City of Glass: The Graphic Novel (New York Trilogy)
by Paul Auster
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Book Summary Information
Author: Paul AusterAdapter: Paul Karasik
Adapter: David Mazzucchelli
Introduction: Art Spiegelman
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-08-01
ISBN: 0312423608
Number of pages: 144
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of City of Glass: The Graphic Novel (New York Trilogy)
Book Review: a haunting graphic novel...
Summary: 5 Stars
Reviewed by Elizabeth P. Glixman for Small Spiral Notebook
I never liked comics in any form. I avoided the syndicated Brenda Star and Pogo. I ignored Archie comic books. Batman was never on my reading list. Since I read the graphic novel, City of Glass, the 2004 adaptation of his 1994 story in New York Trilogy, all that has changed.
For those not familiar with this literary form, graphic novels are literary hybrids, a combination of film noir, and comic book. There are the same narrative sequential panels as in comic books, the same stylized images and icons; however, in graphic novels the comic form is no longer only funny. These novels are stories of loss, loneliness, and existential angst. They echo the tone of post world war film noir where suspicion, fear, alienation, and suspense fill the screen.
City of Glass, named one of the 100 best comics of the century, is the story of mystery writer Daniel Quinn. Since his wife and young son died he has become a recluse. One night in his solitude the phone rings. It is the wrong number. The phone rings again. The caller Virginia Stillman is looking for Paul Auster of the Paul Auster Detective Agency. She wants to hire Auster to protect her mentally disturbed husband Peter from his father who will soon be released from prison. Peter received a threatening letter from his father. Peter Stillman Senior was incarcerated for abusing his son (he beat him when he spoke) while using him as part of a linguistic research project. Quinn decides with the encouragement of the fictional detective Max Work, the narrator of his own mystery novels, to take on the case pretending to be the detective Paul Auster.
Quinn finds the senior Stillman. He follows him, waits outside his hotel in an alley to make sure he does not get to the son.
Quinn spends days watching. Stillman never leaves the hotel or does he? Quinn grows disheveled, eats little, loses weight, does not sleep, or bathe. He runs out of money. He finds the real Paul Auster and asks him to cash the check Virginia Stillman gave Quinn at their initial meeting as an advance. But the Auster Quinn finds is not the detective. He is the author Paul Auster. Regardless, he will cash the check. Apropos for a book where reality is hazy.
Eventually Quinn gives up. He learns the senior Stillman killed himself. Virginia and Peter Stillman are nowhere to be found. Quinn returns home to find his apartment has been rented. Quinn's previous life as he knows it disappears; people are now dead or missing. Emptiness prevails. Identities are fragile. The stark graphics echo this disintegration.
The illustrations by Paul Karasik, whose work has been in the "New Yorker" (also former associate editor of "Raw Magazine"), and David Mazzucchelli, internationally known comic book artist, create moods and interior emotions that raise comics to the art of serious fiction for adults.
In this new introduction to City of Glass, Art Spiegelman, the guru of comic book artist and recipient of The Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel Maus, says Mazzucchelli and Karasik: "have created a strange doppelganger of the original book" and a "a breakthrough work."
Summary of City of Glass: The Graphic Novel (New York Trilogy)
A graphic novel classic with a new introduction by Art Spiegelman
Quinn writes mysteries. The Washington Post has described him as a ?post-existentialist private eye.? An unknown voice on the telephone is now begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print.
Adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, with graphics by David Mazzucchelli, Paul Auster?s groundbreaking, Edgar Award-nominated masterwork has been astonishingly transformed into a new visual language.
Quinn writes mysteries. The Washington Post has described him as a ?post-existentialist private eye.? An unknown voice on the telephone is now begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print.
Adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, with graphics by David Mazzucchelli, Paul Auster?s groundbreaking, Edgar Award-nominated masterwork has been astonishingly transformed into a new visual language.
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