The New York Trilogy

by Paul Auster

He wrote the screenplays for Smoke, Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge, which he also directed.

Edition with three works in one volume published in Penguin Books 1990

City of Glass copyright © Paul Auster, 1985 Ghosts copyright © Paul Auster, 1986 The Locked Room copyright © Paul Auster, 1986

Introduction copyright © Luc Sante, 2006

Luc Sante (born 25 May 1954, Verviers, Belgium) is a writer, critic, and artist. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His books include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991).

Bought for $8 on 4/19/21 after watching Smoke with the Osher Film Club and upon Lucy Fischer’s recommendation: a postmodern interpretation of detective and mystery fiction, elements of Existentialism and the Absurd, assumed and shifting identities, relationships with strangers, lives benefit or are harmed from the interactions, stories and memories more important than “reality.” Here’s the story behind Smoke which has overlaps with the first story here: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/25/opinion/auggie-wrens-christmas-story.html Dark / darkness (“Henry Dark” and the Tower of Babel) Not right in the head Daniel Quinn = Don Quixote Read The Locked Room in May & June 2021 for Osher class on detective fiction with Mark Helfand.

Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American writer and film director. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His books have been translated into more than forty languages.

Auster’s key is like the key to dreams or the key to the highway.

passe-partout

a field of variegated phenomena once considered discrete,

a force field charged by synchronicity and overlap,

peregrinate

the cartoonist Ben Katchor,

Q...

B...

the unseen Fanshawe,

glossolaliac

what passes for the city in the average experience is nothing more than a thin coat of paint.

capricious telephone calls can link people in ways that may seem random but end up sealing their fates,

you probably have a double out there somewhere among the eight million whose life runs such a close parallel to yours that the lines never converge—although if they ever do: beware.

the primeval forest,

recognizably the same labyrinth of chance.

transubstantiated

subsist

Their contents are often cryptic, often coded, sometimes dull, sometimes so disturbing that their readers cannot responsibly give an account ...

painful enough to be considered an abomination.

a metaphysical detective.

his mission has led him through the labyrinth on a path that describes an irregular circle.

an author, who appears in each of the novels,

An intradiegetic narrator

If the city is a forest and the detective is a pilgrim, the author is a pilgrim as well. He is the one who makes it out alive, who can exchange his story for supper and a bed of straw.

The first story, City of Glass, features an author of detective fiction who becomes a private investigator and descends into madness as he becomes embroiled in the investigation of a case. It explores layers of identity and reality, from Paul Auster the writer of the novel to the unnamed "author" who reports the events as reality, to "Paul Auster the writer", a character in the story, to "Paul Auster the detective", who may or may not exist in the novel, to Peter Stillman the younger, to Peter Stillman the elder (and a second Peter Stillman the elder who is abandoned as soon as described), and finally, to Daniel Quinn, the protagonist who sometimes is (almost) Max Work, Robinson Crusoe, and Marco Polo. City of Glass has an intertextual relationship with Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote. Not only does the protagonist Daniel Quinn share his initials with the knight, but when Quinn finds "Paul Auster the writer," Auster is in the midst of writing an article about the authorship of Don Quixote. Auster calls his article an "imaginative reading," and in it he examines possible identities of Cide Hamete Benengeli, the narrator of the Quixote who claims to be writing a true account. This author, too, examines the possible identities of Quinn and Stillman, and claims to be writing a true account, while Cervantes claims the same and writes his book based on a translation of Hamete’s manuscript. April 2021 The intradiegetic narrator steps in, briefly, ch. 12 pp. 111, 115-116, ch. 13 p. 128-130. Other identities: Marco Polo, p. 6 Max Work, pp. 6, Robinson Crusoe, p. 117

he would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

Quinn,

Author to the reader

both his wife and son were now dead.

he wrote mystery novels.

William W...

He read many books, he looked at paintings, he went to the movies.

New York was an inexhaustible space,

all places became equal,

He had continued to write because it was the only thing he felt he could do.

Mystery novels seemed a reasonable solution.

William Wilson, after all, was an invention, and even though he had been born within Quinn himself, he now led an independent life. Quinn treated him with deference, at times even admiration, but he never went so far as to believe that he and William Wilson were the same man.

He had an agent, but they had never met.

It had been more than five years now.

Marco Polo’s Travels

Max Work,

In the triad of selves that Quinn had become, Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist, Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise.

reading the first page again.

Cf. Cervantes, later.

Paul Auster?”