Mysteries in New York - The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster

Résumé du document

One night in New York, Quinn, a writer, is telephoned by someone asking to speak to Paul Auster, a private detective. At first, he hangs up but at the second call, interested, he decides to play the role of this detective and accepts a meeting. He is asked by Peter Stillman to follow his father who has been freed from jail after having cloistered his own son during all his youth. During all the stalking, the father has a weird behaviour which is reported to Peter. Comes a day when Quinn loses him, and decides to give up his life in order to finish his job. He becomes a homeless living on the street, just in front of Peter's flat in case his father comes around, until he learns that Peter has moved, and his investigation came to an end.

Extraits

[...] In The Locked Room, Fanshawe flees from his family because he thinks he is not done for this way of life: wasn't meant to live like other people.”; then the narrator flies away from his family because he wants to forget Fanshawe and all what he got from him (family and money): “Instead of looking for Fanshawe, I had actually been running away from him.”. He feels that he is locked in a room and just wants to get out of it: had been struggling to imagine him, to see him as he might have been but my mind had always conjured a blank. At best, there was one impoverished image: the door of a locked room . this room, I now discovered, was located inside my skull.”. [...]

[...] There is no logic in its characters' behaviour, like in New York, which is often described as a crazy place for its speed (Wall Street), its shows (Broadway Avenue) and its dimensions (the Empire State Building). New York is the city which seems to be known by everyone but which is at the end, blurred and hidden behind its walls in glass. [...]

[...] New York is Babel In City of Glass, the older Stillman has worked out a theory about language. He locked his baby son in a room to prevent him from learning any language, waiting for him to develop his own. He wants to improve the English language: invent new words that will correspond to the things It will be the most important event in the history of mankind.”. This is why he collects things in the streets. When Quinn reconstitutes Stillman's walks, he discovers that each walk forms a letter and gathered, they make the word: “Tower of Babel”. [...]

[...] Mysteries in New York: the New York Trilogy, Paul Auster I. Plots City of Glass: A night in New York, Quinn, a writer, is phoned by someone asking to speak to Paul Auster, a private detective. At first, he hangs up but at the second call, interested, he decides to play the role of this detective and accepts a meeting. He is asked by Peter Stillman to follow his father who has been freed from jail after having cloistered his own son during all his youth. [...]

[...] In City of Glass, we do not know: -if Quin has followed the right Stillman; -who feeds him when he is naked in Stillman's flat; -what he becomes afterwards; -how his family (wife and son) died; In The Locked Room, we do not know: -who he is the narrator; -why Fanshawe disappeared; -what was written in the red notebook which could solve all the mysteries; Moreover, all the titles of these short stories could be given to any of them: in The Locked Room, Fanshawe is a ghost; in Ghosts, Blue is locked in a room; in City of Glass, Quinn becomes a ghost and the younger Stillman has been locked in a room during his childhood. This is how we can understand the following sentence: could not have started this book. The same holds for the two books that come before it, City of Glass and Ghosts. These three stories are finally the same story but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about.”. [...]