The New York Trilogy
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Get 3 months for £0.99/mo
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Narrated by:
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Joe Barrett
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By:
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Paul Auster
About this listen
Paul Auster's brilliant debut novels, City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room brought him international acclaim for his creation of a new genre, mixing elements of the standard detective fiction and postmodern fiction.
City of Glass combines dark, Kafka-like humor with all the suspense of a Hitchcock film as a writer of detective stories becomes embroiled in a complex and puzzling series of events, beginning with a call from a stranger in the middle of the night asking for the author - Paul Auster - himself. Ghosts, the second volume of this interconnected trilogy, introduces Blue, a private detective hired to watch a man named Black, who, as he becomes intermeshed into a haunting and claustrophobic game of hide-and-seek, is lured into the very trap he has created.
The final volume, The Locked Room, also begins with a mystery, told this time in first-person narrative. The nameless hero journeys into the unknown as he attempts to reconstruct the past, which he has experienced almost as a dream. Together these three fictions lead the reader on adventures that expand the mind as they entertain.
As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Paul Auster's book, you'll also get an exclusive Jim Atlas interview that begins when the audiobook ends.
This production is part of our Audible Modern Vanguard line, a collection of important works from groundbreaking authors.©2006 Paul Auster (P)2009 Audible, Inc.Critic reviews
I agree with a previous reviewer who likened Auster to Marmite - you are seldom indifferent. Well, as my first Auster experience it took a couple of chapters but then it quickly became addictive! And it will require a second read to 'get' some of the nuances.
And... I rate books rather critically, and 5 stars are rarely given, the book has to be exceptional. So don't be put off by my rating it at only 4 stars; this is a 'nearly exceptional' book. And the narrator reads it beautifully - very sympathetic to the spirit and character of the novel.
Delicious
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of all the tea, in all the world this was not my cup.
said nothing to me
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Could have been a short story
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The first, City of Glass, is the best. It is a rather bizarre work whose full plot should not be revealed. That the novel is intentionally interwoven with Cervantes’ Don Quixote, with it's surreal and performatively mad play of fictions further elaborates the joys of the text. It purports to be a detective tale but is reminiscent of Kafka, Borges, or Hesse’s Glass Bead Game in its portrayal of mirrored uncertainty and unfolding mystery, even madness. At the end, I laughed at the twisting jokiness of it. A good reason not to reveal the plot is that it only means what it does in the context of the journey of reading or listening to the novella itself. But a few elements can be highlighted. An author of detective fiction is commissioned to observe a suspect who may be planning to do harm. The origin of the method of commissioning oh something to a real life event that happened to the author, Auster. (We learn this in the interesting supplementary interview with him included in the package.) The source of the authorial voice is never disclosed although the true author becomes a fictioned (sic) character in the novel. The protagonist is a detective who takes on a persona and within that persona masks himself in various other characters. He spends forever observing someone who seems to be doing nothing much but what it is turns out to be the crux of the tale although how and why is never explained fully. The circumstances however may have something to do with events in the other novellas.
The third, The Locked Room, is intriguing but has an unconvincing moment that turns the novel . That said, people are always doing things they simply shouldn’t, things that should be utterly unconvincing. Life it is said can be a stranger than fiction. Mind you, this deus ex machina event is only one of a series of highly unconventional behaviours leavened by the ongoing ordinary. A not very successful writer is commissioned by an assumed dead man to inspect his writings and if they are any good arrange their publication. The missing man’s ‘widowed’ wife and his mother play play key roles in the unfolding and unravelling story.
Ghost, the middle yarn — for these are intellectually adroit yarns I think — also concerns a detective commissioned to observe a suspect. The characters are called Black, Blue, Brown, and White and the action takes place on Orange Street. What is truth?
All the novellas engage with themes of identity and the nature of reality and fiction.
The ‘detective’ is a parable for the search for truth we all doge or dive into. Madness is an ever present outcome, but what is sanity? The novels are born in the era immediately following the developing awareness of reflexive consciousness, contextual response, cybernetic self-regulation and R.D. Laing’s sanity in an insane society. But this intellectual verve is conveyed in a straightforward and down-to-earth narrative. The Audible voice reflects this. The narrator is an Audible regular, a New York voice with direct diction. I listened on slightly quickened tempo.
Twisted aspects of identity and truth claims
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An original take on the detective story
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