New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

I'm reading Paul Auster's, The New York Trilogy, and I'm enjoying it a bit too much I think. Big surprise, as with most things I read lately, I think it'd be a sweet book to write about. There's several parallels in Auster's style, at least within these three stories, to some of Beckett's work and some of the ideas I'm writing about with regard to Beckett.

Anyway, here, I thought it might be interesting to include some of the lines/sentences/paragraphs I found of interest so far.

From the story, "City of Glass":

"New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the steets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escapee the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. The world outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again" (4).

Also from "City of Glass":

"What he liked about these books was their sense of plentitude and economy. In a good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so--which amounts to the same thing. The world of books comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions. Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked. Everything becomes essence; the center of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book comes to its end.

"The detective is the one who looks, who listens, who moves through the morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable. The reader sees the world through the detective's eyes, experiencing the proliferation of its details as if for the first time. He has become awake to things around him, as if they might speak to him, as if, because of the attentiveness he now brings to them, they might begin to carry a meaning other than the simple fact of their existence. Private eye. The term held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was it the letter 'i,' standing for 'investigator,' it was 'I' in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out of himself into the world and demands the world reveal itself to him. For five years now, Quinn had been living in the grip of this pun" (8).