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Jepp, her komme ein liten forklaring på bokå eg stadig går å mase om, "The New York Trilogy" av New York forfattaren Paul Auster. Bokå består altså av tri novellas (lang novelle/kort roman); "The City of Glass", "Ghosts" og " The Locked Room". De kan lesas separat, men henge likavel sammen.

"The City of Glass" features Quinn, a solitary man, living quietly after the death of his wife and son, and writing detective stories under a pseudonym. One night, Quinn receives a mysterious phone call from a man demanding the services of a private detective, Paul Auster... Although it is clearly a wrong number, Quinn decides to pretend to be Auster and take the challenge, changing his life forever.

A complete change of life circumstances is also a fate of the protagonist of a second (and the shortest) novella "Ghosts". Blue, who is a professional private detective, receives a task from the disguised client, White, to watch Black. The trouble is, Black never does anything interesting except reading or writing, and bored Blue tries to find out, where the real secret of this investigation lies.

In the last novella "The Locked Room", the main character is involved in the publication of the works of his missing childhood friend, Fanshawe. The books are a great success, he marries Fanshawe's wife and he assumes Fanshawe's identity, happily at the beginning...

These are not easy novels to read, Auster gives us enough information to work at it but not enough that he has to sit there and explain it all to us, at the end, the only judgemnet we can make is our own and maybe that's not totally accurate. There are threads dangling, lives cut off, people who aren't what they're supposed to be and aren't sure when the change happened, or what it really means. Auster delves into what makes us what we are, and who we think we are and how the quest can change us, like not looking into a mirror for too long and forgetting what you really look like. When you finally see your reflection, you're surprised, because you think it's someone else, after all this time. This is the kind of book that probably needs to be read and reread, in order to catch the interlocking themes, the tiny clues that carry over from one book to the other. But even from one reading I can tell it's a thick work, thought provoking and constantly evolving. I may not have gotten everything, but what I did get gave me a lot to think about. As I said earlier, there is a central mystery in each book, but that's just the window dressing, an excuse to get you to read. The real meat of the novel lies elsewhere, somewhere in the mind.

" We all want to be told stories and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another-for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself." (The Locked Room)

Kilde: amazon.com