Paul Auster

City of glass, Ghosts, The locked room

The New York trilogy

Sarah Christine Gill

He was busy removing the starfish from the wet sacks and arranging them on the cool concrete floor. The starfish were twisted and knotted up, for a starfish loves to hang on to something and for an hour these had found only each other, Doc arranged them in long lines and very slowly they straightened out until they lay in symmetrical stars on the concrete floor.

CANNERY Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop houses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches, by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said: Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men, and he would have meant the same thing. 

Who?" Humpty Dumpty. You know who I mean. The egg." 'As in "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall"?' Exactly." I don't understand.' Humpty Dumpty: the purest embodiment of the human con- dition. Listen carefully, sir. What is an egg? It is that which has not vet been born. A paradox, is it not? For how can Humpty Dumpty be alive if he has not been born? And yet, he is alive - make no mistake. We know that because he can speak. More than that, he is a philosopher of language. "When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean -neither more nor less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master- that's all.

Daniel Neri

se vc espera investigação policial, história de detetive e afins, não é o que vai encontrar aqui, pelo menos, não de maneira tão satisfatória... 
a história me interessou muito mais pelas discussões acerca de linguagem e literatura, afinal, todos os três contos acabam falando sobre esses temas.
ainda vou levar um tempinho pra digerir esse livro.
não é surpreendente, mas não chega a ser ruim

Auster's 80s tales, reawakened? Not worth the sleep lost. These three cryptic stories, dredged from the '80s, offer little but paradoxes, pretentious tricks, and bleak emptiness. New York is reduced to chaos and confusion, mirroring the characters' own troubled minds. More psychoanalysis than detective tales, they leave you unsatisfied and yearning for meaning... a two-star plunge into oblivion.

Liana

Auster's 80s tales, reawakened? Not worth the sleep lost. These three cryptic stories, dredged from the '80s, offer little but paradoxes, pretentious tricks, and bleak emptiness. New York is reduced to chaos and confusion, mirroring the characters' own troubled minds. More psychoanalysis than detective tales, they leave you unsatisfied and yearning for meaning... a two-star plunge into oblivion.



Mykyta Barabanov

Ostensibly straightforward the trilogy uses subtext to dwell into the topics of self-actualization, solitude and anxiety. Written pliantly auester's fiction is an accessible window into a more obscure reading. The worst you can get from the book is a subpar detective story.

Emmett

Here is delivered a mystery that is half mystery and half a questioning of the mystery genre. The Literary Review's christening of it as a "metaphysical thriller" (quoted on the back cover) is not a misnomer. In increasing generality, it brings into consideration the significance of actions, signs, and ultimately, the representation of reality, the straining of words to meet and fix the Real. The New York Trilogy is made of three mysterious stories that are mystery stories in all appearances, fulfilling the characteristics and expectations of the genre. However, where archetypal mysteries are labyrinthine but definite, moving in a twisting but single line, like a loopy piece of string, towards a happy, tied-with-a-bow, conclusion, here the assumed trajectory fails the reader and the seeking protagonist, as straight paths have the habit of turning into Mobius strips, the detective and the idea of detection challenged and countered by either the sheer volume of life's discrete details, or the trouble of producing/understanding a life. The seemingly unrelated trio of stories, strung together (as the reader halfway through is apt to think) almost precariously by the sole theme of an obsessive, messy search for Something, abruptly click into place with the rapidly of a well-oiled door. This book asks for the reader's patience and attention to the very end - the reader is encouraged to hold and withhold questions and doubts; it is in "The Locked Room" that everything falls together with quiet, final, brilliance. In what does not, in those jagged edges and gaps that fact and documentation do not seam and fill, are plainly fictions, this Trilogy openly admits, or, as I have come to think of it as I reached the last page, a ghostly shell of a house haunted by questions.

The New York Trilogy is perhaps the most astonishing work by one of America's most consistently astonishing writers. The Trilogy is three cleverly interconnected novels that exploit the elements of standard detective fiction and achieve a new genre that is all the more gripping for its starkness. It is a riveting work of detective fiction worthy of Raymond Chandler, and at the same time a profound and unsettling existentialist enquiry in the tradition of Kafka or Borges. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of what it means to be human. The New York Trilogy is the modern novel at its finest: a truly bold and arresting work of fiction with something to transfix and astound every reader. 'Marks a new departure for the American novel.' Observer 'A shatteringly clever piece of work . . . Utterly gripping, written with an acid sharpness that leaves an indelible dent in the back of the mind.' Sunday Telegraph 'The New York Trilogy established him as the only author one could compare to Samuel Beckett.' Guardian

The New York Trilogy

Doug Belshaw

Read again recently and the way that the three stories both implicitly and explicitly interact with one another is amazing.

Xenia

im confused but in need of more paul content <3

Trevor Berrett

For my complete review, go here:

http://mookse.wordpress.com/2008/10/0...

nahla mujahed

The best trilogy I've read so far. A must read.

City of Glass/ Ghosts/ the Locked Room

Akanksha Chattopadhyay

Lauren

Carolina Lopes

DNF at 75%
This is not a bad book, it simply didn't interest me and given I've been really busy with Uni, I can't waste precious reading time in things that bore me

Joao Freitas

Diane Wang

Chiara Buccolieri 

Bruno Costa Teixeira

mina nayeri

Marie

humita gomita

A kabel 

Yago Ramalho

Aidan

Quinn, a mystery writer, becomes involved in a puzzling case, Blue is hired by White to spy on Black, and Fanshawe, a gifted novelist, disappears, leaving his family and work behind

The New York trilogy City of glass, Ghosts, The locked room

Reviews

Highlights