Paul Auster's "The New York Trilogy" personal """""review"""""

I'm not a big fan of Auster's style, his type of fiction, one that plays with your mind, self-awarness and gives you a wide range of queer emotions. Still, he makes some very interesting points along the story, hidden in the mental logorrhea of the narrator. I don't tend to allow myself to have agressive opinions on books, specially with this kind of litterature, where one is constantly confused, troubled, and yet somewhat joyful altoghether. 

This particular story leaves a great deal of doors open, which is not my favorite thing, but the icing on the confussion cake is the lack of ability the brain has to piece toghether the first two novels with the couple of names and facts the last provides. 

That said, I went looking for interpretations on forums or discussions/review wesites to see if I had missed something crucial to achieve this, but without succes. However, I found some interesting comments on the book that in one way or another express ome thoughts I had on it:

"However, I honestly don't think Auster needed to write it that way, and while you can argue that the third part's power is cumulative, that you've got to pound through the first two wondering whether you were being mind-fucked or just pointlessly bored in order to win the prize at the end, I absolutely do not agree. After all that I do believe Auster is a great writer, but he needs to cut out this cutesy-poo monkeyfart "meta" crap and just make a damn story"

"City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986): Meta as in metafiction, also metaphysics and metaphor. This is fiction about fiction, writing about the writer. Who’s writing whom? Who’s the author and who’s the imagined character? Auster's characters aren’t “real” people (even when they are autobiographical) in the sense that you might invite one over for dinner, but are real in the sense that you might imagine yourself dissolving into fiction, or have the sense that the self is fiction.

These are stories that demand that the reader NOT check her brain at the door: disquieting, self-weary perhaps, not particularly plot-driven. They include elements of detective fiction, of mysteries and thrillers. Detective stories in the sense that characters follow one another around and spy on one another. Characters disappear and/or mirror one another: one “self” becomes the “other.” Everyone here is lost and almost no one is found. Who is trailing whom becomes undecidable or indecipherable. Characters disappear. We don’t know where they go and neither does the author."

If this were a true review I would have to say whether I like the book or not, and give it a certain amount of stars, but luckily for me, this is not a true review, so I don't have to do anything :). The truth is the book was deeply interesting, and very Auster, and I enjoyed reading it. I don't feel I've learned something new so much as I've reafirmed some old convictions. And that's that. That's all I can say after reading so many times that words fail many times.