One of the things that makes this trio of pieces at once so accessible and so ungraspable is the apparent clarity of their language and narratives - it's as if the reader, in seemingly so easily penetrating the surface of the text, finds themselves all at once to have come out on the other side while being none the wiser as to the meaning of what they have just encountered. So with that in mind, how might a literal reading of City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room proceed?
Well, it would need to begin at the end, with the third of those, whose unnamed narrator says that he wrote all three, each representing different stages in his self-understanding (or something to that effect).
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Wrote the above some two or three weeks ago, then left it to sit, not particularly having the time to develop and think through the rest. In the mean time, we've book clubbed the trilogy, most of which was spent trying to work out what actually happens in the book(s) and how all the pieces fit together (I'm convinced at least by Andrew B's conjecture that all three are written by Fanshawe - although of course that's without taking 'Paul Auster' out of his box, though it's probably not possible to arrive at the reading whereby F is indeed the author without an awareness of the existence of PA 'within' and 'outside' City of Glass and the trilogy as a whole). Discussing the book(s) was an experience much like reading it/them (see above); The New York Trilogy is at once both a complete tease and extremely satisfying. I feel that I've almost grasped it - but full understanding is still just beyond my reach.
