"The New York Trilogy" by Paul Auster

 This book contains three novellas. They are connected.

City of Glass

Quinn, who writes mystery novels under the pen name William Wilson starring a private eye called max Work, receives a series of late night phone calls asking for help from "Paul Auster ... of the Auster Detective Agency". 

The first couple of chapters, in which the identity issues of the protagonist are discussed in short, matter-of-fact sentences, felt very Kafkaesque. The  research into the Tower of Babel was very reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, as is the thesis about whether a child brought up without language will speak the language of God. A doppelganger makes an early appearance. 

The middle of the story seems to be the relatively straightforward story about a 'detective' following a man whose seemingly random wanderings through New York might have a pattern ... or has that been imposed from outside? Then, towards the end, the themes of identity, and the Kafkaesque and Borgesian atmospheres return before the enigmatic ending. 

There's also a link with Don Quixote, about which the author Auster is writing (a piece querying the authorship of Don Quixote).

Ghosts

All the characters have colour names.  Private investigator Blue (trained by Brown) is hired by White to watch Black, which he does, for months ... But all is not as it seems.

The Locked Room

A hack writer's best-friend-growing-up disappears, leaving three novels and other works. The novelist's wife commissions the hack writer to get them published. They're successful. The hack writer begins to prepare a biography; this task becomes a quest to find the missing man.

The three books explore identity. The plots are light-years away from standard PI-genre plots. There's a lot of confusion. It's very Kafka and some Borges but I'm not sure how much I understood it.

Selected quotes:

• "Remembered things, he knew, had a tendency to subvert the things remembered." (City of Glass 2)
• "It seemed to Quinn that Stillman's body had not been used for a long time ... so that motion had become a conscious process ... all flow and spontaneity had been lost." (City of Glass 2)
• "I am Peter Stillman. I say that of my own free will. Yes. That is not my real name. No." (City of Glass 2)
• "It is merely a blank stare, signifying thought rather than seeing, a look that makes things invisible, that does not let them in." (Ghosts 1)
• "What I had done so far amounted to a mere fraction of nothing at all. It was so much dust, and the slightest wind would blow it away." (The Locked Room 1)
• "Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them ... experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them." (The Locked Room 2)
• "Every life is inexplicable." (The Locked Room 5)
• "That's what you finally learn from life: how strange it is. You can't keep up with what happens. You can't even imagine it." (The Locked Room 6)

An original but very strange book, beautifully written. 

February 2023; 314 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

The Guardian calls NYT "one of the few books you can buy in airport bookshops about the annihilation of identity in the urban world."