Countless critics and readers consider this to
be Auster’s best book. For me, however, there are a few issues. For starters,
I’m not too fond of the format: the three stories are too long to be considered
short stories, but they are way too short for anyone to even think of splitting
them into three separate books now (although they were originally published as
such), so what we end up is, in my opinion, a somewhat unhappy mixture. In most
of his books set in New York, Auster paints a beautiful picture of a city that
is so unequivocally New York-esque – I have the feeling he doesn’t capture the
same magic in this book, which ironically has the city’s name in its title (to
me, the stories could be set pretty much anywhere in the US). Lastly, I find
the alienation of the characters to simply be a bit too much – I wish at least
some of them would act rationally and not lose their mind...
The book, however, does have a huge plus for me:
it is where Auster has put in written form so many of the wonderful anecdotes
shared by Harvey Keitel and William Hurt in Smoke,
the movie for which he wrote one of the greatest scripts of the last 30 years.
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