The New York Trilogy

Product Information

In adapting Paul Auster’s postmodern detective story City of Glass as a graphic novel, Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli succeeded in producing a visual translation of an often non-visual text.

Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (1987) is one of the most striking examples of the “anti-detective” or “metaphysical” detective story as described by Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney in Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (1999).

Despite the late hour, I opened the curtain in my lounge, and used my new binoculars to spot the dark-haired man in the apartment on the third floor of the house across the road. In contrast to Robert Coover, he doesn’t just exploit genre conventions to house a story or myth he has invented. Pudimos ser otra cosa, nuestra vida podría haber discurrido por otros caminos, cómo de distintos podríamos haber sido, somos solo fruto del azar? The postmodernist heart of the trilogy’s obsession with identity and legitimacy extends even beyond the book’s publication.

Yet his pursuit of Black (no matter how confusing) has allowed him to channel some reflected light on his own self.Even if the protagonist in each of the stories at some point devotes himself to an investigation, the element of detection here concerns linguistic and existential issues rather than criminal ones. Con la struttura aperta della "Trilogia", secondo David Lodge, Auster sembra voler riproporre allegoricamente l'idea che, dopo la "Caduta", sia impossibile ricostituire il legame fra significante e significato presupposto antecedentemente, propendendo per l'assoluta arbitrarietà nell'associazione del nome proprio con il senso al quale dovrebbe rinviare. l’intera poetica di Auster per come ho imparato a percepirla, temi che si ritrovano anche nelle sue opere seguenti. IBS: More so than The Invention of Solitude, I think, even if it also invites a great deal of reflection. 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.

That is, if you can first get a toehold on the island at all, which these days requires serious bucks. The double, the original and the copy, occupies the postmodernists on a number of levels, including a double reading of any work of literature.

The text’s investigation into, and interrogation of, language is brought to bear on the comic version’s own visual language, and City of Glass: The Graphic Novel emerges as valuable source material for a future poetics of comics.