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.  

The Darkroom of Damocles - Willem Frederik Hermans

I'd never heard of W F Hermans before I got the Pushkin newsletter.  He was a leading postwar novelist in the Netherlands and won many prizes.  Having now finished The Darkroom of Damocles (1958) I'm not at all surprised.

Henri Osewoudt is a strange young tobacconist in the small town of Voorschoten.  He is in many ways androgynous - he doesn't need to shave and yet he is clearly not impotent.  He has married his older cousin, who taught him everything he knows about sex.  His father was murdered by his mother during a fit of insanity.  The mother has since been released into Henri's rather lacklustre care.

In 1940, as Holland is falling to the Nazis, Henri bumps into a Dutch officer called Dorbeck who, bizarrely, looks a lot like Henri, except for the fact that he has dark hair and can grow a beard.  Dorbeck asks Henri to develop a roll of photographic negatives for him, which Henri does (badly) and posts off to the address Dorbeck provided.

He hears nothing for four years.  Then Dorbeck sends a message.  He is now a leading member of the underground, working with London to get rid of the Nazis.  He draws Henri into the circle and Henri very quickly finds himself assassinating traitors and collaborators.  He finds a new Jewish girlfriend and thus has to rid himself of the old wife.  He is captured by the Nazis, freed by the Resistance, disguises himself as a woman and, in that guise, crosses into the part of Holland already liberated by the Allies - and is promptly arrested as a collaborator.

The rest of the novel is about his yearlong quest, in custody, to prove his innocence.  He needs the war hero Dorbeck to come forward but Dorbeck cannot be found.  What has happened to him?

I must confess I was getting a little bored with the last bit - until the thunderbolt was very cleverly dropped.  It really is a stunner - one I've used in my own short fiction but never saw coming here.  Some critics have likened Hermans to Camus and Sartre, and I see where they are coming from.  Highly recommended.

The Reflection - Hugo Wilcken

A cracking little twist on a noir meme, this. Taking his cue from John Franklin Bardin's The Deadly Percheron, which I must re-read, Wilcken conjures up a Kafka-esque nightmare in which Manhattan psychiatrist David Manne finds himself with the identity of a man he himself has committed to the mental hospital. Is he the victim of a conspiracy or is one - or both - identity a delusion? Wilcken tangles his web brilliantly, leaving us with no real answers, only questions. I loved it.