Criss-crossing stories exchange themes and characters freely... characters and writer exchange places, fight and sometimes try to kill each other. This book can be read at different levels:
- A commentary in the art of creation and the relationship between creation and creator
- Does "truth" exist on its own, or only to the extent we create it?
- The complex relationships between language and reality.
- Construction and deconstruction of personality.
- Descent into madness through obssession.
Paul Auster hijacks the detective thriller form and makes it fit his own purposes masterfully, without losing anything in the process. These stories still read very well as thrillers.
Quotes:
Auster’s detectives are pilgrims, questers.
If the city is a forest and the detective is a pilgrim, the author is a pilgrim as well. He is the one who makes it out alive, who can exchange his story for supper and a bed of straw.
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
“Is this Paul Auster?” asked the voice. “I would like to speak to Mr. Paul Auster.”
In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable. The reader sees the world through the detective’s eyes
I have not been hired to understand—merely to act.
“You see, the world is in fragments, sir. And it’s my job to put it back together again.”
But people change, don’t they? One minute we’re one thing, and then another another.
Memory is a great blessing, Peter. The next best thing to death.
“Lying is a bad thing. It makes you sorry you were ever born. And not to have been born is a curse. You are condemned to live outside time. And when you live outside time, there is no day and night. You don’t even get a chance to die.”
The red notebook, of course, is only half the story, as any sensitive reader will understand.
First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown. Brown broke him in, Brown taught him the ropes, and when Brown grew old, Blue took over. That is how it begins. The place is New York, the time is the present, and neither one will ever change.
In every report he has written so far, action holds forth over interpretation. For example: The subject walked from Columbus Circle to Carnegie Hall. No references to the weather, no mention of the traffic, no stab at trying to guess what the subject might be thinking. The report confines itself to known and verifiable facts, and beyond this limit it does not try to go.
This isn’t the story of my life, after all, he says. I’m supposed to be writing about him, not myself.
He says to himself: what happened is not really what happened. For the first time in his experience of writing reports, he discovers that words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say.
What he does not know is that were he to find the patience to read the book in the spirit in which it asks to be read, his entire life would begin to change, and little by little he would come to a full understanding of his situation—that is to say, of Black, of White, of the case, of everything that concerns him.
Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.
But that was a long time ago. We grew up, went off to different places, drifted apart. None of that is very strange, I think. Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.
who wouldn’t jump at the chance to redeem himself—what man is strong enough to reject the possibility of hope?
Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said.
Only darkness has the power to make a man open his heart to the world [...]
I had entered my own darkness, and it was there that I learned the one thing that is more terrible than anything else: that sexual desire can also be the desire to kill, that a moment comes when it is possible for a man to choose death over life.
I was a detective, after all, and my job was to hunt for clues.
A month is a long time, more than enough time for a man to come apart.
The same holds for the two books that come before it, City of Glass and Ghosts. These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about.
This man was Fanshawe because I said he was Fanshawe, and that was all there was to it. Nothing could stop me anymore.
My name isn’t Fanshawe. It’s Stillman. Peter Stillman.
Names aren’t important, after all. What matters is that I know who you really are.
the truth was no longer important
I did not die there, but I came close, and there was a moment, perhaps there were several moments, when I tasted death, when I saw myself dead. There is no cure for such an encounter. Once it happens, it goes on happening; you live with it for the rest of your life.
You can’t possibly know what’s true or not true. You’ll never know.
All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other out.
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