Synopsis & Review | Ghosts from the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, Faber and Faber, 1992 (Originally Published in 1986) | Jean-Michel Serres, Composer-pianist (Apfel Café Music): Website

Summary Synopsis

A private detective, Blue took a riddle case by White. The request is to watch a mysterious man, Black. But, Black did not do anything. He just sat beside the window, write something, read Walden by Henry David Sorrow and took a brief stroll. To watch and to think about Black, Blue felt complex feelings mixed up friendship, calmness, worry and hostility, and a feeling to watch like a Doppelgänger. Blue searched Black by some measures, but the case didn’t make progress. About one year passed by, Black’s life didn’t vary. A summer day, Blue followed Black, Black took a seat at a lounge of a hotel, and Blue shared the table with Black. Then Black said “I’m a private detective. My current job is to watch someone. He doesn't do anything…"

Book Review

Ghosts is a novelette by Paul Auster and the second volume of his New York Trilogy. And the most symbolic and representative work of the trilogy. This novel is to be said “postmodernist literature”, but the expression and the description are plain, yet to understand the veritable meanings of content and theme is difficult. The style of this novel is unique and particular, and the description is minimal and metaphorical. This novel is a psychological and philosophical story that uses the form and style of a detective story or mystery story, describes the lack of human existence, the question for self, the emptiness of contemporary routine life and the impossibility of writing a novel or a story. Also, it’s a novelette to deconstruct the form and the significance of story or grand narrative.

Blue was requested by White, to watch and investigate Black and to send weekly reports. But Black only did his routine in solitude more than one year, and to watch Black, Blue felt a dilemma between friendship or pity and impatience or anxiety, and to watch his Doppelgänger or looking-glass self. And Blue couldn’t act freely, he was in a closed and limited situation, he reflected on his life and tormented the strange existence of Black. So this novel is a detective story without an incident and a mystery without a murder, and no significant incident occurred until the end. Half of this novel describes the contemporary sober and monotonous life and its emptiness. I think one theme of this novel is the lack of self and real existence of people live in contemporary society, and to escape from the monotonous routine life.

Characters of this novel are named by colors. It has an effect the world of this novel appears monotonous, colorless and blur to a reader. Colors are signifiers or surficial meanings of things and persons, it implies today’s people and things have no reality, soul and content. The names of colors strengthen the world of this novel become monotonous.

And the word ghost in this novel means traces or spirits of persons who passed away, and a metaphor of men of emptiness such as writers, detectives and the state of today’s people spent a vacant life. Writers and detectives think out, make up or trace others’ stories or plots, they don’t live a story of themselves. On the other hand, today’s people live in story or discours made by others or society. I think this novel splendidly succeeded to describe the nothingness and the impossibility of writing story itself by describing a novel.

In this novel, White's request is impossible at first and his aim was ambiguous. So Blue and readers seek an incident and an enigma themselves. In the other words, they seek the story and the meanings to follow.

In the end, Blue found a pile of paper in Black’s room was Blue’s weekly reports. This implies the story and the world of this novel are operated by Black. Blue was controlled by Black, also readers are controlled by him. And the story can’t be said as a proper story, it’s vain and nothing had happened. Then Blue read Black’s manuscript and he knew it was Blue’s story, Black’s biography is identical to Blue’s life or this novel Ghosts itself that we read. This novel is a novel about a novel. And, so, this novel is also a story that deconstructs and breaks out of the modern subjective structure of story.

This novel is also a story of many excellent, vivid and skillful citations and cited episodes. Citations are Blue’s aspiration in his head and his wish to escape from dull Black’s case and the unexciting life. Also, the story is made up of parts and fragments, it's the thought about the literature of Paul Auster. By Auster’s thought, a story is only built by others’ fragments and data for better or worse. And writer or novelist doesn’t write by his subjectivity.

Paul Auster deconstructed the proper story by writing a novel, and he succeeded to write a story of the nothingness or the nihilism as today’s problem of there’s no story and its meanings, the impossibility of writing by writing the nothingness itself causes the impossibility of writing a story.

I think this novel is today's existentialist novel which describes the sufferings of existence as today’s people have no self and real existence. There’s no proper, positive and subjective story. We must live in the world of emptiness, nothingness and that stories are deconstructed.

The later part of this novel is the beginning of the end, Blue said. I think this novel is Paul Auster’s end of the beginning. His beginning is this radical and brilliant deconstruction of story or novel, then his true novelist career and veritable his own grand story begun from following works.