Ghosts

I feel renewed by the lovely prose and uncanny ability of Paul Auster, now from the grave, to retell that our existence is still a mystery. Ghosts is a little like reading Kafka using Camus as a guide, set in New York 1940s with a gumshoe protagonist. Blue (everyone is a colour) is a detective, given an assignment without clarity of purpose. Camus’ absurd came to mind. We seek purpose and meaning from the universe. But when we ask it a question, we receive silence in return. That yawning gap, that chasm in understanding is the Absurd. I find it a comforting notion when I read it and it helps to know that there are no answers. Less energy is expended that way.

Blue’s assignment is to watch a fellow called Black. Black, he discovers show more is a writer. He follows Black for a few days when he wanders around New York and then watches him from the window opposite. Writing is a dull, repetitive business and the unglamorous side is well expressed since all Blue does is watch Black hunched over his desk. All the time for days and weeks. That much effort watching very little is exasperating and that is where I am reminded of the endless pursuit of answers by Joseph K in The Trial; or, the helpless efforts of Gregor Samsa as an insect, lying on his back in bed, rendered helpless and incapable of moving apart from flailing about with his new legs.

The day continues to pass. Once again, Blue falls into step with Black, perhaps even more harmoniously than before. In doing so, he discovers the inherent paradox of his situation. For the closer he feels to Black, the less he finds it necessary to think about him. In other words, the more deeply entangled he becomes, the freer he is. What bogs him down is not involvement but separation. For it is only when Black seems to drift away from him that he must go on looking for him, and this takes time and effort, not to speak of struggle.

Blue’s task seems pointless. He writes reports every week and duly gets paid for his time. But he does gain insights. He sees a mirror of himself in Black.

he finds himself thinking about things that have never occurred to him before, and this, too, has begun to trouble him. I thinking is perhaps too strong a word at this point at this point, a slightly more modest term- speculation, for example- would not be far from the mark. To speculate, from the Latin speculates, meaning to spy out, to observe, and linked to the word speculum, meaning mirror or looking glass. For in spying out at Black across the street, it is as though Blue were looking into a mirror, and instead of watching another, he finds that he is also watching himself.

I read this because it’s short and filled in tired hours travelling and after reading Glenn Russell’s tribute soon after Auster died a few days ago it seemed just right. Reading a dead author’s words, having read them before, is like seeing a phantom passing by. Or like seeing again what I didn’t see the first time.

Lucid prose with fine ideas. show less

Mavi, bir özel dedektif. Müşterisi Beyaz için Turuncu Cadde’de oturan Siyah’ı izleyip hakkında ayrıntılı rapor yazmaya çalışıyor. İnsanların sadece renklerle var olduğu, kimin gerçek, kimin hayal ürünü ya da hayalet olduğu anlaşılmayan bir ortamda gerilim yaratan olaylar sonunda Mavi, neredeyse Siyah’ın yaşamı içinde kaybolma noktasına geliyor. Bir başkasını izleme teması üzerine kurulu polisiye roman şablonu bu kitapta kişinin kendi kendini izlemesi sonucuna vararak genel geçer klişenin dışında bir özgünlük taşıyor. Kişilerin benlik arayışları ve gerçek arasındaki ilişkiler, Paul Auster’ın akıcı diliyle hayata geçiyor.

Paul Auster's Ghosts (1983) reads like the square root of a hard-boiled detective noir novel, an off-the-wall, bizarre mystery where there is no crime and the whodunit is replaced by a meditation on the nature of identity. Here are the opening few line: "First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown. Brown broke him in, Brown taught him the ropes, and when Brown grew old, Blue took over." Blue is a detective and it is Blue we follow on every page of this sparse (less than 100 pages) novel set in 1947 New York City. Actually, this is the 2nd of the author's The New York Trilogy, bookended by City of Glass and The Locked Room.

To gain an initial feel for the novel, please show more go to Youtube and watch a snippet of one of those 1940s black-and-white noir films, like The Naked City. You will see lots of hard-talking tough guys in gray suits and gray hats running around city streets socking one another in the jaw and plugging one another with bullets -- plenty of action to be sure. And that's exactly the point - a world chock-full of police, detectives, crooks and dames is a world of action.

But what happens when one of those 1940s detectives is put on a case where all action is stripped away, when the only thing the detective has to do is look out his apartment window and keep an eye on a man across the street in another apartment sitting at his desk reading or writing? This is exactly what happens in Ghosts. So, rather than providing a more detailed synopsis of the story (actually, there is some action and interaction), I will cite several of Blue's musing along with my brief comments on Blue's relationship to literary and artistic creation:

"Until now, Blue has not had much chance for sitting still, and this new idleness has left him at something of a loss. For the first time in his life, he finds that he has been thrown back on himself, with nothing to grab hold of, nothing to distinguish one moment from the next. He has never given much through to the world inside him, and through he always knew it was there, it has remained an unknown quantity, unexplored and therefore dark, even to himself." --------- So, for the first time in his life, Blue is given a taste of silence and solitude, the prime experience of someone who is a writer.

"More than just helping to pass the time, he discovers that making up stories can be a pleasure in itself." ---------- Removed from the world of action and building on his experience of silence and solitude, Blue is also given a hint of what it might mean to be a fiction writer, one who sits in isolation, exploring the inner world of imagination in order to create stories. And, on the topic of stories, the unnamed narrator conveys how Blue reflects on many stories, including the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, stories from the lives of Walk Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, and several stories Blue reads in his all-time favorite magazine: True Detective. Auster's short novel is teaming with stories.

"For the first time in his experience of writing reports, he discovers that words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say." ---------- Blue discerns it is possible that words cannot adequately articulate the depth and full range of human experience. And what is true of a detective's report is truer for works of great literature: there is a rich, vital, vibrant world of feeling and imagination beyond the confines of words and language.

"Finally mustering the courage to act, Blue reaches into his bag of disguises and casts about for a new identity. After dismissing several possibilities, he settles on an old man who used to beg on the corner of his neighborhood when he was a bog - a local character by the name of Jimmy Rose - and decks himself out in the garb of tramphood . . ." ---------- During the course of the novel, Blue take on a number of different identities and with each new persona he experiences life with a kind of immediacy and intensity. Spending a measure of his creative life as a screenwriter and director, Paul Auster undoubtedly had many encounters with actors thriving on their roles, energized and invigorated as they performed for the camera. I suspect Auster enjoyed placing his detective main character in the role of actor at various points.

Ghosts can be read as a prompt to question how identity is molded by literature and the arts. How dependent are we on stories for an understanding of who we are? In what ways do the arts influence and expand our sense of self? Do we escape purposelessness and boredom by participating in the imaginative worlds of art and literature? show less

Because Ghosts is the second book in a trilogy, I'm going to write my review in sections, each an impression after completing one book of the three. I'm also going to delay rating the book, since the conclusion of each book is (hopefully) clarified by the contents of the successive books.

Part I
If City of Glass was an odd book, Ghosts is its eerie twin. As they always said at the start of Dragnet: the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Only in this case it seems in order to confuse the reader, to provide him with a sense of deja vu. As you read, you get a strong sense that this novel is headed to the same place its predecessor wound up at.

Mr. Blue, the protagonist, provides us with some details of his personal history show more leading up to the case which forms the backbone of the novel. He is head of his own detective agency. Mr. White has hired him to watch Mr. Brown. The purpose of this surveillance is unclear. Unlike Quinn from the first book, Mr. Blue has no alter-egos and doesn't assume the persona of anyone else. He does occasionally uses disguises to interact with Mr. Brown, first as a bum, then as the Fuller Brush man. Like Quinn, Mr. Blue's assignment eventually destroys both his life and his psyche. Like City of Glass, an unknown first-person narrator injects himself into the story on the final page and leaves us in the same dissatisfying position of not knowing the whereabouts of Mr. Blue at the conclusion of the story.

Like its predecessor, Ghosts is also a novel filled with details of New York City - the story of the builders of the Brooklyn Bridge, for example. Walt Whitman, Henry Ward Beecher and other former inhabitants of Orange Street - where the story occurs - play an important part. As does Thoreau. It feels a little Ragtime-ish in its blend of history and fiction. At a mere sixty pages and only a handful of words requiring a consultation with Meriam and Webster, it takes only a few hours to read. But it leaves you with the same puzzlement City of Glass did. Having glanced at the first page of The Locked Room, the final book in the trilogy, I don't believe I'm going to learn the fates of any of the characters from either of the first two novels. That I will be left wondering if this is just the detective fiction version of Invisible Cities, a book that isn't about what its contents claim to be about at all.

Part II
Sometimes your ideas fall flat. Writing my reviews of the New York Trilogy in sections turned out to be less clever and meaningful than I had envisioned.

Because the surnames of all the characters of Ghosts are colors, I had the sense that this was more allegorical or theoretical in nature. When the characters failed to reappear in the final novel, The Locked Room, my premonition mentioned at the end of Part I was realized. You never find out the fates of any of the characters.

As I wrote about City of Glass, this is a well-written, somewhat entertaining novel but I wouldn't include it on my must-read list for the same reason: its unresolved plot leaves me unsure of what the book is supposed to be about. show less

Great continuation from City Of Glass, but this time more condensed. Its all there, crisis of identity, writer as character, character as writer, and the detective story as plot arc. Brilliant.

I felt like nothing happened in this one, and I didn't really care about the characters. Naming them Blue and Black made the whole thing seem too general, as if none of the events really mattered. I can see the argument that the point of doing this is to show that the same dynamic arises in all three stories and the individual players don't matter, but that doesn't make it fun to read. I didn't have this problem with the first book of the trilogy and haven't so far with the third.

Paul Auster's Ghosts (1983) reads like the square root of a hard-boiled detective noir novel, an off-the-wall, bizarre mystery where there is no crime and the whodunit is replaced by a meditation on the nature of identity. Here are the opening few line: "First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown. Brown broke him in, Brown taught him the ropes, and when Brown grew old, Blue took over." Blue is a detective and it is Blue we follow on every page of this sparse (less than 100 pages) novel set in 1947 New York City. Actually, this is the 2nd of the author's The New York Trilogy, bookended by City of Glass and The Locked Room.

To gain an initial feel for the novel, please show more go to Youtube and watch a snippet of one of those 1940s black-and-white noir films, like The Naked City. You will see lots of hard-talking tough guys in gray suits and gray hats running around city streets socking one another in the jaw and plugging one another with bullets -- plenty of action to be sure. And that's exactly the point - a world chock-full of police, detectives, crooks and dames is a world of action.

But what happens when one of those 1940s detectives is put on a case where all action is stripped away, when the only thing the detective has to do is look out his apartment window and keep an eye on a man across the street in another apartment sitting at his desk reading or writing? This is exactly what happens in Ghosts. So, rather than providing a more detailed synopsis of the story (actually, there is some action and interaction), I will cite several of Blue's musing along with my brief comments on Blue's relationship to literary and artistic creation:

"Until now, Blue has not had much chance for sitting still, and this new idleness has left him at something of a loss. For the first time in his life, he finds that he has been thrown back on himself, with nothing to grab hold of, nothing to distinguish one moment from the next. He has never given much through to the world inside him, and through he always knew it was there, it has remained an unknown quantity, unexplored and therefore dark, even to himself." --------- So, for the first time in his life, Blue is given a taste of silence and solitude, the prime experience of someone who is a writer.

"More than just helping to pass the time, he discovers that making up stories can be a pleasure in itself." ---------- Removed from the world of action and building on his experience of silence and solitude, Blue is also given a hint of what it might mean to be a fiction writer, one who sits in isolation, exploring the inner world of imagination in order to create stories. And, on the topic of stories, the unnamed narrator conveys how Blue reflects on many stories, including the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, stories from the lives of Walk Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, and several stories Blue reads in his all-time favorite magazine: True Detective. Auster's short novel is teaming with stories.

"For the first time in his experience of writing reports, he discovers that words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say." ---------- Blue discerns it is possible that words cannot adequately articulate the depth and full range of human experience. And what is true of a detective's report is truer for works of great literature: there is a rich, vital, vibrant world of feeling and imagination beyond the confines of words and language.

"Finally mustering the courage to act, Blue reaches into his bag of disguises and casts about for a new identity. After dismissing several possibilities, he settles on an old man who used to beg on the corner of his neighborhood when he was a bog - a local character by the name of Jimmy Rose - and decks himself out in the garb of tramphood . . ." ---------- During the course of the novel, Blue take on a number of different identities and with each new persona he experiences life with a kind of immediacy and intensity. Spending a measure of his creative life as a screenwriter and director, Paul Auster undoubtedly had many encounters with actors thriving on their roles, energized and invigorated as they performed for the camera. I suspect Auster enjoyed placing his detective main character in the role of actor at various points.

Ghosts can be read as a prompt to question how identity is molded by literature and the arts. How dependent are we on stories for an understanding of who we are? In what ways do the arts influence and expand our sense of self? Do we escape purposelessness and boredom by participating in the imaginative worlds of art and literature? show less