Customer Reviews

City of Glass: The Graphic Novel (New York Trilogy)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

City of Glass is the story of Daniel Quinn, a poet turned mystery writer, who is called one night by a person urgently seeking a detective. After several nights of "Sorry, wrong number," Quinn decides to impersonate Paul Auster, the detective the person wants to hire. Accepting the assignment leads to his ultimate ruin.

This story is primarily about Quinn's descent from depression into outright obsession and madness. Horrific abuse based on misinterpreted religion plays a big part in the book, as does the threat of murder. The perceived danger eventually disappears and the case fades away, but Quinn cannot return to his former life, and ends up completely delusional.

City of Glass is a book of unusual subtlety. Much of the tension is implicit, but is sensed through sections of extensive dialogue. The sparse artwork of the book, finally, highlights the dialogue by moving it along and filling it out, rather than distracting the reader from what is being said.

This is an exceptional work of fiction, even for readers unaccustomed to graphic novels.

Having not read Paul Auster's original novel I can't compare it with the graphic novel, but I can certainly assume it must be an excellent book since it provided the source for this excellent work. I also can't say that I fully understand everything that goes on in this deceptively simple-looking little book; there are multiple layers, and the more times you read it the more questions it answers...and the more questions it asks.

A widower named Quinn lives in New York City with nothing to do but write detective novels. They fill the time, but they don't mean much to him. He walks around the city and likes to feel lost. He is so alone that his loneliness has actually become his companion. One night his phone rings: a wrong number. The caller wants something. He has no reason, but he goes along because it provides a direction, something he has been sorely lacking for years. He becomes involved in a case that has nothing to do with him and he lets it become an obsession. He imagines himself a detective, like the hero of his novels. He imagines that New York is his cocoon, protecting him from the real world, when actually it could be his Hell. He may be losing his mind.

Who is Quinn? Are the other characters in the novel parts of himself, or are they real? Is he looking for a reason to go insane, or is the world really this way? And what parts of Quinn belong to the novel's author, Paul Auster, who also appears in the novel? What is being said here about writing, about loneliness, about language, about growing old, about families, about faith? Questions upon questions. Some are answered in repeated readings, some are never answered. They are for you.

An absolutely mind-boggling piece of work with a thrilling story, a deeply personal perspective, and wonderfully evocative images that at once recall old Bogart films, nightmares, and great comics from the past. I wish more artists would attempt what Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli did here: not merely to translate, but to re-imagine a novel into an entirely new form. Bravo!

In all the reviews I am surprised no one has mentioned Poe's short story "William Wilson," the very definition of doppleganger in literary prose. Here in "City of Glass' we have the same thing, even Auster uses the name William Wilson.

This novel brings back true literature in a culture devoid of anything that smacks of indepth thinking on the part of the reader. Allusions, allegory, symbol, puns, linguistic twists, irony, shifting narrators...it's all here. The play on initials between Don Quixote and Danial Quinn is exquisite; the continual movement of Stillman and the paradox of his name speaks volumes about the craft of the author; the quick syntax of detective fiction when Quinn is Auster is beautifully reminiscent of Phillip Roth; the Socratic philosophical dialogue between Stillman and Auster makes me smile with joy that an author encapsulated the form so subtlely and let the audience 'get it' on their own.

As a reader, the beauty of the style and form shines through without me having to be told by the author what he is doing. That is priceless in a contemporary literary world where stunted, choppy, rough prose has eclipsed mastery. I am so glad I have a copy of City of Glass; it is the best book I have read in years.

If you enjoyed (or more likely were haunted by) City of Glass then you owe it to yourself to read this graphic novel. Yes, it is essentially the exact same story as Auster's metaphysical detective novella. However, this is a fascinating and beautifully rendered interpretation of the source work. My only complaint: where are the graphic novels for Ghosts and The Locked Room?

Reviewed by Elizabeth P. Glixman for Small Spiral Notebook

I never liked comics in any form. I avoided the syndicated Brenda Star and Pogo. I ignored Archie comic books. Batman was never on my reading list. Since I read the graphic novel, City of Glass, the 2004 adaptation of his 1994 story in New York Trilogy, all that has changed.

For those not familiar with this literary form, graphic novels are literary hybrids, a combination of film noir, and comic book. There are the same narrative sequential panels as in comic books, the same stylized images and icons; however, in graphic novels the comic form is no longer only funny. These novels are stories of loss, loneliness, and existential angst. They echo the tone of post world war film noir where suspicion, fear, alienation, and suspense fill the screen.

City of Glass, named one of the 100 best comics of the century, is the story of mystery writer Daniel Quinn. Since his wife and young son died he has become a recluse. One night in his solitude the phone rings. It is the wrong number. The phone rings again. The caller Virginia Stillman is looking for Paul Auster of the Paul Auster Detective Agency. She wants to hire Auster to protect her mentally disturbed husband Peter from his father who will soon be released from prison. Peter received a threatening letter from his father. Peter Stillman Senior was incarcerated for abusing his son (he beat him when he spoke) while using him as part of a linguistic research project. Quinn decides with the encouragement of the fictional detective Max Work, the narrator of his own mystery novels, to take on the case pretending to be the detective Paul Auster.

Quinn finds the senior Stillman. He follows him, waits outside his hotel in an alley to make sure he does not get to the son.

Quinn spends days watching. Stillman never leaves the hotel or does he? Quinn grows disheveled, eats little, loses weight, does not sleep, or bathe. He runs out of money. He finds the real Paul Auster and asks him to cash the check Virginia Stillman gave Quinn at their initial meeting as an advance. But the Auster Quinn finds is not the detective. He is the author Paul Auster. Regardless, he will cash the check. Apropos for a book where reality is hazy.

Eventually Quinn gives up. He learns the senior Stillman killed himself. Virginia and Peter Stillman are nowhere to be found. Quinn returns home to find his apartment has been rented. Quinn's previous life as he knows it disappears; people are now dead or missing. Emptiness prevails. Identities are fragile. The stark graphics echo this disintegration.

The illustrations by Paul Karasik, whose work has been in the "New Yorker" (also former associate editor of "Raw Magazine"), and David Mazzucchelli, internationally known comic book artist, create moods and interior emotions that raise comics to the art of serious fiction for adults.

In this new introduction to City of Glass, Art Spiegelman, the guru of comic book artist and recipient of The Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel Maus, says Mazzucchelli and Karasik: "have created a strange doppelganger of the original book" and a "a breakthrough work."

This graphic novel was based on a novella by the same author and Comic Journals voted this in the top 100 for the 20th century. It's about a writer who takes on the role of his detective character to investigate a mystery but this choice sends him down a path of obsessive madness. It blurs the line between reality and fantasy and even identity as the author of this tale finds himself changing roles, stories and overall identities. The voices coming out of objects and gradual changes and pullbacks were intriguing. That said, it's so cleverly done that I feel there wasn't enough of an interesting story here so I'd say it's worth a look for its overall cleverness but it isn't Sterling Silver quality for the tale. Casual readers will find this graphic novel mind boggling. STORY/PLOTTING: B minus; CHARACTERS/DIALOGUE: B; SOMETHING NEW AND FRESH: B plus to A minus; ARTWORK: B; OVERALL GRADE: B; WHEN READ: January 2012.

Having read Paul Aster's "New York Trilogy" first, I was really impressed with how a basically un-adaptable book was turned into a comic. Not sure if it holds up as well on its own (at least based on some of the other reviews I'm reading). Innovative as all hell though.

As much as I love the original novel, this version may very well be an improvement. The prose is condensed but very little depth is sacrificed, and the images manage to enrich the work without distracting from its ideas.

Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli use film noir as a springboard for their visual style, much as Auster uses detective fiction as a springboard for the plot of his novel, but what's really surprising is how well the artists keep up even as Auster plunges into purely cerebral territory. There are passages in the book that must have kept the artists awake many a night: Peter Stillman's almost indecipherable speech near the beginning which goes on for almost ten pages, and later conversations with the elder Peter Stillman about the nature of language, for example. With no visual clues to draw on, they somehow manage to give these scenes a visual life of their own, matching the words to parades of symbolic imagery. The atmosphere created - dark, lonely, paranoid - is much more powerful than that of the novel's, although the novel is also great on its own merits and certainly worth reading.

It's apparent on every page that an extraordinary amount of care and consideration has been put into this adaptation. In fact, I'd like to see more novels adapted in this manner. If it can be done for "City of Glass," it can be done for just about anything.

City of glass is a absolutely amazing piece of work. Auster Does a great job

at expressing the main characters depression. The art is very simple

which is a amazing contrast to what the theme of the book is, very

complex. which in and of its self is pretty amazing. The art is simply

drawn, but is very well thought out. There are scenes in the book where

the main character,Quinn is hearing the drowning of a mentally ill man telling

a story and while he's doing this, you see the pictures of what the man

is taking about to further emphasize how mental ill he is.

Quinn is a detective, but not really. He just thinks hes

one, he use to write crime fiction but after his wife and kid died he

just stop. One day Quinn started getting wrong number calls about a

detective and one day a call came in and he just pretended to be the

detective they were confusing him for. In his mind he begain to creat

this character that was a detective.

He takes a case to protect a mental ill man that had been tortured by

his father. His father is coming out of prison soon because of incident

years ago that involved the him (the incident that left him mentally ill) The

man's Wife wants Quinn to find him at a train station and follow him and

see what he does.

After finding the old man, he begins to talk to him, what he finds out

will change the entire story for okay to simply fascinating.

Words into pictures and pictures into words! Who would have thought that all of those dread, ghost-filled spaces between the omniscient narrator's words could be developed, like photo/graphic images? The graphics serve as a supplemental, meta omniscience, and convey what Wallace Stevens called "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." That's a pretty remarkable accomplishment for a supposedly "post modernist" work.