Unfortunately Quinn does not keep it in mind.
I have not been hired to understand – merely to act. If all goes well, it should even be quite simple. …I am supposed to do a job, one little thing, and I have said yes to it. At one point Quinn, the hero of City of Glass, writes in his notebook: Auster’s philosophical stance says knowing or communicating anything is impossible, therefore these quests leave their heroes in the grip of madness. Each book starts as a loving, if disturbed, paean to the detective genre before spinning off into a postmodern quest for the meaning of language and the meaning of a character’s actions. The New York Trilogy is essentially a game. It’s short (put together it only comes to 314 pages), it’s memorable and it’s a grab-bag of postmodern trickery filtered through a sincere enthusiasm for both crime novels and the vicissitudes of language. The New York Trilogy, published through 19, collected together in 1987, is Paul Auster’s first and most famous work of fiction. Lest you think it’s just my serious reading that’s antiquated: When I want a throw-away book I inevitably reach for something from the 70s at the latest.Ībout a year ago I decided to make a concerted effort to read things that were up to date and of the notes I took only those for The New York Trilogy seem worth replicating and re-editing here (the original dates from August 12th, 2011). Observers of this blog may have noticed my rather strong predilection for the modernist movement and it’s true that the number of contemporary works I’ve read is pitiful: Two (or possibly four) from Paul Auster and one each from a handful of others. “Modern” being a term to encompass roughly the last 30 years worth of publications.
Let me start by explaining my own ignorance of the modern literary scene.
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