Gaaaah. Upon finishing the piece of smirkingly self-referential garbage that was "City of Glass", I wanted to jump in a showever and scrub away the stinking detritus of your self-congratulatory, hypercerebral, pomo, what a clever-boy-am-I, pseudo-intellectual rubbish from my mind. But not all the perfumes of Araby would be sufficient - they don't make brain bleach strong enough to cleanse the mind of your particular kind of preening, navel-gazing idiocy. The first story, City of Glass, features an author of detective fiction who becomes a private investigator and descends into madness as he becomes embroiled in the investigation of a case. It explores layers of identity and reality, from Paul Auster the writer of the novel to the unnamed "author" who reports the events as reality, to "Paul Auster the writer", a character in the story, to "Paul Auster the detective", who may or may not exist in the novel, to Peter Stillman the younger, to Peter Stillman the elder and, finally, to Daniel Quinn, the protagonist. Nestling among the main plots in his novels are sudden bursts of playful imagination: minor characters are imbued with whole biographies; the tale of how Blue Stone Ranch got its name in The Book of Illusions turns out to be thematically related to the whole book. Whenever Auster senses a gap in the conversation, he eagerly fills it with historical anecdotes, discussing the lives of such relative unknowns as Emma Lazarus, the author of the poem on the Statue of Liberty, or, indeed, Hawthorne's baby son Julian. "Oh, you really must hear this!" he says, happily launching into the tale of Hawthorne and Poe's friendship. This first tale follows a writer-turned-detective whose interest in detective fiction eventually was so overwhelming that he became a detective himself. He finds a case and is overwhelmed by it. As he considers the odds and ends of it, he feels he might be going crazy. In this story, the detective works closely with the author, Paul Auster, who may or may not be real; the character has a hard time remembering where the lines of reality are. The protagonist is revealed to be Daniel Quinn who wonders extensively about Don Quixote throughout the prose.

PA: In the second part of The Invention of Solitude, I explore many of the same questions, but more from a historical perspective than from a purely philosophical one.This applies equally to the manner in which Auster co-opts elements of detective fiction to pursue his goals. In contrast to Robert Coover, he doesn’t just exploit genre conventions to house a story or myth he has invented.

The Trilogy is also a highly philosophical work. However, unlike most post-modern fiction, the philosophy is tightly wound into the structure or narrative of the novel. The philosophy is almost inseparable from the fiction itself. It’s no mere gratuitous insertion designed to contribute to either length or literary pretension. In other words, it’s both relevant and essential to the fiction:E un roman artificios, în linia povestirilor lui Henry James. Un personaj pornește în căutarea altuia, al doilea se ascunde atît de bine încît nu poate fi găsit, fiindcă nu vrea decît să-l chinuie pe primul (e un pervers, așadar). Amîndoi sînt excesiv de nervoși. Primul face o obsesie, cade în alcoolism și erotomanie, ajunge în preajma nebuniei și doar un noroc îl ferește de disoluția nervilor. Dar, în realitate, se poate presupune că personajul cu adevărat nebun și cu psihicul în descompunere e al doilea. Nu știm foarte sigur (și nci nu ne-ar folosi la nimic) dacă primul nu e cumva al doilea și nici dacă al doilea nu e cumva primul. Și nu e deloc limpede nici dacă nu cumva întreaga anchetă se petrece doar în mintea unuia dintre cei doi, nu știm care, dar asta nu mai contează. Precum scrie în acest pasaj: But perhaps he would be able to make up for the past by plunging forward. By coming to the end, perhaps he could intuit the beginning. Auster met the writer Siri Hustvedt, a blonde willow of a woman with a surprisingly strong handshake and a sharp jawline, at a poetry reading on February 23 1981, a date he preserves for posterity in Leviathan, in which the hero, Peter, meets Iris (hold a mirror up to that name) in a similar situation, and, gushingly, mistakes her for "a fashion model - an error that most people still make when seeing her for the first time". Strikingly, Auster, who almost always writes in the first person both in fiction and non-fiction, becomes in the story of his own life, "A". The distance created by slipping from first to third person reads like a quiet sigh of denial and loneliness, of someone who, he writes, was "living to the side of himself". How often pursuing a certain purpose we are on a wild goose chase. And even if we find something how often ot is not a thing we were looking for.

In such a town the situation of a rebel, an American patriot, say, spying on the enemy forces occupying the city and carrying intelligence across the Hudson to General Washington in New Jersey, where he was encamped with his ragged citizen army, might provide good drama. If that patriot spy was a woman, the stakes would be higher still, and if she were then betrayed, say, by her son - and so it began. This 1987 Tom Wolfe novelis by many considered to be the quintessential New York work of fiction, originally conceived as a series of books that ran in Rolling Stone magazineacross 27 installments starting in 1984. What does it mean, then, when someone calls a book "pretentious"? Let's dissect it. What they really seem to be saying is this: "I didn't find meaning in this book, therefore anyone who claims to have found meaning is not telling the truth." And this boils down to the following syllogism: "I am an intelligent reader; therefore anyone who is also an intelligent reader will share my opinion of this book; anyone who doesn't share my opinion, therefore, isn't an intelligent reader." A valid inference, no doubt, but hardly sound. This is because the whole argument hinges on one unavoidable fact: that by using the word "pretentious," one is implicitly assuming that they themselves are intelligent. And everyone knows that only dumb people think they're smart. The 1958 novella introduces audiences to Holly Golightly, a naive and spoiled society girl played by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film adaptation of the literary work. In March 2006, published as text with illustrations by Art Spiegelman and an Introduction by Luc/Lucy Sante - ISBN 9780143039839

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IBS: Both The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy have captivated audiences all over the world. My students absolutely love them. I taught them again (probably for the tenth time) last week and after the lecture one of my students came up to me and asked me to give you this letter. It says that your work has changed his life and now he wants to become a writer! Listen carefully, and perhaps you will learn something. In his little speech to Alice, Humpty Dumpty sketches the future of human hopes and gives the clue to our salvation: to become masters of the words we speak, to make language answer our needs. Humpty Dumpty was a prophet, a man who spoke truths the world was not ready for. IBS: Even so, you experimented with literary convention, opened new possibilities in fiction, explored ideas. These early books, especially The New York Trilogy, raised very important questions about truth, about language, about being in the world. They prompt reflection about issues that were absolutely pivotal in contemporary literary theory. Classics are classic for a reason, including J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye—a novel that has turned its main character, Holden Caulfield, into a prime example of teenage rebellion and New York the ideal setting for a coming-of-age saga. The only reason I didn't give this five stars is because of the slight headache it gave me. This was probably a bit self-inflicted. I always want everything to fit. This book is like a puzzle box, but the pieces inside are from several different puzzles, none of them matching the picture on the box, and none of the puzzle-sets being complete. I tried stomping the pieces together, hence the headache. I'm planning to return to it and see if I can fill in the blanks somehow, this time without stomping on the pieces and without any headaches. I know I'll enjoy it all over again, but probably a bit differently, knowing what I think I know. This riddle-nature of the book is what makes it so unique: uniquely readable, uniquely challenging, uniquely re-readable, uniquely enjoyable. And very recommendable.