paul auster's new york trilogy is very good
I Don’t Even Know if The New York Trilogy is Very Good, says Paul Auster in his interview about his most well-known book. I beg to differ, but it's one of the hardest books I've ever written about; mostly for the reason that I'd rather write this book, not write about it. Anyways, I wanted to do it, and here it goes.
A crime novel writer Daniel Quinn gets a telephone call, after which he poses as a private investigator working on a case of man called Peter Stillman.
A private eye called Blue investigates a man called Black for a client called White, but the only things Black does are reading, writing and taking walks.
A humble writer takes on a task given to him by his best friend: he must sort out his friend's writings and either publish them or throw them out. This writer ends up marrying his friend's wife and adopting their son.
All these stories are connected. And there's also a red notebook.
I never thought I'd read a piece of American fiction that resembles modern Japanese fiction so closely; Haruki Murakami in particular, with his stories indiscernible from fever dreams, characters who don't really exist, dark wells that serve as meditation stations and, most importantly, his descriptions of ordinary life routines which somehow acquire prophetic meaning.
I tend to think that everything counts. In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.
The New York Trilogy
I have a quote from an interview with Xiaolu Guo, the author of "I Am China", saved in my notebook (a black one) as a reference to how certain authors approach the building of their worlds. It goes like this:
When I am beginning a novel, there are two fundamental things I need to establish. One is horizontal, the other vertical. The horizontal is the landscape. The vertical is the social space. These are the dimensions that allow my imagination to enter my novel and people it with characters. I know for certain that when I write in Chinese, landscape comes first. I must know if I am writing about a village or a city and whether it is an agricultural village made up of cultivated land and animals or a car-choked city full of workers and the newly rich.
Then the architectural elements come in — whether it is an apartment in a tall, modern building or a traditional courtyard. Characters are tied to their living spaces, and their development is tied to the changes in that space. So I construct everything around these two horizontal and vertical elements.
The landscape seems to be constructed similarly in The New York Trilogy; although, of course, New York is mostly vertical. Strange, and stranger things happen as soon as the characters - the actors - move elsewhere. At some point, leaving New York means certain death (a transformation, at least, a change of name, a dissolution of the former personality). Not leaving New York might lead to the very same outcome: this way, the character is effectively lost inside the labyrinth, but there's no Minotaur to be found.
The question of a name, and changes thereof, glues three stories together. I would never spoil the pleasure of discovering who's who and who stole whose name, especially since there is no correct answer to this riddle, but know this: there is a wonderful take on the Tower of Babel narrative problem in the first book, which is a joy to read and a code that's impossible to crack.
And when you finish reading the book, answer me this: who do you feel most sorry for in this story?