Peter speaks in a unique, stilted fashion, the result of the abuse his father, who was gripped by a sort of religious mania, put him through. Quinn gets a strange call one night asking for the detective Paul Auster, and after dismissing the first call, receives another one a few nights later and decides to play along, pretending to be Auster and taking on the case, which involves protecting a young man, Peter Stillman, from his abusive father as the latter is about to be released from prison. The first novella, City of Glass, covers a writer named Daniel Quinn who works under a pseudonym, William Wilson, about a detective named Max Work. The work appears on the Guardian‘s 2003 list of the hundred greatest novels ever written, which is the only reason I even knew of its existence. Each part starts out as a detective story, but turns into something else entirely, exploring questions of identity and meaning, with the three protagonists devolving into madness as their “cases” go awry. Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy is a collection of three novellas that are just barely connected enough that I would call this one novel, although it certainly bends the boundaries of the form.
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