Regular marked price: $15.00Discount Price: $10.20
Cost Savings: $4.80 (32%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780140097313
ISBN number: 0140097317
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 208
Printing Date: April 07, 1987
Publishing house: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Sale Popularity Level: 54117
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
A mystery writer assumes a detective's identity and embarks on a bizzare case: he must protect a man from his criminally insane father, and as he follows the elusive criminal, he embarks on a mission that takes him to the depths of his own soul. Auster's In the Country of Last Things is being published this month by Viking.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
In all the reviews I am surprised no one has mentioned Poe's short story "William Wilson," the very definition of doppleganger in literary prose. Here in "City of Glass' we have the same thing, even Auster uses the name William Wilson. This novel brings back true literature in a culture devoid of anything that smacks of indepth thinking on the part of the reader. Allusions, allegory, symbol, puns, linguistic twists, irony, shifting narrators...it's all here. The play on initials between Don Quixote and Danial Quinn is exquisite; the continual movement of Stillman and the paradox of his name speaks volumes about the craft of the author; the quick syntax of detective fiction when Quinn is Auster is beautifully reminiscent of Phillip Roth; the Socratic philosophical dialogue between Stillman and Auster makes me smile with joy that an author encapsulated the form so subtlely and let the audience 'get it' on their own. As a reader, the beauty of the style and form shines through without me having to be told by the author what he is doing. That is priceless in a contemporary literary world where stunted, choppy, rough prose has eclipsed mastery. I am so glad I have a copy of City of Glass; it is the best book I have read in years.
Rated by buyers -
I found this book to be a remarkably inventive work of fiction. Auster is a tremendously intelligent, and surprising writer who seems to create an almost continuous suspense in part by creating new mysteries and questions as he goes along. We wait and watch with the former writer Wilson Wilson now become the detective Daniel Quinn who is known to his client Shipman and his wife Virginia by the name Daniel Auster as Quinn tries to keep track of Shipman's father just released from prison who he fears being murdered by. At the end of the work we not only wonder what has happened to the younger Shipman and his wife Virginia who apparently have disappeared, but even more urgently wonder what has become of Quinn. We are not even certain where he is.
In the course of the telling the whole multiple- identity complication is informed by a discusion of fictional reality, and the text-of-reference here is Quixote. The detective Quinn goes to the house of the man whose name he has adopted, the writer Paul Auster and among things they consider Cervantes device of having the second part of his novel allegedly written by a fictional narrator.
All of the games of multiple- naming however do not diminish from the powerful real feeling created by the author, in telling for instance of Wilson's loss of his wife and son, or of what it means to him to meet a prosperous happy Auster with beautiful wife and son. The same holds true in the telling of the story of young Shipman's years of imprisonment by his father. Here the whole story is enriched by a brief history of children raised in the wild , including that of the child of Auvergne and Kaspar.
If I have one complaint about the book is that it ends leaving so many questions open. But then again it is the very first novel of a trilogy and Auster may have some answers in the volumes to come.
Rated by buyers -
To start this is NOT a detective story. This is NOT a standard fiction novel. This is NOT a nouveau roman in the style of Alain Robbe-Grillet's "The Erasers". What this is, IS a stylized version of a man's endeavor to encounter himself and survive. OK, this sounds almost as ambiguous as the book itself.
To my feelings (and IMHO), Auster is trying to look into the 'soul' of a character in a novel and bring him into our own thought processes. It may just be a way for him to tell us about himself and how he has searched for himself, in a very unorthodox way. His search is the story itself, and the wanderings of Auster/Quinn is his own anabasis. His time in the alley and dark room, would then be his exploration of what is the minimum we truly need to survive, and not what we want in the ways of creature comforts.
He tells us what he IS trying to do in the book in his discusion of the Auster character's essay of Cervantes "Don Quixote". He explicitly states the proposition there are questions as to who is the author of DQ. Whether Cervantes is really DQ, and the whole story of finding the book in a bookstall and translating it into spanish from arabic is Cervantes way of giving up ownership to see how it will be perceived.
I don't think that the naming of the wandering character "Daniel Quinn" (DQ) is anything but a direction by Auster to this idea. That DQ uses his name, as Don Quixote represented Cervantes seem straight forward.
The subsequent two volumes should make this clearer as the follow-ups are supposed to do in a trilogy.
Rated by buyers 
-
The very first book of Auster's New York trilogy was originally published in 1985, and in 1994 was adapted into this graphic novel. I've never read the original (or any of the other parts of the trilogy), so I can't comment on Karasik and Mazzicchelli's adaptation. However, I can say that since I'm not particularly fond of existentialist or postmodernist literature (those two terms being the most common critical shorthand for Auster's story), this really didn't do anything for me at all. The story is basically an exercise in metafiction, and if you like that stuff, great -- I do not. It is dressed up (at least initially) in the mystery genre, but that's just window dressing. (There's a long legacy, especially in France, of cloaking novels and films of ideas in genre trappings (for example Alain Robbe-Grillet's two books The Erasers and The Voyeur, or the films of Jean-Pierre Melville.)
The story begins fairly straightforwardly: a reclusive writer of potboiler mysteries named Daniel Quinn lives in New York on his own since the death of his wife and son. A complete stranger calls him and thinks Quinn is a private detective named Paul Auster and begs him to to take his case. (The writer Paul Auster, and his family, shows up for one scene -- it's that kind of book.) Quinn meets with the strange man, who was raised in rather harrowing circumstances by his professor father, who was seeking to discover the true language of God. The father has been released from jail and Quinn is supposed to keep an eye on him and report. Everything starts to derail when he loses track of both the old man he's been following, and his clients. He spends several months watching the building and going crazy. Once he realizes they've disappeared, he finds his own life has disappeared as well. Obviously this is all somewhat about identity, but it's more about fun stuff like language, representation, and other tiresome postmodern subjects (as are the other two parts of the trilogy, which involve a man spying on someone, and yet another disappearance).
It has to be said that the artwork does an admirable job of treating the bizarro world Auster has thrust his characters into. The simple, heavy grey and white inking is a perfect match to the material, especially when the representations become less literal and more symbolic. However, if your taste runs more toward things like plots and characters, this is probably not for you. Fans of Auster may enjoy this, but fans of the graphic novel form are probably going to be much less keen.
Rated by buyers -
"City of Glass" is Austers very first book of his "New York Trilogy". He keeps his themes so it is also about poverty, hunger and chance. "City of Glass" is about the writer Daniel Quinn who pretends to be the detective Paul Auster. Quinn observes a man who locked in his son for years in the dark in order to teach him god's language. Quinns client fears his father who will be set free from jail. Daniel Quinn is like the other protagonists by Paul Auster. At the beginning "City of Glass" is a very trilling novel. If you read something else by Auster before you read this book you may know what will happen. In the end your expectations won't be fullfilled. For me it is too strange because I don't like Austers theories of chance.
Find other books like this one:
