a bad thing.

I expected a well-crafted, pulpy detective fiction, perhaps borrowing liberally from Hammett, Chandler, and maybe Leonard. And it was to be fraught with New York-ish details and ambiance. I expected it to more or less follow the expectable twists, turns, and general direction of the genre I believed it to take part in.

What I got was something different. Not entirely so, of course. But different enough for me More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 16, 2009

Anthony rated it:

An interesting, spiralling twist on the detective-fiction genre, the main issue I had with City of Glass is that I couldn't ever really decide WHY? Not 'Why' as in 'why-are-the-characters-doing-this?', but 'why' as in 'why-does-this-book-exist?'. Yes, sometimes a ripping yarn is reason enough for a book to call attention to itself, and be brought into existence, but Auster's book seems to demand a deeper reading, and seems to be working at unveiling a larger, more complex message, but it is not More...

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Jun 11, 2009

Samantha rated it:

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...

1 comment like

Oct 14, 2009

Dan rated it:

Like Travels in the Scriptorium, there is no tidy conclusion to Auster's City of Glass, which is on the surface a detective story. As others have mentioned thousands of times, it's a detective story in name only, using the form to pose questions about identity, the relationship between the author and his characters, etc.

I'm choosing to defer judgment until I've read Ghosts and the Locked Room, the second and third installements of the so-called New York Trilogy. But I have to ask: Wh More...

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Sep 14, 2010

Tintin rated it:

Very intriguing from the start. Not your average detective story. Full of grandiose, original and mind-stretching ideas. Paul Auster's prose is spare and morose, which work with the book. As the blurb says, it is "..turning the mystery novel inside out." If you stop to think about it for more than a second, your brain starts looping around itself until your head is all messed up. That's the mystery of it. In the end, you ask: Who was Paul Quinn after all? And more importantly, WHO wrot More...

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Jun 13, 2009

Sasha rated it:

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...

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Jun 23, 2011

Keli rated it:

I set out to love this book and ended up a little ambivalent. It certainly is unique, post-modern and very very meta. But I felt at times that Auster was trying to be clever rather than create a unique work. The whole business of inserting himself into the story was a little strange. I felt that he was going to explore the relationship of the writer to his character, as he did with the main character, but it didn't go anywhere. And he started out by exploring language through the Fall and t More...

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Oct 17, 2009

Lauren rated it:

I started the New York Trilogy but only finished part 1, City of Glass, before I had to return it to the library! However, if I get the chance I would definitely like the read parts 2 and 3. I found the first story be thought-provoking and it certainly kept me guessing about what was going to happen next. During the course of this unconventional mystery, Auster takes us along for the fiction writer's investigation while also raising questions about the relationship between an author and his sub More...

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Jan 26, 2009

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...

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Feb 21, 2011

Molly rated it:

A mystery writer answers a wrong number addressed to whom he assumes is a PI, and ends up on a bizarre case: a man who was left for years in a room by himself by his mad professor father fears that his father will be released from prison and kill him. The PI is the author Paul Auster and is visited by the mystery writer, who becomes increasingly strange and obsessed. I was genuinely surprised with this ending, and delighted with the quirks of the narrative. It is an odd, flawed but appealing cro More...

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