“Unraveling the Postmodern Intricacies in Paul Auster’s ‘City of Glass’: A Journey Through Identity, Language, and Metaphysical Musings”

“Auster knows the prime rule of pseudo-intellectual writing,” wrote BR Myers. “The harder it is to be pinned down on any idea, the easier it is to conceal that one has no ideas at all.”
Hadley Freeman.

In that way you can dissect pretty much any post modernist novelists. I dunno excpet Rushdie maybe. And yet this is one of my fav. genres of novels. I loved Eco, Pamuk, Calvino. Since i started reading literature two things attracted me the most. First stories on identities. Thats how got hooked with Pamuk. Second the metaphysical aspects. Or unknown perspectives that challanges your own or makes you think about something that never crossed on your mind.

Both of these aspects are strongly present in Austers Novel. The only that isnt present is the strength of his plots. To sum up the first story, City of Glass is about a writer (Wilson) who writes on a pen name(Quinn) got a call one night about a detective named Paul Auster. So he met the guy assuming the detective role and gets a fascinating story. A young guy whose father experimented on him in his childhood to find the origin of language. In philosophy or even in pop culture there is this idea of Tebula Rasa that we have a god given original language and it gets diluted. This idea is nothing new. Herzog made a film on similar idea named “Enigma of Kasper Hauser”. So he gets on jail and comes back after decades to kill his son supposedly. And he was assigned to follow her which leads as a detective story archetypes but within it its a book of post modern ideas than detective fiction. As of Freemons quote from above i like these books because no matter how psuedo it siunds these ideas are actually very fun think about. Say the thing about language bit, or the entire idea of Don Quixotes writing that it was an experiment to see if his friends will be amused with this bullshit stories of his journeys. Another thing why i liked this book, despite somewhat poor writing and finishing at places is that i like to read on cities, Joyce visualised Dublin, Pamuk Istanbul, Humayun Dhaka and Auster New York, Calvino with his imagined cities. History is a hardcoded facts that can create a lie based on truth but literature and fiction, on the other hand, gives context to the historical facts by telling lies. Fiction tells us the inside, intertwined lives of people in certain times in certain place that helps us to see it more vividly. And in the post modern sense the can blend in identities, structures and between ideas. And because of it, i liked this boom. Had food for thoughts for my brain, some passage made me go yo, thats a useless but interesting perspective. Na, I am being too harsh on him. It was entertaining to say the least.