The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

An impromptu critique...

Auster writes of the emancipation of a man using the detective novel as an allegory for this struggle of life without god. He uses epistemology as a leitmotif and his literary musing pertain further to the classic philosophical search for meaning through the understanding of language. His characters are not real in the sense of individual. They are tropes for the various aspects of the concept that he investigates through his inevitably narcissistic cogitations. His meta-fictional manipulations allude to the ineluctability of each and every life. A visage he deliberately coins in order to heighten the trepidation that he builds with each thwarted moment of the amaranthine yet iniquitous plots. As with Kafka, the concepts are all too well known. They spawn from the seemingly utterly exhausted detritus left by a wealth of literary minds over the past few millennia. Yet, again as with Kafka, they are hidden somewhere in amongst the pervading tedium and unless otherwise prompted, only revealed half way through the second story. Fortuitously, Auster has chosen the short story and not a novel to toy with these extraneous and dangerous motifs - as all young authors apparently feel they must. My admonition can only be to read this work as one would listen to bewitching yet aureate pop music, i.e. from some distance and with due distain for the denotation. Better still read more Calvino! (his catalogue is apparently endless) or Dirk Gently (Adams) if you’re particularly into the detective genre ~ that is if you prefer Conn to Cohen. Although City of Glass has been adapted as a graphic novel, perhaps through this medium we at least might find something worthy of the aspired notion of entertainment.