A life completely her own

Well, the impending doom that I had forecasted in the last post came quicker than expected, placing me now at the end of my first week of unemployment.  It was no surprise though, and therefore failed to jar me in any way.  Coincidentally, along with my finishing up The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, I will be spending some hours in the Big Apple working toward a new career.  Hopefully good things will come from that, but as Auster describes in "The Locked Room" (the second of the three stories), "In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm."  I'd rather less squirming and more veering, after almost three years of risen hopes and inevitable letdowns.  Anyway, to get on with the book...

What a strange book, with layers that go deeper than I can explain in any fathomable way -- especially since I haven't yet been able to wrap my mind around it myself.  The New York Trilogy is composed of three "installments".  I went into it thinking that each would be its own short story but found that the three parts are mysteriously interwoven in very subtle ways that very effectively haunt the reader (at least, me) into discomfort.

The third part, "The Locked Room", is the climax of the unsettling feeling that builds throughout the book.  It is self-conscious of itself as a whole (while the previous two parts simply reveal strange and questionable connections to each other) -- book existentialism! -- but it does this through such delicate hints that one is continuously left questioning these connections.  One of the things I am talking about here of course (*spoiler*), is Auster's "retelling of anecdotes" and stories throughout the entire novel.  I've never read a fictional book that does this, and I found it very interesting.  To place your own original writing alongside quotations and ideas from other authors seems a little bit courageous as well as inspiring...at least to me.  It gives a glimpse into the author's (or I suppose, character's) interests, and that to me further adds depth and stimulates the already numerous things going on in your head while you read this book.

The collection as a whole is a mental labyrinth.  Although the characters in all three stories ultimately find freedom from their struggles and paranoia, the reader is not allowed the same privilege, but rather left to puzzle over what the connections really were, and how best to interpret them. I suppose this mental struggle is a small reflection of the billions of personal fights we must overcome these days (especially as young people)...just like Sophie; "Sophie was just twenty-six years old.  She was too young to live through someone else, too intelligent not to want a life that was completely her own".  Voice of a generation (lol).  Overall though, I can confidently say that The New York Trilogy is a much more accomplished and powerful work than I found Moon Palace to be.  We'll have to see how the rest of his books on the list compare.