The New York Trilogy: City of glass. Ghosts, The locked room.
Copy signed by Paul Auster in volume 1, with a signed bookplate in volume 2, and a signed presentation inscription in the last: “For Tom – Paul Auster.”
Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy plays with the conventions of several genres at once: detective fiction, the quest for identity, the urban novel, the doubling of self and other. Yet every convention is subverted. Quinn is not Quinn, but neither is he Wilson, nor truly Stillman, even as he agrees to be mistaken for a detective named… Paul Auster. As for Virginia, we never learn who she really is, since everything she does or signs — even her checks — seems to vanish into thin air. And, read closely, even Cervantès turns out not to exist.
The three stories unfold in New York, a city that occupies a very particular place in the work. In 1989, the journalist Claude Michel wrote in Le Figaro littéraire that “the unity of the whole, the dreamlike realism presiding over City of Glass, these games of identity that would have delighted Orson Welles, and the triumph of failure haunt the reader page after page”: “nothing was real except chance,” as the opening of City of Glass has it. The trilogy brought Paul Auster international recognition, particularly in France, where he had lived during the 1970s.
A very fine copy, rare in these first printings and signed.