January / Thriller Reading: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

[TheFifthElement]

PPS: make of this what you will:

In short, Lacan's theory declares that we enter the world through words. We observe the world through our senses but the world we sense is structured (mediated) in our mind through language. Thus our subconscious is also structured as a language. This leaves us with a sense of anomaly. We can only perceive the world through language, but we have the feeling of a lack. The lack is the sense of a being outside of language. The world can only be constructed through language but it always leaves something uncovered, something that can not be told and be thought of, it can only be sensed. This can be seen as one of the central themes of Paul Auster's writing.

I'll have to think about this.

Yes, very interesting. I think that comes across in the book, the further you read into it.

I'm starting to think that any discussion of Auster we will have will only scratch the surface!

I second that! My only criticism of Auster is that he leaves me feeling badly educated

Back on the subject of things occurring in threes, unless I've missed any in City of Glass three dreams are mentioned, as follows:

Chapter 1

In his dream, which he later forgot, he found himself alone in a room, firing a pistol into a bare white wall.

Chapter 8

In his dream, which he later forgot, he found himself in the town dump of his childhood, sifting through a mountain of rubbish.

Chapter 11

In his dream, which he later forgot, he found himself walking down Broadway, holding Auster's son by the hand.

and I wondered what the purpose of this was.

And I also wondered if there was a blurring here between the narrator and Auster, here at the end of chapter 5:

And then, most important of all: to remember who I am. To remember who I am supposed to be. I do not think this is a game. On the other hand, nothing is clear. For example: who are you? And if you think you know, why do you keep lying about it? All I can say is this: listen to me. My name is Paul Auster. That is not my real name.

At this point, and I think it's the listen to me that does it, I get the feeling it is Auster speaking, not the character of the narrator of the book. I think it is an interesting passage.

And I'm looking forward to Nick's photos

[Paige19]

How about those dreams? I wondered about them. Not their content, which in itself is fodder aplenty for interpretation, but that they were recounted at all. Who is telling them to us? During the reading of the story, we believe that we are reading from a third-person-limited viewpoint. We only know what Quinn knows. But at the end, it is revealed that there is a narrator, and no matter what he gleaned from the notebooks or anything else, how would he know about the dreams if Quinn forgot them?

WARNING! SPOILER BELOW!

Also, has anyone else yet said how the experience Quinn has in the white room at the end is like a reversal of Peter Stillman's? Light becoming dark, less and less words. Finally, disappearance. Like being unborn. Or something.

[Virgil]

I'm thirty something pages in, and it's a fun read.

[jon1jt]

Is this a pop novel? Because if it is I definitely won't read it, never ever.

[bouquin]

PS: I haven't even finished this, but just ordered two more of Auster's books. Thanks for nominating him, whoever it was. I feel a reading project coming on...

Moi again the same one who brought you Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love! .... You're welcome!

In Ghosts : I think the name Green would have been more suitable to Blue for he seems rather callow and unsophisticated.

[Virgil]

Is this a pop novel? Because if it is I definitely won't read it, never ever.

It's definitely got literary merit Jon.


I do find some parts kind of absurd. For instance Quinn sits down to talk with Stillwell at around ten o'clock in the morning, and Stillwell has a non-stop (albeit hilarious) monologue, with Quinn not saying a single word, or either of them getting up to eat or relieve themselves, until it got dark. I'm mean that's funny, but it's kind of like a TV comedy skit. But I am enjoying this.

[TheFifthElement]

How about those dreams? I wondered about them. Not their content, which in itself is fodder aplenty for interpretation, but that they were recounted at all. Who is telling them to us? During the reading of the story, we believe that we are reading from a third-person-limited viewpoint. We only know what Quinn knows. But at the end, it is revealed that there is a narrator, and no matter what he gleaned from the notebooks or anything else, how would he know about the dreams if Quinn forgot them?

WARNING! SPOILER BELOW!

Also, has anyone else yet said how the experience Quinn has in the white room at the end is like a reversal of Peter Stillman's? Light becoming dark, less and less words. Finally, disappearance. Like being unborn. Or something.

Yes, there has to be a reason why they're worded in the exact same way. And they appear, seemingly, out of the blue.

I wondered if Quinn's experience in the room was a reference back to the Tower of Babel - the legend that if you entered the tower and remained there for 40 days you would forget everything you'd ever known. And I wondered about the passage of time here as well, and as Virgil mentioned:

I do find some parts kind of absurd. For instance Quinn sits down to talk with Stillwell at around ten o'clock in the morning, and Stillwell has a non-stop (albeit hilarious) monologue, with Quinn not saying a single word, or either of them getting up to eat or relieve themselves, until it got dark. I'm mean that's funny, but it's kind of like a TV comedy skit. But I am enjoying this.

because time does seem to move through the story in a rather bizarre way.

Stillman Virgil, Stillman

[Virgil]

Eek, Stillman, you're right.

[Niamh]

I bought the book so i hope to join in the discussion soon!

[papayahed]

How about those dreams? I wondered about them. Not their content, which in itself is fodder aplenty for interpretation, but that they were recounted at all. Who is telling them to us? During the reading of the story, we believe that we are reading from a third-person-limited viewpoint. We only know what Quinn knows. But at the end, it is revealed that there is a narrator, and no matter what he gleaned from the notebooks or anything else, how would he know about the dreams if Quinn forgot them?

Exactly, how does the narrator know anything prior to Quinn writing in the notebook? or that Quinn "tended to feel out of place in his own skin". Unless Quinn wrote this in the notebook.

But then who is feeding Quinn? Is someone feeding Quinn? Has Quinn gone into his own world like the homeless people he desribes? Quinn has never known who he really is, we've already mentioned William Wilson and Max Work but he makes mention early on of friends giving him clothes when he was just starting out and what about claiming to be Auster? (And how twisted (yet cool) is it to have a character in the book by the same name as the author? )

Is this a continuation of Stillman Sr's experiment? Could the Stillmans have made up the whole thing to experiment with Quinn? Peter started out with no contact with others and is brought into society the reverse is true of Quinn he was brought with normal human contact but slowly reverts into himself.

[Paige19]

You know, I am finding that there quite a lot of deconstruction regarding this book on the internet, and I'm wading through some of it. Normally, I wouldn't. But this story fascinated me, and I like the fact that it can be read just as it is - as a really weird and convoluted quasi-detective story - or you can jump into all the deconstruction and think about all that.

As for our speculations about who the real author of the story is, papayahead, my inclination at this point is to say that the narrator who announces himself at the very end is the author, and that he knows everything he knows because he made up the story, plain and simple, and his revealing himself simply acts as one more layer to the already complex layering of characters in it.

[Virgil]

I will say I am enjoying the New York elements to the novel. Everything is real as far as I can tell, the newspaper, the luncheontte type of eateries, the egg creams (do people outside of New York even know what an egg cream is?) the baseball players and events. I swear I can remember that game where Dave Kingman made that error to lose that Mets game, but Kingman probably made lots of errors to lose games. Judging by the ballplayers mentioned, I think the novel is set in the early 1980's, possibly 1982. Well, I just loved this paragraph, enough for me to take the time to quote it.

New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movements of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. The world was outside him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again.

Besides capturing that New York feeling of a labyrinth, one I've known quite well, I think this paragraph resonates with the themes that carry the novel forward. Of course i've only read a quarter of the way through at this point, but I do think that's a significant section.

[Alexei]

As I said in my previous post, in my opinion the Don Quixote's authorship problem could be a hint how to solve this one. What if the person who actually find the manuscript is Quinn himself? I thought so for a while, but I remembered that if it was so, Auster would have recognised him when they met for the first time. Also, this is too obvious. Judging by Don Quixote's story I think maybe we shouldn't take it so seriously. For one think how comes that the check Virginia Stillman gave Quinn is a bad one, or that someone called Paul Auster the private eye from a detective agency that actually does not exist? Actully, from the beginning of the story the reader knows something is wrong and that can be simply explained if we consider this mistakes for something made with a certain reason.
This explanation of course is highly unsatisfying, but I can't stop these things are connected in some way and the Don Quixote problem is important for the story.

[bouquin]

I finished Ghost, but have no comments at the moment.



Very nice. I still don't understand why Quinn decided to live in the alley across from Stillman's building, rather than go to their apartment to speak to Virginia; I know he thought it was the universe trying to prevent him from dropping the case, but ... why?

City of Glass / why Quinn decided to live in the alley :

I think Quinn simply had a nervous breakdown, he was already pretty much depressed and alienated to start with. And then he wasn't really a detective and yet he decided to embark on an obscure venture that was too dangerous and complicated for his fragile state of mind. I think he really lost it after his encounter with Paul Auster and his family; that was too much for him. It reminded him of what he had lost. Soon afterwards he started interpreting his situation in a rather odd way, that it was Fate that the phone was always busy at Virginia Stillman's appartment (see end of Chapter 11).

[Paige19]

I agree with bouquin. This is a story of a man who, through the course of the story's action, we watch completely lose an identity that wasn't all that stable to begin with. By the end, he is literally nonexistent.

As for the author of the story, I still think there's no trick to it. (I agree that the Don Quixote reference must be meaningful, but not sure what that meaning is.) I think the story is written by an omniscient narrator, who does not reveal himself until the end. Until that point, we think we are reading a third person limited narrative, but we aren't.