City of Glass - Paul Auster

 City of Glass is the first novella in Auster's New York Trilogy, one of his earliest works and still probably the best known.   I bought it when it came out in the UK but only got round to reading it now, almost thirty years later.

It is, paradoxically, a late existential work.  Daniel Quinn has built a reputation as a modernist author but hit the payload as 'William Wilson', reclusive creator of the Max Work detective mysteries.   Quinn doesn't care about the money, so long as he has enough to live on.   It is the reclusiveness he craves.   His wife and young son were killed in an accident.  A large part of Quinn died with them.   Now he has a quasi=posthumous existence - until he gets a call from a weird late night phone call from an odd-sounding man called Peter Stillman, who wants to contact the Paul Auster Detective Agency.

At first, of course, Quinn assumes it's a wrong number call.   He explains but Stillman keeps calling.  He sounds distressed.   In the end Quinn says he is Auster, how can he help?   He visits Stillman and finds an sexless young man who can clearly afford to live without working and who has an attractive wife who was originally his wife.   It is Mrs Stillman who persaudes Quinn/Auster to help.  It turns out Peter was the victim of his genius father - also Peter Stillman - who experimented on his son, depriving him of all contact with the outside world in his search for an inherent natural form of communication.   Peter senior got a substantial prison sentence for child cruelty but is now due for release.  He has let it be known that he intends to visit his son in New York.   Mrs Stillman is terrified what might happen to her husband if he sees his father again.   She knows the train on which Peter Senior is due to arrive ar Grand Central staion...

so Quinn turns detective.   He trails the elder Stillman from the station to a grubby hotel.  He follows him over the coming days as he wanders round the distrrict.   The wanderings seem aimless until Quinn traces them onto a streetmap, when he realises that the former professor is sending a message through the streets.  Quinn goes deeper.   It occurs to him that maybe there is a Paul Auster Detective Agency.  There isn't, but he tracks down Paul Auster, critically acclaimed modernist author and translator.  They meet.  Auster digresses into his latest project, an abstrusive essay about who really wrote Don Quixote.  Quinn notices the confluence of initials...

It's a brilliant fiction of ideas about identity and authorship.   As Quinn delves ever deeper he withdraws further and further from reality and even existence.  In the end Auster (the fictional Auster) solves the case in so far as it is ever solved.   That makes the ending sound trivial but it absolutely isn't.   It certainly got me thinking and I look forward to Part Two, Ghosts.  

Moravagine - Blaise Cendrars

I found out about Moravagine from Jacques Chessex's Vampire of Rompraz (reviewed below) which was a take on Cendrars' original. The Cendrars certainly is original. I know of nothing quite like it. It is, in a sense, a psychological picaresque in which our narrator ("Dr Science") has devoted his life to studying "Moravagine" a nobly-born serial killer of pubescent girls, gross comedian and adventurer. Clearly neither of these men are really encumbered with these names, nor are we told who they really are. Cendrars is himself a fiction, who himself appears in his fiction. One thing both Rompraz and Moravagine have in common is the scene in which Cendrars of the French Foreign Legion loses his arm in World War I. That might well be the only real event in either, but both writers adopt a terse, journalistic style, skimming through loads of circumstantial detail which would otherwise slow down their narrative. They both profess to explain their titular freaks of nature and never get anywhere near so doing. Moravagine is the more imaginative novel, Ropraz the more convincing illusion. The Vampire is more frightening than the child killer because we never really see the killer at work whereas we are shown the gruesome handiwork of the Vampire.

Moravagine is relentlessly offbeat, wacky to the point of derangement, yet it is compelling, occasionally funny, and always fascinating.