Resumo de The New York Trilogy

Paul Auster New York Trilogy

Under the formal attire and props of the traditional American detective story (the silent, tough private eye contacted by mysterious clients ? wealthy men, lovely women - who need urgent help) Paul Auster takes us into a house of mirrors, a labyrinth of lives real and imagined, a kaleidoscope that subtly shifts the scenes while the reader turns the pages following one strand of the story, until suddenly a totally new landscape has emerged and there is a story within the story, and one is no longer sure which carries which. Paul Auster himself enters at a point as one of the characters.One is reminded of trick pictures, in which a drawing can be two different figures, depending on how one focuses one?s attention. (The vase, the old lady with a hat), or of M. Escher?s complementary tessellations and impossible staircases.
What is left unsaid ? the gaps ? the complementary picture ? alternate with the text in the story line. Sometimes there is the literary equivalent of bizarre topological objects such as Moebius strips and Klein bottles, as in some of J.L. Borges?stories.

In City of Glass, the first novella in the trilogy, Daniel Quinn is a thirty five year author of detective stories, who after losing his wife and son has sought refuge in a secluded, stunted life under a pseudonym. He keeps his identity secret from both agent and publisher. He takes long random walks in the city, his whole existence is now a search for obliteration.
This precarious balance is upset late one night by a phone call from a stranger asking for Paul Auster of the Auster Detective Agency. His curiosity aroused, he pretends to be the detective Paul Auster and in an elegant New York apartment he meets Peter and Virginia Stillman, a young man and his wife, a slightly older, very beautiful woman.

From the young man?s bizarre account, and the wife?s subsequent explanation, he pieces together a story of a child locked in a dark room in total isolation from the ages of two to eleven by his father, a distinguished scholar whose obsession with the interpretation of the story of the Tower of Babel has driven him insane after his wife?s death. His imprisonment of his child is a replication of earlier historical barbaric experiments of rearing infants in isolation in order to discover the original language of man. The boy, discovered following an accidental fire in the apartment, was sent to an institution for rehabilitation. The old man has been confined to an insane asylum but is about to be released and the couple are afraid he will attack them. Daniel in his assumed role agrees to find and follow the elder Stillman. He does, but loses him.

Daniel Quinn the writer now becomes obsessed with his detective role. He now lives in the street, watching the Stillman apartment. He collapses from lack of sleep and when he recovers, tries to return to his former life and fails. He goes back to the Stillman place, and finds the apartment empty. He moves into the tiny room where Peter was imprisoned as a child. Food is mysteriously provided. All he does now is write in his red notebook, while there is light. His writing is his only existence, and he is conscious of his own evanescence as the days become shorter and shorter.
A new narrator closes this opening story. Several strands are left loose, to be picked up at the close of the trilogy.

The second story, ?Ghosts?, is more surrealistic. An unknown agent has set up two investigators to spy on each other, from opposite apartments across the street. Again, this is a story of obsession, as each becomes progressively entangled with the other to the point of losing all inner balance. Hate inevitably develops in this insane setup of mutual dependence and disengagement from all previous existence. The protagonists have abstract names: Black, Brown, Blue, White.

The connection to the whole will only become apparent in the last story of the set, ?The Locked Room?. The narrator receives aa call from Sophia Fanshawe, the wife of an old childhood friend who has disappeared, leaving her instructions to give him his unpublished writings for evaluation and eventual publication. He agrees, and eventually marries her and adopts their boy, born after his friend?s disappearance.

But again, there emerges a pattern of lives reflected in other lives that might have been, the writer?s effort to understand the nature of his own reality and against the hold of imagination upon the will. The narrator is driven again to a quest to find out that which has been hidden, and in his struggle there will emerge a new vision of the two preceding pieces in the book.

Where does this journey take the reader? Because Paul Auster is a master storyteller, one may be often puzzled but never bored. At the very best moments, one makes contact. In fleeting views in an imaginary mirror, for an instant, we recognize the scene, it belongs to our own experience (real or dreamed, it doesn?t matter), and one finds an answer to inner questions. And this is the basic contract: Tell me about me. Writers write, readers read, to find out, to discover the questions they need.

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