{"id":11647,"date":"2016-02-03T06:02:20","date_gmt":"2016-02-03T14:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=11647"},"modified":"2016-02-02T10:04:26","modified_gmt":"2016-02-02T18:04:26","slug":"lit-matters-paul-austers-identity-collage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2016\/02\/03\/lit-matters-paul-austers-identity-collage\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Matters<\/em>: Paul Auster\u2019s identity collage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cReality is a great deal more mysterious than we ever give it credit for,\u201d said Paul Auster, an American novelist, essayist, and translator who is probably best known for his existential detective novels, collected as The New York Trilogy.<\/i><\/p>\n

Auster, who began writing in the early \u201980s, is impossible to pin to a single genre. Yet many of his books explore common themes: the search for identity, the role that chance plays in shaping our lives, and the importance of stories as a method of dealing with life.<\/p>\n

The Invention of Solitude<\/i> was Auster\u2019s first prose work and is a meditation on the character of his real-life father, a man who was more distant to Auster than many of the fictional characters he encountered in books.<\/p>\n

He explores his father\u2019s life through a series of anecdotes and speaks about \u201cthe anecdote as a form of knowledge.\u201d Facts, especially when they are about people, are more readily available to us (and are more useful to us) when they are encapsulated in narrative, even if it is only an anecdote.<\/p>\n

The piecing together of identity from the fragments of experience is also a theme in City of Glass<\/i>, the first novel in The New York Trilogy<\/i>.<\/p>\n

In City of Glass<\/i>, Daniel Quinn is a writer who is thrust (by chance) into the role of impersonating a private detective. Quinn, who has become increasingly estranged from himself, must try to hold on to what\u2019s left of himself while taking on the various personae related to the case. His fiercest opponent becomes the ability (or, rather, inability) of language to do what we expect it to do, which is to fit stories to our experiences, and with these stories to name ourselves.<\/p>\n

Paul Auster must-read:<\/b>
\nCity of Glass<\/i>
\n(UVic Library: PS3551 U7C57)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cReality is a great deal more mysterious than we ever give it credit for,\u201d said Paul Auster, an American novelist, essayist, and translator who is probably best known for his existential detective novels, collected as The New York Trilogy. Auster, who began writing in the early \u201980s, is impossible to pin to a single genre. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11648,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,159],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-february-3-2016"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11647"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11649,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11647\/revisions\/11649"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}