Paul Auster

This first text is very confusing, I’m not quite sure where it’s taking me, and it is psychologically convoluted. The main character, Quinn, has invented for himself identity upon identity, leaving no room for himself, it seems. Therein lies the metafiction: Quinn is an author of detective novels under the pseudonym William Wilson. When someone accidentally calls his apartment looking for some private eye called Paul Auster, he thinks that it’d be fun to play along and “become” this Paul Auster by acting out everything he knew about Max Work through the eye of William Wilson...this is Quinn we’re talking about here. Because of the multi-ID’ed Quinn, the story is hard to get lost in, as the reader is always trying to figure out which of the identities is saying what, or who he’s trying to be at that moment.

There are definitely times where I feel like Quinn when he’s playing Paul Auster, private eye, when he’s mapped out the walking pattern of a man over time, trying to decipher the pattern in the overall movement. What he has are lines and zig-sags that somewhat resemble symbols one may have seen before, but what it is is a man walking down and across rectangular city blocks over time, that are eventually bound to create some sort of geometric pattern. I believe that his task was hopeless, like trying to find some deeper meaning in the random pattern in clouds. I also believe that this story is going nowhere. I’ve been conditioned over the years to read stories that had a point to be made, and an objective to be accomplished. This book, it seems, is challenging everything i’ve learned about reading, and is putting “patterns” out there that I'm focus ing on, trying to make sense of it all, but in reality, I’m just grasping at straws.