New York Trilogy

I am peter stillman. i am not peter stillman. But i did meet Fanshawe once. In Malaysia called himself Bob McCorkle.
Great book, got me into auster, arguably his best

I'd disagree with Rokkitnite in that there was a little bit of flatulence. Just a trace - perhaps a ghost of an eggy smell, particularly during the Kurtz like emergence of a rarely seen but whimsically brutal arch-mastermind character. But in all other respects, the novel is a profoundly uncomfortable and thoroughly interesting read. It's strange to find a text that questions metaphysics and its own conception when it is so often lumped into the category of crime fiction (probably due to the Private Eye aspect) - a genre famous for its blatant but (usually) unconscious construction as a 'formalised puzzle'.

Auster poses questions, but he doesn't answer them in ways we expect. His creation is a glass city, self-reflective (reflexive?), shining, fragile and frighteningly hollow.

I'm not going to say anymore, because I'll end up ruining the stories. You should have a look.

Paul Auster's New York Trilogy is a rare beast - postmodern fiction that doesn't disappear up its own self-regarding arse in a whiff of indulgent flatulence. All three novellas are entertaining, character-driven stories in their own right - even more so than Borges, Auster regards the slippage and uncertainty of epistomological relativism as a dark, malevolent thing. Characters become aware of their status as fictional creations and stumble onward, recognising that such realisations do nothing to liberate them, and indeed form yet another part of their deterministic existences.
Think Beckett on a hunt for the Maltese Falcon and you're almost there.