Book # 200 - The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

The original point of this blog was to read the top 100 books that appeared on http://thegreatestnovels.com/top100.htm. And while that is still my goal, I slowly added other reading lists to the project to add some variety to my reading... so now I need to point out that the website that provided the initial 100 list actually has a second list with the 101-200 "greatest novels". Now I'm not going to say that I'm going to read all of the second hundred but I will be reading some of them from time to time.

So, I just back from a vacation to New York and I was trying to find something New York related to read while traveling and The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster sounded like the perfect thing. The New York Trilogy consists of three mostly unrelated sort of detective mystery stories. The first story, City of Glass, is about a writer that receives a phone call intended for someone else and ends up becoming involved in a weird mystery. Next is Ghosts, in which a man is hired to follow another man and tries to figure out why he is tailing this other man. And last is The Locked Room in which a man finds out that an old friend has disappeared and has left him a stack of great unpublished novels.

I enjoyed all three stories quite a bit. Each one starts out like a typical detective story but slowly they become stranger and stranger until the main character has a mental breakdown and begins to question their own identity. The interior cover pages label each story as "A Penguin Existential Mystery" which does seem very accurate. All three stories share similar themes and aren't really about solving the mysteries they present but rather asking questions about identity, obsession and the connection between the person solving a mystery and the person who created it.

I'd recommend the book if you like mysteries and don't mind if they don't get solved in the end in a traditional way. An A.

Oh yeah... the novel name checks Moby Dick a few times and includes a whole discussion about Don Quixote and the framing device used within it that questions who the "actual" author is supposed to be and how the answer to that informs the reader on possible motives of the characters within Don Quixote. That whole sequence left be glad that I'd already read Don Quixote.