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

[NickAdams]

That's quite interesting indeed. But this isn't the only strange thing we've seen when it comes to the problem with authorship. These mysteries turned out rather difficult to solve and I start to think they are supposed to be against all logic. If this is the case I think they are more or less irrelevant to the more important problems posited by the stories.

Yes, but I have to assume she leaves him, because the narrator hints at a negative outcome, which I don't believe refers to the his incounter with Fanshawe.

Tell me about it At least I've read Don Quixote. Still there are some additional reading in this direction too. I am trying to get to an essay on it written by José Ortega y Gasset for ages. I've heard his interpretation is quite interesting and more or less out of the box. Probably it's irrelevant for this discussion but at least it will bring me back to the atmosphere of the book. By the way, if we start thinking for Don Quixote in the way suggested by the fictional Auster, doesn't Don Quixote remind you of Hamlet? This whole madness and testing the others thing?

I would have to think about the Hamlet connection more closely, but the José Ortega y Gasset sounds worth a look. Where kind I find it?

I finished The City of Glass last night and I'll have to go up the thread and look over comments. I really enjoyed it, but I'm not sure what to think of the ending. Those last two chapters seem to come from nowhere. Do they fit? I need to ponder this a little.

I fond the last two chapters completely irrational and seems as if he went mad before he went mad. Why didn't he visit the apartment? I think City of Glass and Ghost are thematic explorations of the events in The Locked Room. I think the story revolves more around theme than plot. I think that is where my initial confusion spawned from. I expected the emphasis to be on on plot since this is a Detective/Thriller/Mystery novel. My preconceptions of the novel's identity did me in.

[Virgil]

I fond the last two chapters completely irrational and seems as if he went mad before he went mad. Why didn't he visit the apartment? I think City of Glass and Ghost are thematic explorations of the events in The Locked Room. I think the story revolves more around theme than plot. I think that is where my initial confusion spawned from. I expected the emphasis to be on on plot since this is a Detective/Thriller/Mystery novel. My preconceptions of the novel's identity did me in.

The more I think about the last two chapters the more I think they are off track. How does he go from a writer to a bum living in an alley not minding the sitting in a garbage tank, or whatever they're called? It seemed an improbable leap. Was there any prep work for it?

[NickAdams]

The more I think about the last two chapters the more I think they are off track. How does he go from a writer to a bum living in an alley not minding the sitting in a garbage tank, or whatever they're called? It seemed an improbable leap. Was there any prep work for it?

I'm with you Virgil. It was suggested in another post that he had been slowly going insane after leaving his routine. I don't think you'll find the answer in plot or psychological development, or devolvement, but the answer is held in the authors personal history, which you will only discover in The Locked Room. I think these stories were constructed the way Yeats constructed A Vision. You have to review the themes and the symbolism, but all that is in the last book.

[Virgil]

I'm with you Virgil. It was suggested in another post that he had been slowly going insane after leaving his routine. I don't think you'll find the answer in plot or psychological development, or devolvement, but the answer is held in the authors personal history, which you will only discover in The Locked Room. I think these stories were constructed the way Yeats constructed A Vision. You have to review the themes and the symbolism, but all that is in the last book.

But who takes over the narrative at the last few pages? It really goes kooky then. But overall I did enjoy the novel. And love visualizing New York City as he moves about. Ok I will have to keep reading.

[NickAdams]

But who takes over the narrative at the last few pages?

Auster's friend. He has been telling the story the whole time, but towards the end of City of Glass he reveals how he got involved. Remember Auster feeling guilty and all that?

[Amethyst2010]

What is the significance of Peter Stillman's appearance in The Locked Room ? The author thought that he might be Fanshawe and picked a fight with him. How does this incident shed any light to anything in City of Glass ?

I think the two main themes to all three stories are madness and loss of identity, in the characters Quinn, Black, and Fanshawe. Blue was also struggling with identify and Fanshawe's sister Ellen was in a way mad. Quinn was deteriorating to madness in City of Glass. After finishing Ghosts, I think Black started out quite insane visiting Blue disguised as White. Fanshawe was "confirmed" crazy in the final scene in the locked room. Assuming that Fanshawe was still sane when married to Sophie (or Sophie will detect the insanity and mentioned it ?) what drove him insane when ?

[NickAdams]

What is the significance of Peter Stillman's appearance in The Locked Room ? The author thought that he might be Fanshawe and picked a fight with him. How does this incident shed any light to anything in City of Glass ?

I believe The Locked Room to be more or less real. It is the experience of Fanshawe's childhood friend, who is also the narrator of The Locked Room and the author of City of Glass and Ghost. I think the experiences of The Locked Room was the source material for City of Glass and Ghost. The Narrator follows Peter Stillman, as does Quinn, who he wants to be Fanshawe. Quinn becomes confused in the train station by two men who could both be Stillman. He almost wills the man he follows into being the correct choice. Fanshawe's red book becomes a personal symbol in City of Glass and Ghost.

[Virgil]

Oh my Gosh, I've just read a dozen pages of Ghosts and find it incredibly boring. I can't keep the colors straight. This is completely different than City of Glass.

[NickAdams]

Oh my Gosh, I've just read a dozen pages of Ghosts and find it incredibly boring. I can't keep the colors straight. This is completely different than City of Glass.

Your "Oh my gosh" deceived me.

[Virgil]

I was surprised to find Ghosts to be this way after enjoying City of Glass so much. Lucky it's only around 60 pages. I'll slog through it.

[applepie]

That's no incentive Virgil. Here I am nearing the end of City of Glass, and now I'm not sure I want to even bother with Ghosts

[Virgil]

That's no incentive Virgil. Here I am nearing the end of City of Glass, and now I'm not sure I want to even bother with Ghosts

Did you enjoy City of Glass?

[Virgil]

Ok I've come to a very interesting section of Ghosts that I took the trouble to type out. Blue has been following Black and he follows him across the Brooklyn Bridge. Here's the first paragraph I wish to highlight:

It had been many years since Blue crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on foot. The last tine was with his father when he was a boy, and the memory of that day comes back to him now. He can see himself holding his father’s hand and walking at his side, and as he hears the traffic moving along the steel bridge-road below, he can remember telling his father that the noise sounded like the buzzing of an enormous swarm of bees. To his left is the Statue of Liberty; to his right is Manhattan, the buildings so tall in the morning sun they seem to be figments. His father was a great one for facts, and he told Blue the stories of all the monuments and skyscrapers, vast litanies of detail—the architects, the dates, the political intrigues—and how at one time the Brooklyn Bridge was the tallest was the tallest structure in America. The old man was born the same year the bridge was finished, and there was always the link in Blue’s mind, as though the bridge were somehow a monument to his father. He liked the story he was told that day as he and Blue Senior walked home over the same wooden planks he was walking on now, and for some reason he never forgot it. How John Roebling, the designer of the bridge, got his foot crushed between pilings and a ferry boat just days after finishing the plans and died from gangrene in less than three weeks. He didn’t have to die, Blue’s father said, but the only treatment he would accept was hydrotherapy, and that proved useless, and Blue was struck that a man who had spent his life building bridges over bodies of water so that people wouldn’t get wet should believe that the only true medicine consisted of immersing himself in water. After John Roebling’s death, his son Washington took over as chief engineer, and that was another curious story. Washington Roebling was just thirty-one at the time, with no building experience except for wooden bridges he designed during the Civil War, but he proved to be even more brilliant than his father. Not long after construction began on the Brooklyn Bridge, however, he was trapped for several hours during a fire in one of the underwater caissons and came out of it with a severe case of bends, an excruciating disease in which nitrogen bubbles gather in the blood stream. Nearly killed by the attack, he was thereafter an invalid, unable to leave the top floor room where he and his wife set up house in Brooklyn Heights. There Washington Roebling sat every day for many years, watching the progress of the bridge through a telescope, sending his wife down every morning with his instructions, drawing elaborate color pictures for the foreign workers who spoke no English so they could understand what they could do next, and the remarkable thing was that the whole bridge was literally in his head: every piece of it had been memorized, down to the tiniest bits of steel and stone, and though Washington Roebling never set foot on the bridge, it was totally present inside him, as though by the end of all those years it had somehow grown into his body.

First all that is true. That is part of the history of the Brooklyn Bridge, and if you ever get to see a documentary of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, watch it, it's fascinating. Now this is quite a digression but it's also the first moment that there is any depth to the characters in Ghosts. Until now t's been an abstract story, no real characters except named as colors andsome vague story of a detective following a character, similar to City of Glass but with hardly any details to give them flesh and blood. Here we see Blue's childhood and relationship with his father. All of a sudden it's as if the character has become real, but it's integraated into the true story of the building of the bridge. And there is a parallel that's created, the Roebling father and son and Blue and his father.

For your edification, here's a couple of pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge, the second showing walkers going across, the walkers being on an upper level platform with the car traffic below.







What is also interesting is the very next paragraph:

Blue thinks of this now as he makes his way across the river, watching Black ahead of him and remembering his father and his boyhood out in Gravesend. The old man was a cop, later a detective at the 77th precinct, and life would have been good, Blue thinks, if it hadn’t been for the Russo case and the bullet that went through his father’s brain in 1927. Twenty years ago, he says to himself, suddenly appalled by the time that has passed, wondering if there is a heaven, and if so whether or not he will get to see his father again after he dies. He remembers a story from one of the endless magazines he has read this week, a new monthly called Stranger than Fiction, and it seems somehow to follow from all the other thoughts that have just come across to him. Somewhere in the French Alps, he recalls, a man was lost skiing twenty or twenty-five years ago, swallowed up by an avalanche, and his body was never recovered. His son, who was a little boy at the time, grew up and also became a skier. One day in the past year he went skiing, not far from the spot where his father was lost—although he did not know this. Through the minute and persistent displacements of the ice over the decades since his father’s death, the terrain was now completely different from what it had been. All alone there in the mountains, miles away from any other human being, the son chanced upon a body in the ice—a dead body, perfectly intact, as though preserved in suspended animation. Needless to say, the young man stopped to examine it, and as he bent down and looked at the face of the corpse, he had the distinct and terrifying impression that he was looking at himself. Trembling with fear, as the article put it, he inspected the body more closely, all sealed away as it was in the ice, like someone on the other side of a thick window, and saw that it was his father. The dead man was still young, even younger than the son was now, and there was something awesome about it, Blue felt, something so odd and terrible about being older than your own father, that he actually fight back tears as he read the article. Now, as he nears the end of the bridge, these same feelings came back to him, and he wishes to God that his father could be there, walking over the river and telling him stories. The, suddenly aware of what his mind was doing, he wonders why he has turned so sentimental, why after all these thoughts keep coming back to him, when for so many years they have never even occurred to him. It’s all part of it, he thinks, embarrassed at himself for being like this. That’s what happens when you have no one to talk to.

Auster continues building the relationship between Blue and his father, providing the detail of the father's death, and then Blue's thoughts turn to a story he's read in a magazine about another father and son with the son also discovering the death of his father. Now what does all this have to do with the story of Blue following Black? I don't think anything. I think it's just stray thoughts that are not relavant to the plot. Notice this shortly after walking across the bridge. Blue comes across a copy of Walden Pond and discovers it's copywrited by someone named Walter J. Black.

Blue is momentarily jarred by this coincidence, thinking that perhaps there is some message in it for him, some glimpse of meaning that could make a difference. But then, recovering from the jolt, he begins to think not. It's a common enough name, he says to himself--and besides, he knows for a fact that Black's name is not Walter. Could be a relative, he adds, or maybe even his father.

Well, I haven't finished reading, so I can't be certain, but it's not. There is no connection between the publisher Black and the Black Blue is following. There is no connection between Walden Pond or the Skier story or the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. In a traditional detective story, there are signs and clues that connect events and motivations. What Auster is doing is setting up a disconnect between facts and relavance, a dislocation of signs to narrative events. This falls under the phiosophic study of semiotics. I bet we can apply this disconnect to City of Glass as well. All these allusions are just extraneous signs that are not connected to the narrative in any relavant fashion. Why does Aster do this? It's an aesthetic form to protray his understanding of the life and the universe. I hope that made sense.

[NickAdams]

I forgot all about that. There are a few others stories that are interesting. Looking back, Ghost may be my favorite of the three. There is a connection, but it will be revealed as you read (not a spoiler).

[Amethyst2010]

There is a connection, but it will be revealed as you read (not a spoiler).

And read till the end of the third story The Locked Room. The answer isn't simple and obvious to me but I think I see some connection. The Locked Room may be the most enjoyable one, if you look for more meaningful interaction between the characters.