Max's review
City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, Vol 1)
by Paul Auster
Max's review
City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, Vol 1) by Paul Auster
Max's review
rating:
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 could stop being so smug. As a novel, it fails; as a representation of thinking feeling humans in their encounter with their worlds, it manages to fall *below* the works of Terry Goodkind - and when your work is less human than a book that contains an ancient Objectivist wizard named Zeddicus Zu'ul Zorander, you know you're in trouble. Read it for the atmosphere, which is at its best an acceptable echo of Tom Waits' Night Hawks at the Diner, and keeps you turning the pages long after logic quits...more
