sofiafcalvo

This is late. Or as late as anything can be that doesn't have an actual deadline. And these book reports or whatever the fuck they are certainly don't help matters. I seriously finished this and another book over a month ago and I've found myself slowing down my reading because I don't want the bother of articulation. Of course that's only part of the story, the other part is that I'm just out of phase at the moment. So maybe this will get things going again. After all, I'm only 43 books from goal and I've the better half of a year ahead of me. But you didn't tune in for my meta musings on the project, no, if you're tuning in at all, you have a passing interest in whatever the hell I'm reading or in this case, have read. And that's the other factor in my delay. Put simply, I wanted to have something meaningful to say about this book and I just don't. At this point I don't even want to sketch out the theme or tackle the question of whether it's genre fiction or literary fiction or whether the meditations on identity (I mean the core questions of who we are and how we know it) in the book hang together or are just literary parlor tricks. What I do want, is to say that this book was important to me. Not earth-shattering, Armageddon kind of important, but it resonated with me and it left something of a stain. And I do mean stain. This is a dirty little book full of dark things and unhappy endings. There's a deconstruction at work in these stories and it's all the more disturbing for having constantly caught me unaware. The only certainty here is the city itself (New York--certainly its own character) and some mediation of author and protagonist. In the final story of the trilogy, Auster breaks that mediation decisively to tell us that *this central thing* is what the entire book is about... but as many times as I read this disclosure, and the preceding pages, and the pages after it, I was dumbfounded. I cannot provide you with either a synopsis or a demarcation of this book so I'm calling it, which is what I meant to do in the first place. If you want more from me on this I'll be happy to sit down over some drinks. (4.5/5)

2022-11-14 16:33