by Paul Auster

isbn: 0140131558
subject: Fiction and Literature
finished: 7/8/1998

City of Glass is a strange, haunting detective story. By ten pages in it's already working on four levels: the main character confuses his identity with that of his pseudonym and of the main character of the books he writes under that name, and then he receives a phone call for Paul Auster. Normally I have a very low opinion of meta-fictional tricks like this, but Auster pulls it off and the result is a confusing, compelling, and very good story.

Ghosts is shorter than City of Glass, but even more gripping -- I literally read the whole story without taking my eyes off of the book. It's about Blue, a private detective hired to watch a man named Black who just sits there all day, looking back at him and writing. Blue slowly starts to realize that the more he learns about Black the less he knows:

As he reads over the results, he is forced to admit that everything seems accurate. But then why does he feel so dissatisfied, so troubled by what he has written? 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.

The feel of Ghosts reminds me of the first half of David Lynch's Lost Highway, which I consider to be one of the most tense and surreal hours on film.

In The Locked Room, a story similar in several ways to Harlan Ellison's All the Lies That Are My Life, the narrator appropriates the life and work of a childhood friend who has mysteriously disappeared. Then things start to get complicated.

Alienation, confusion of identity, and the inadequacy of words are themes in all three stories. I'm not completely sure why I liked them so much; certainly they're very well written but that's not enough. Anyway, highly recommended.