The New York Trilogy — Paul Auster (2)
Continued from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/03/22/the-new-york-trilogy-paul-auster/
My review of Auster’s 4, 3, 2, 1 — https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/09/16/4-3-2-1-paul-auster/
My first reading of this book as inspired by reading and reviewing Royle’s SHADOW LINES here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/03/15/shadow-lines-by-nicholas-royle/
My aide mémoire will continue in the comment stream below…
THE LOCKED ROOM
(1)
“‘You don’t know me,’ the letter began, ‘and I apologize for writing to you like this out of the blue.’”
Seems apt that Mrs Fanshawe, still breast-feeding a baby, writes out of the BLUE to the narrator about her missing husband who used to be a bosom pal of the narrator when they were younger till they had lost contact with each other, and developed quite separate backstories. Both now happening to have lived in New York, without contacting each other, and now it seems that the narrator as successful writer has been bequeathed, by his long lost friend, the latter’s manuscripts to evaluate and to disseminate.
You must all know, better than me, the details of this opening of the last third of the trilogy, and the two suitcases of manuscripts that weighed more than a man that the narrator totes away, with much else that goes under the radar of this review, including the fact that Mrs F had once hired a private detective called Quinn to find her missing, now presumed dead, husband, which Q never managed to accomplish.
(2)
“– he never seemed older than he was – but that he was already himself before he grew up.”
A truly compelling aide memoire by the narrator of his own backstory as a boy alongside Fanshawe, male bonding in extremis, and the remarkable character of F himself who seemed morally admirable in many ways, a person, even as a boy, of inscrutable stoicism, but also with wild cards in life to play, I guess. F was also in the habit of telling stories to himself and this destined him to be a writer. All of this is described by the narrator via Auster, or vice versa, in a simple language but with complex implications, including F’s father’s death, and the snowy cemetery where F sits at the bottom of an empty grave plot that had been left open…. (the ultimate open ending?)
“In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.”
(3)
SPOILER ALERT, but you already know, surely, that the narrator would inevitably open the suitcases, despite agonising over the decision for some time. You already know this because the Fanshawe manuscripts are now famous and you probably have already read them, especially his tour de force novel, ‘Neverland.’
“In all there were over a hundred poems, three novels (two short and one long), and five one-act plays – as well as thirteen notebooks, which contained a number of aborted pieces, sketches, jottings, remarks on the books Fanshawe was reading, and ideas for future projects.”
Note the “thirteen notebooks”. I wonder if they were RED ones?
What about the ‘laughing gas’ joke? And “…watching a movie about Marco Polo. I finally conked out at around four, in the middle of the Twilight Zone rerun.”
The novel itself, and the publisher — whom the narrator arranges from the combined backstory days of himself and the late Fanshawe — says “There’s something powerful about it, and the oddest thing is that I don’t even know what it is.”
The narrator: “…the more fully I disappeared into my ambitions for Fanshawe, the more sharply I came into focus for myself.”
He is sole arbiter in the dissemination of F’s work, as delegated by F’s widow, Sophie.
“She [Sophie] bought me an expensive, illustrated edition of Moby Dick, took me to dinner in a good restaurant, and then ushered me along to a performance of Boris Godunov at the Met.”
Their KISS, that I put in capital letters.
(4)
“: what it means when a writer puts his name on a book, why some writers choose to hide behind a pseudonym, whether or not a writer has a real life anyway.”
Even I will not break a reviewer’s SPOILER rules by equally not breaking the secret of this chapter. Needless to say, it continues this book’s pre-satirical gestalt real-time reviewing of itself as if it is making things up even while it is still being written. But the above quote from it does remind me of pictorially revealing my own red NEMO BOOK at an earlier stage of this review, and the intrinsic Nemonymity of, say, ‘The Vanishing Life and Films of Emmanuel Escobada’ still being authorless — a so-called fiction work first published in Nemonymous #2 in 2002.
(5)
“Each room acquired its own memory, each spot evoked a different moment, so that even in the calm of practical life, a particular patch of carpet, […] We [the narrator and Sophie] had entered the paradox of desire.”
This is where the narrator is suspected of having written Fanshawe’s work, and he questions the realities of people’s lives and all their twists and turns. Much haunting and fascinating material, including some of it surrounding people contemporary to Mozart. Asked to write F’s biography leads to memories of when he worked as a census taker. “…I could see a dozen men in a bare room writing on long picnic tables…” For the reasons I did not divulge in these notes of mine about part (4) above, everything in his biography of F would be a lie. And he had invented censuses for all the right and wrong reasons, sometimes creating characters with names that resonate with my memory of the names in GHOSTS above.
“the colours (Brown, White, Black, Green, Grey, Blue)”
(6)
“That’s what you finally learn from life: how strange it is. You can’t keep up with what happens. You can’t even imagine it.”
Fraught stuff, as the narrator and S visit F’s mother. Sorting through a would-be-in-hindsight dopplegänger’s possibly posthumous letters and other items in his old bedroom for the biography, later going on his own to visit this mother, leading to another perhaps reluctant KISS et al….
“…the blankety x and y and z, and so on and so forth.”
(7)
“It went on for months, and each day the material expanded, grew in geometric surges, accumulating more and more associations, a chain of contacts that eventually took on a life of its own. It was an infinitely hungry organism, and in the end I saw that there was nothing to prevent it from becoming as large as the world itself. A life touches one life, which in turn touches another life, and very quickly the links are innumerable, beyond calculation.”
F struggling to get breakfast to captain on ship.
Ivan Wyshnegradsky, composer, and the fridge F bought him.
Cutbirth’s taunting backfires
Find another Quinn. And more.
F’s biography taking the narrator over. F’s past letters, as gestalt to be gathered from erstwhile reports home to his mother via his sister ‘when’ F was alive. But now he ‘isn’t’. Nudge nudge wink wink. But letters can lie, words, too?
I get subsumed, too, by bookish things, for sure. Like this book. I wonder if my wife has noticed,
(8) & (9)
The “locked room” that is my own skull? From Paris to Boston, the “entire story comes down to what happened at the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book.”
“…and if he’s no one, then he must be Fanshawe.”
Whatever the case, I am still a man.
“– the randomness of it, the vertigo of pure chance. It made no sense, and because of that, it made all the sense in the world. “
“…blinded by the book that had been written for me.”
Names cross over all three parts, ending with that same red notebook…
Henry Dark or Herman Melville? Rhetorical question.