Penguin Books The New York Trilogy 紐約三部曲 保羅·奧斯特

“Exhilarating . . . a brilliant investigation of the storyteller’s art guided by a writer-detective who’s never satisfied with just the facts.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer

 

The remarkable, acclaimed series of interconnected detective novels City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, from New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster. The New York Trilogy famously upends the traditional mechanisms of the detective story – its many influences include Raymond Chandler – with all manner of postmodern tricks. In the first of these adaptations, Quinn, a writer of detective fiction, is drawn into a real-life mystery. In the second, a private eye called Blue descends into madness, fatally flummoxed by the case on which he’s working. In the third, another writer – he may or may not be Auster – is creatively blocked, a situation he’ll perhaps fix by solving the disappearance of his childhood friend, Fanshawe.

 

This is a stone-cold masterpiece, an instant classic that will be read for decades to come. Sketched in black and white, these books have a concise, noirish, cinematic feel, even as they’re hugely inventive, playing their own games when it comes to pace and scale: Quinn, who loves to walk, appears as a giant on a map of Manhattan; the unnamed narrator of the third book appears in miniature, sitting inside a suitcase that contains a Fanshawe archive. Somehow, they go further than words, metaphorical labyrinths transformed into human brains, internal monologues wittily depicted as other activities (thinking is represented as digging a hole). 

 

Above all, the frames of a comic lend themselves so perfectly to Auster’s city setting and his stories’ themes of chance and loneliness. They bring irresistibly to mind doors and windows; a sense of what lurks unseen beyond apartment landings. Push against them, dear reader, and who knows what you’ll find. Although The New York Trilogy gives a nod to the detective genre, they are not conventional detective stories organized around solving mysteries. Rather, Auster uses the detective form to address questions of identity, space, language, and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern form in the process.

 

Features

• Edition : -
• Binding : Paperback
• ISBN : 9780140131550
• Publication Date : 1990/4/1

 

Materials & Care

• Imported