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A review by gregbrown
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
5.0
Read the opening chapter of Auster's The New York Trilogy, and instantly know whether you'll enjoy the pages that are to follow. It's such an daring premise that I was enthralled from the start, but some may find it absurd, and too clever by half. (For one, the protagonist's very real reaction grounded it for me.) Either way, it sets up the ground rules for the book, letting you know just how far Auster is willing to go in exploring and contorting the familiar detective story. Each of the three stories starts from a central premise—trailing or searching for someone, and trying to figure them out—and strikes outward in a different direction. Each is strange in their own way.
In doing so, the novel wears its influences on its sleeve. Borges would be proud of how trailing someone for months means becoming them, almost like Pierre Menard's Don Quixote. Kundera would appreciate the twinning of literature and life in the opening piece. And of course, Pynchon would love the constellation of details in each story, each unclear if or how it relates to the whole, forming a parallel world of inference and supposition within the protagonist's mind. And of course, that last part is also reminiscent of Eco's semiotics. This multiplicity of influences makes the novel feel even more unreal, a strange sense of deja vu but without feeling like a copy. And this feeling is heightened by some of the works since that were clearly inspired by Auster's work, such as Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. (The clipped language and sexual undertones of the opening piece certainly point that way.)
Do the stories benefit from being grouped like this, or do they needlessly repeat each other? To put it more bluntly: are they best understood as a unified work? My instinct says yes, in the same way as The Lost Books of the Odyssey's stories work together to hint at different facets of some unencompassable whole. The three stories in the trilogy feel almost combinatorial, echoing each other as they echo themselves, looping inward and outward through the central mystery of trying to know someone else. In a way, they feel similar to oulipo's project: using a central restriction to enable an explosion of creativity down lesser-traveled paths. The overall effect is wonderful to read; I originally considered spacing out my reading sessions, but I'm glad I chose otherwise.
In doing so, the novel wears its influences on its sleeve. Borges would be proud of how trailing someone for months means becoming them, almost like Pierre Menard's Don Quixote. Kundera would appreciate the twinning of literature and life in the opening piece. And of course, Pynchon would love the constellation of details in each story, each unclear if or how it relates to the whole, forming a parallel world of inference and supposition within the protagonist's mind. And of course, that last part is also reminiscent of Eco's semiotics. This multiplicity of influences makes the novel feel even more unreal, a strange sense of deja vu but without feeling like a copy. And this feeling is heightened by some of the works since that were clearly inspired by Auster's work, such as Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. (The clipped language and sexual undertones of the opening piece certainly point that way.)
Do the stories benefit from being grouped like this, or do they needlessly repeat each other? To put it more bluntly: are they best understood as a unified work? My instinct says yes, in the same way as The Lost Books of the Odyssey's stories work together to hint at different facets of some unencompassable whole. The three stories in the trilogy feel almost combinatorial, echoing each other as they echo themselves, looping inward and outward through the central mystery of trying to know someone else. In a way, they feel similar to oulipo's project: using a central restriction to enable an explosion of creativity down lesser-traveled paths. The overall effect is wonderful to read; I originally considered spacing out my reading sessions, but I'm glad I chose otherwise.