Title: The New York Trilogy
Author: Paul Auster
Category: Fiction
ISBN: 0140131558
The New York Trilogy
Paul Auster
This book is a trilogy of novellas -- City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. City of Glass features a lonely protagonist (a mystery novel writer) who desires to assume the role (and identity) of the hero of his own novels. So when he receives a call for help, for a detective called Paul Auster, he assumes that name and takes up the case. The result is a surreal detective story.
Ghosts is about a private detective named Blue, who is hired to watch a man called Black. Blue takes up a room across the street, and soon discovers that Black does nothing all day but look out of his window (at Blue), and write. Alone in his room, Blue loses touch with the world, and discovers that his weekly reports are unable to convey what he wants to report about Black.
The final story, The Locked Room, is about a writer whose childhood friend disappears, leaving his writings in the former's care. Presuming the friend to be dead, the protagonist gets the work published, which becomes a literary success. Then the story complicates.
Each of the stories is set in New York, and Paul Auster uses his characters to explore the fragility of one's identity, and how words and language influence one's perception of the real world. The stories are bizarre, with strange twists at the end. This tinge of madness is what I disliked when I started reading, and I think this is why I liked the book so much in the end :-). The writing goes a long way in emphasising the mood of each of the stories.
A great read, highly recommended.