Am I who you think I am? (The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster)

Member Name: sunmeilan

Product:	The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
Date:	26/01/07 (269 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Strangely compelling, beautifully written

Disadvantages: If you like neat endings, stay well clear

I came across this book on the recommendation of a friend who knows I like crime fiction, yet from very early on, I was aware that this was something very different about this book. What initially seems to be a straightforward detective story soon becomes a confusing read, so that identities begin to merge together and then separate again. Despite this, Auster writes in such a way that his make compelling reading and at no point did I feel like throwing the book away in disgust.

I think it is necessary to understand a little of Paul Auster’s background and beliefs in order to grasp the concept behind this book. Auster is well-known for his postmodernist tendencies. For those of you who don’t know what postmodernism means (I had to look it up on wikipedia.org), it refers to trends, usually in art or literature, that rebel against the ‘modernist’ period, which usually refers to trends at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Sometimes postmodernism involves bringing back artistic fashions from the classical period, other times, it involves taking modernist styles to extreme. In this book, he has certainly done the latter, taking what could have been a conventional detective story and twisting it to question what we believe is the case.

As the title suggests, the book is made up of three stories. The first, City of Glass, involves a writer, Daniel Quinn, whose wife and child are dead. He receives a series of phone calls from a man asking for the detective, Paul Auster, and although he ignores them at first, he soon becomes intrigued, pretends to be Paul Auster and goes to meet the man looking for him, called Stillman. Stillman was abused by his father as a child and is convinced that his father, about to be released from prison, is going to kill him. He wants Quinn, in his detective guise, to follow his father and ensure that he stays away.

The second story, Ghosts, is about a man named Blue who is asked by Mr White to spy on Mr Black, a writer. Mr Blue moves into an apartment across from Mr Black and becomes obsessed with his job, to the extent that he loses contact with his fiancée and virtually all other human contact.

Thirdly, The Locked Room, is the story of another writer, whose childhood best friend’s wife contacts him to say that her husband, called Fanshawe, has gone missing, presumed dead. Before going missing, he told his wife, Sophie, to contact the narrator if anything happened to Fanshawe, give him the manuscripts to the many books and poems he has written and then either burn them or publish them depending on the quality of the work. The narrator reads Fanshawe’s work, realises that it is the work of a genius and falls in love with Sophie. The two of them live of the proceeds of Fanshawe’s work, but whereas Sophie and everyone else believe that Fanshawe is dead, the narrator knows that he is not.

Although all of the stories, at first glance, seem to be quite different, they do have quite a lot in common. For a start, they all involve the protagonist searching for someone, ostensibly a flesh and blood person, but this is later called into question and we wonder if the protagonist is either mad or confused. Sometimes the characters overlap and we suspect they may be the same person rather than two individuals. At other times, it is unclear whether one or more of the characters actually exist at all. Sometimes, the names of characters appear in more than one story, although we are not sure if they are the same person, and even the author, Paul Auster, is a character in one of them. All of the stories involve writing; either noting down the comings and goings of the target, or, as in the latter story, trying to get something down on paper that just won’t materialise. Yet on reading back what has been written, nothing seems to make sense.

If you like a nice, neat ending, stay away from this book. None of them really end and the reader is left to his/her imagination to decide what finally happened to the protagonists – did they go mad, did they start a new life or did they eventually manage to get a grip on reality?

I am not always fond of this type of book. I am a very down to earth, practical person and I can’t be doing with pretentiousness or airy fairy stories that mean what you want them to mean. In this case though, I have to make an exception. I found this book extremely readable and very intriguing. Apart from the obvious confusion over identities and what actually exists and what doesn’t, it is hard to say what this book is really all about. However, it is somehow not important; this is a compelling book in its own right and it manages to be so without being in the slightest bit pretentious. In many ways, it is just like a dream; one in which there are events that can’t be, yet somehow they all make sense at the time. It is only when you think about them afterwards that you begin to ask questions.

This is a book that I highly recommend to anyone who likes to read something that makes them think. It is not difficult to understand – the language used is very simple – but the stories have remained with me for several days after finishing it. If you like detective fiction, this is initially very similar to the ‘hard-boiled’ noir novels by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler before it starts to go off in other directions, so fans of this genre might enjoy this book. I would recommend giving it a try whatever type of book you like though – you never know, you may just enjoy it.

The book is available from play.com for £5.99. Published by Faber and Faber, it has 320 pages. ISBN: 9780571152230

Summary: Weird and wonderful, but brilliant too