{"id":760,"date":"2013-09-07T10:35:54","date_gmt":"2013-09-07T18:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=760"},"modified":"2017-12-18T13:27:35","modified_gmt":"2017-12-18T21:27:35","slug":"review-city-of-glass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/07\/review-city-of-glass\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: City of Glass"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"City<\/a>
\n City of Glass<\/a> by Paul Auster<\/a>
\n My rating: 3 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

The writer mentions Through the Looking Glass<\/i>, and so glass means mirror. Why not call the novel \u201cCity of Mirrors\u201d? Because that\u2019s too obvious. I guess. This is my introduction to my review of the first novel in Paul Auster\u2019s New York Trilogy<\/i>.<\/p>\n

A thousand years ago, or maybe fifteen or so, I interviewed P.J. Rondinone, a writer in New York who\u2019d studied with Barthelme. We talked about how Rondinone took Barthelme\u2019s stories and New-Yorked them, a legitimate enterprise, as Barthelme talked about when talking about Borges talking about Menard re-writing Don Quixote<\/i>. Now, I\u2019ve never read Don Quixote<\/i>, so I didn\u2019t know, at the time, that Cervantes himself claimed that Don Quixote<\/i> was actually written by Cid Hemete Benengeli. I went on, myself to write a rewrite of Rondinone\u2019s re-write; I office-cubicled one of his New-Yorked stories.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll not be doing the same with City of Glass<\/i>, this review notwithstanding. Paul Auster mentions Don Quixote<\/i> in this novel, and his character Daniel Quinn is a New-Yorked Cervantes. Not a New-Yorked Quixote\u2014Daniel Quinn is himself a writer, you see. And so is Paul Auster (the minor character in the novel). Daniel Quinn gets a phone call, a wrong number, falls through the mirror, and Alice-in-Wonderlands through his own creation: a New York of characters. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a miasma, an existential mess, characters scattered by the god Auster (not the minor character in the novel) like mankind scattered at Babel. By the end, The writer gets mad at himself for not caring about his characters more, robbing them of hunger, taking away their sunlight, abandoning them, both literally and literarily.<\/p>\n

A very expertly constructed and unsatisfying read.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

City of Glass by Paul Auster My rating: 3 of 5 stars The writer mentions Through the Looking Glass, and so glass means mirror. Why not call the novel \u201cCity of Mirrors\u201d? Because that\u2019s too obvious. I guess. This is my introduction to my review of the first novel in Paul Auster\u2019s New York Trilogy. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Review: City of Glass”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-cg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=760"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":761,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760\/revisions\/761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}