Paul Auster: They come out of material I’d been thinking about and working on for many years. In The Red Notebook, I describe the phone call I received from the person who wanted to talk to the Pinkerton Agency. It triggered the first novel, City of Glass. The idea of a wrong number intrigued me and, because it happened to concern a detective agency, it somehow seemed inevitable that my story should have a detective element to it. It’s not in any way a crucial part of the story, and it was always irritating to me to hear these books described as detective novels. They’re not that in the least.

Sophie arrived at the writer’s apartment each night until the following Thursday, when she seemed to have an argument with him. Nobody drew the curtains this time, because Sophie left the apartment and slammed the front door, leaving the writer to resume his reading.Despite, or perhaps because of his rather unliterary upbringing - his mother had "no particular interest in writing" and his father, who died before Paul achieved critical success, was bemused by how he had "produced a poet for a son" - Auster has a very traditional view of the role of the author, almost self-consciously so. In Hand to Mouth he writes, "Becoming a writer... [you] don't choose it so much as get chosen." Lauterbach agrees: "Ever since I've known him, Paul has wanted to be a writer with a capital W." If you’re interested in reading just one example of metafiction, I can’t think of any better work than "The New York Trilogy" (except perhaps Thomas Pynchon’s "The Crying of Lot 49").

Il detective indaga sì, ma all'interno, nella stanza privata che è il suo cervello, alla ricerca di un senso della vita dell'uomo che non riesce a trovare.Nicol, Bran The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) ISBN 9780521679572. Chapter 7, 'Two postmodern genres: cyberpunk and detective fiction', includes a section on City of Glass. urn:lcp:newyorktrilogy0000aust:epub:88862c81-91ed-406a-8673-656ef0e6841a Foldoutcount 0 Grant_report Arcadia #4281 Identifier newyorktrilogy0000aust Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t1qg7ph6z Invoice 2089 Isbn 0571149251