Synopsis & Review | City of Glass from the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, 1985 | Jean-Michel Serres, Composer-pianist (Apfel Café Music): Website

Summary Synopsis

The trigger was a wrong number. A mystery writer in NY, Daniel Quinn accepted the case of Peter Stillman, as a private detective Paul Auster. Virginia Stillman, the wife of Peter Stillman, requested him to watch the same name father, Peter Stillman would discharge soon, the former professor of Columbia University wrote a book of extraordinary and occultist religious theory. He shut up his son in a room for nine years.

Quinn watched Stillman during two weeks, but he was wandering around a constant area of town only. Quinn tried to talk to Stillman but his talkings were incoherent. A day, Stillman suddenly checked out of the hotel he stayed, so Quinn lost track of Stillman…

Book Review

City of Glass is Paul Auster’s major debut novel originally published in 1985 and the first volume of his New York Trilogy.

A thirteen chaptered novel borrows the style of detective stories. And a snobbish postmodernist or avant-garde literature contains various elements and signs, many fine little interesting episodes and mentions of classical literature. It describes confusion, complexity, difficulties and emptiness of the contemporary huge metropolitan city, New York, and deconstructs the grand narrative, the significance and the form of traditional novels.

My first impression, I think this novel resembles Auster’s next novel Ghosts which also borrows the form of detective stories. Both of them is the story the main character was perplexed, confused and manipulated by a mysterious and confused person(s), and the storyline and elements are resemble.

Almost works by Paul Auster and contemporary novelists have a structure as to seek a riddle or something, and to try to solve questions and riddles. Auster indicated the structure itself on this novel in a symbolic form.

In some parts, Auster indicates his literary thought and philosophy of writing. For him the ideal form of novel is practical detective stories has full of meaning and no vainness. And Quinn was interested in the relation among stories and their combinations. And words are has no fixed meanings. Words and stories should be made by people’s activities as writing. But Stillman Sr. denied the thought of contemporary language theory, he think it was the fall. On this novel Quinn gathered fragments of things, wrote a red notebook and resulted in construct a his story. I think the Auster’s thought of writing is like behalf of Wittgenstein’s language game and Sartre’s existentialism, also it includes the postmodernist theory of deconstruction. It is an active and pragmatic policy of writing put emphasis on physicality, reality and 　contingency or randomness.

This novel is an excellent story of stories and writings. The stories in this story splendidly consists this story. And this novels is a self-reference novel. Quinn, a writer “Paul Auster” and the narrator are writers, the characters may reflect Paul Auster himself, and the notion what are writing, story and words is an important element in this novel.

And I think an outstanding characteristics of Paul Auster’s novels is there were many or some impressive, colourful and vivid scenes and interesting, intellectual and integral descriptions and little fine and funny episodes such as the notion about New York, mystery novels and detective, the description when Quinn bought a red notebook, the summary of The Garden and the Tower: Early Visions of New World by Peter Stillman, the portrayals of Grand Central Terminal and a writer, Paul Auster’s talking his essay on Don Quixote. They calls a harmony and an elaborated image like music, especially like a symphony or a concerto.

This novel is not an armchair story, is a story in the city and in motion or moving. I think Auster’s policy of writing a novel is novels should be written in motion or moving and in the city. The main characters of Auster’s novels moved, fought with difficulty, struggled in the real world or a restricted situation, and the stories progress. So it’s Auster’s practice of language game which was mentioned by Wittgenstein. Also in Auster’s novels, characters play their own language games construct words and stories.

And a sub theme of this novel is a struggle of the view to words and language between Quinn and Stillman Sr.. The former is a contemporary practical language theory like Wittgenstein’s language game or the Saussurean semiology. The latter is like the classical historical language study pursues Proto-Indo-European such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Jacob Grimm.

But Quinn was defeated in the struggle and couldn’t solve the question and find the answer. Readers thought about and experienced the story with Quinn. But the the questions and the riddles were not solved, so this novel involuntary asked the readers about the problem of contemporary people’s emptiness and confusion. And this novel has no conclusion and answer of the question. Many riddles and questions remain. So I think no conclusion is the answer or conclusion.