THE NEW YORK TRILOGY by Paul Auster
Do writers have real lives?
This is the implicit question that lies at the heart of these three separate though interconnected stories. They all share the same setting (New York, obviously), the genre (Detective fiction with an existential twist) and each deal with themes of identity, isolation and intrigue.
In The Locked Room, the final part of the trilogy, the author’s voice steps in to highlight the similarities: “These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about”.
In the first story, City Of Glass, Quinn is employed as a private eye and describes his assignment to watch Stillman as a “glorified tail-job” which entails long hours watching and waiting for something to happen. Nothing does. Continue reading
