The New York Trilogy

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Di seguito i pensieri che mi hanno indotto i racconti da cui ho dedotto le riflessioni più sopra riportate.

Traditionally, detective fiction has reinforced the reader’s confidence in the power of logical analysis to solve a crime or understand the world (including the world within the book). Here, Auster uses the genre to create a work of fiction that questions the ability of logic and language to convey and understand the outside world and the other, not to mention oneself.Fatto sta che mi è sceso l’interesse mentre lui è diventato sempre più intervistato, sempre più fico, sempre più familista, ha cominciato a non perdersi un party, di quelli con intellettuali & modelle… Paul Auster in bed, reading Paul Auster's novel, "The New York Trilogy", in New York City, New York. It's a book by Paul Auster, for Paul Auster, about several Paul Austers, including himself, Paul Auster, author otherwise known for rather austere writings. Zilkosky, John. 1998. The revenge of the author: Paul Auster’s challenge to theory. Critique 39 (3): 195–206. If Virginia Stillman had appeared to be forward, Sophie was even more enthusiastic. She walked into the bedroom, turned on a bedside light and started to remove her blouse. Then she looked out the window, through which it was quite possible that she could see me and my binoculars. She didn’t seem overly alarmed, although she walked over and closed the bedroom curtains. Now, it is not my aim to create a sort of synchronicity between any two books I have on the go at any certain time. In this case, my non-fiction choice was based solely on the fact that the book was immediately available.

The postmodernist heart of the trilogy’s obsession with identity and legitimacy extends even beyond the book’s publication. In 2004, City of Glass was transformed into an experimental graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli under the title City of Glass: A Graphic Mystery in 2004. Even more to the point, perhaps, was the 2006 reissue adorned with magnificently lurid cover art in the style of classic 1940s pulp detective magazine covers. Certainly, it was no mere coincidence that the cover art was the work of another member of the postmodern vanguard: Art Spiegelman, the creator of the revolutionary comic book Maus. Update this section! We encounter the narrator, a writer by profession, navigating the choppy waters of passion and commitment, forever brooding on an entire range of topics: life and death, self and other, childhood and memory, friendship and fatherhood, love and hate, reading and writing, self-definition and self-identity. Burke, Edmund. 1958. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. London: University of Notre Dame Press Original edition, 1757. Kugler, Mathias. 1999. Paul Auster’s the New York Trilogy as Postmodern Detective Fiction. Hamburg: Diplomarbeiten Agentur. I think this was my first encounter with Paul Auster, a man who I met through the cult of the 1001 books to read before you die list. Prior to that I was vaguely aware of Auster and his peculiar brand of love/loath inciting literature which had friends alternatively raging or swooning, but had never bothered my arse to go and see what all the fuss was about.Attali, Jacques. 1999. The Labyrinth in Culture and Society: Pathways to Wisdom. Trans. Joseph Rowe. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Original edition, 1996. Those series of coincidences that mark the narrative of the stories that make up The New York Trilogy are interconnected to one way or another with yet another piece of threat tying the stories together: the Double. The real mystery at the heart of the quest of the detectives in this book is how identity of the self is inextricably intertwined with the legitimacy of the self and how those unexpected yet hardly ever surprising “mechanics of reality” serve to interfere with the processes of apprehending identity and establishing legitimacy.

I found the story and writing as compelling as Chandler's The Big Sleep or Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and as thought-provoking as reading an essay by Foucault or Barthes. By way of example, here are three quotes from the novel coupled with key concepts from the postmodern tradition along with my brief commentary. For the first time in his experience of writing reports, he discovers that words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say." ---------- Blue discerns it is possible that words cannot adequately articulate the depth and full range of human experience. And what is true of a detective's report is truer for works of great literature: there is a rich, vital, vibrant world of feeling and imagination beyond the confines of words and language. Nisam se baš načitala američke književnosti zato što mi kod većine tamošnjih pisaca ona pomenuta zabava uvek ostane samoj sebi svrha, što mi brzo dosadi, ali Oster ima malo evropejskog šlifa i finog francuskog glanca, pa je elemente visprenije ukrojio, štepovi mu se ne vide i tako postiže izvesni stepen elegancije (dok američka elegancija ostaje skoro pa oksimoron). Auster builds his metaphysics on the foundation of facts and empiricism, before embracing the challenge of metafiction.Barone, Dennis, ed. 1995. Beyond the red notebook. Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Il detective indaga sì, ma all'interno, nella stanza privata che è il suo cervello, alla ricerca di un senso della vita dell'uomo che non riesce a trovare.Söderlind, Sylvia. 2011. Humpty Dumpty in New York: Language and regime change in Paul Auster’s “City of glass”. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 57 (1): 1–16. un gioco di incastri e scatole cinesi e specchi e matrioske, dove per esempio, il primo detective è uno scrittore di romanzi polizieschi e un altro personaggio centrale si chiama guarda caso proprio Paul Auster. Che anche nel romanzo è uno scrittore di romanzi, ma invece lo becchiamo che sta scrivendo un saggio su don Quixote, le cui iniziali, D e Q, sono le stesse del protagonista, Daniel Quinn. Bernstein, Stephen. 1999. “The question is the story itself”: Postmodernism and intertextuality in Auster’s New York trilogy. In Detecting texts: The metaphysical detective story from Poe to postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale and Elizabeth S. Sweeney, 134–153. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.