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I want to start with a disclaimer. When I read City of Glass, I had a feeling that something was wrong with that story, and I spent quite some time trying to figure out what. I finally reached a conclusion, and I searched the net as a madman looking for a review or essay that might support my assumptions. But such texts as I could find were not much helpful and offered no such support. So, what I am writing here is the result of my own musings about the novel. I ask my eventual readers to take it for what it is worth.
In a sentence: I think the story is a lie, and that most of the events related never took place.
If I am right, City of Glass is a prank, but an extremely smart one, because it is played not on the reader, but on the writer, and the prankster is the central character. The clues to the truth are planted in the novel for the reader.
The central clue is the interpretation of Don Quixote that Auster as a character presents to Daniel Quinn. The important fact to be borne in mind is that Cervantes pretended not to be the creator of the story: he alleged that he had found a genuine Arabic manuscript by one “Cid Hamete Benengeli”, of which he procured a translation. The relevance of this will become apparent once I sum up Auster’s interpretation to Quinn.
The essay written by the character Paul Auster starts by the question: if Cervantes wanted us to believe that Don Quixote is factual truth, whom should we take to be Cid Hamete Benengeli? Not a true Arab, since in that case he couldn’t have known so much about Don Quixote’s adventures. If the adventures were real and were found in an Arabic manuscript, the manuscript had to be explained through other means.
The original narrator had to be an eye witness to the hidalgo’s adventures, and the only possible candidate is Sancho. But Sancho is illiterate and couldn’t have written the story. He might, however, have dictated the stories to the barber and the canon, and their text might have been translated into Arabic by the bachelor Samson Carrasco under the pseudonym Cid Hamete Benengeli. And it was this text that fell into Cervantes’ hands.
The coup de grace, however, was in Auster’s final conclusion: Don Quixote had planned everything from the beginning. He took Sancho along as a convenient witness, confident that his fake adventures would be done justice by that naïve bumpkin with a knack for words. According to this interpretation, then, Don Quixote was no madman, but an intelligent fan of knight-errantry who conceived a scheme to shine in literature just as the heroes he admired. And the book we have today was in fact a contrivance of its protagonist.
This is what Auster tells Quinn. Now let us get back to what happens in City of Glass itself.
- Quinn is a writer of detective novels who secretly envies the hero of his books, and yearns for a chance to have similar adventures of his own;
- After hearing Auster’s theory about Don Quixote, Quinn imparts to Auster the mysterious case he is involved in. Knowing that Auster is a novelist, Quinn is careful to awaken his interest in the case;
- After that meeting we read several uncouth adventures until Quinn’s final “disappearance”; none of these adventures had any eye-witness, and were extracted from a red notebook found by Auster and one “friend” of his (who is the purported author of City of Glass), thanks to clues left by Quinn himself.
The “friend” of Auster decided to make that into a book. But the “friend”, just as Cid Hamete Benengeli, is a cover for the author, who is Auster himself. And Auster here is the naïve reporter of the “true” story he found in a manuscript (the red notebook), a bunch of lies invented by Daniel Quinn (whose initials are tellingly “DQ”) with a view to become the hero of a detective novel.
The resulting detective novel is City of Glass, which we find in bookstores with the name of Paul Auster on the cover, dupe of his own creation.
I want to start with a disclaimer. When I read City of Glass, I had a feeling that something was wrong with that story, and I spent quite some time trying to figure out what. I finally reached a conclusion, and I searched the net as a madman looking for a review or essay that might support my assumptions. But such texts as I could find were not much helpful and offered no such support. So, what I am writing here is the result of my own musings about the novel. I ask my eventual readers to take it for what it is worth.
In a sentence: I think the story is a lie, and that most of the events related never took place.
If I am right, City of Glass is a prank, but an extremely smart one, because it is played not on the reader, but on the writer, and the prankster is the central character. The clues to the truth are planted in the novel for the reader.
The central clue is the interpretation of Don Quixote that Auster as a character presents to Daniel Quinn. The important fact to be borne in mind is that Cervantes pretended not to be the creator of the story: he alleged that he had found a genuine Arabic manuscript by one “Cid Hamete Benengeli”, of which he procured a translation. The relevance of this will become apparent once I sum up Auster’s interpretation to Quinn.
The essay written by the character Paul Auster starts by the question: if Cervantes wanted us to believe that Don Quixote is factual truth, whom should we take to be Cid Hamete Benengeli? Not a true Arab, since in that case he couldn’t have known so much about Don Quixote’s adventures. If the adventures were real and were found in an Arabic manuscript, the manuscript had to be explained through other means.
The original narrator had to be an eye witness to the hidalgo’s adventures, and the only possible candidate is Sancho. But Sancho is illiterate and couldn’t have written the story. He might, however, have dictated the stories to the barber and the canon, and their text might have been translated into Arabic by the bachelor Samson Carrasco under the pseudonym Cid Hamete Benengeli. And it was this text that fell into Cervantes’ hands.
The coup de grace, however, was in Auster’s final conclusion: Don Quixote had planned everything from the beginning. He took Sancho along as a convenient witness, confident that his fake adventures would be done justice by that naïve bumpkin with a knack for words. According to this interpretation, then, Don Quixote was no madman, but an intelligent fan of knight-errantry who conceived a scheme to shine in literature just as the heroes he admired. And the book we have today was in fact a contrivance of its protagonist.
This is what Auster tells Quinn. Now let us get back to what happens in City of Glass itself.
- Quinn is a writer of detective novels who secretly envies the hero of his books, and yearns for a chance to have similar adventures of his own;
- After hearing Auster’s theory about Don Quixote, Quinn imparts to Auster the mysterious case he is involved in. Knowing that Auster is a novelist, Quinn is careful to awaken his interest in the case;
- After that meeting we read several uncouth adventures until Quinn’s final “disappearance”; none of these adventures had any eye-witness, and were extracted from a red notebook found by Auster and one “friend” of his (who is the purported author of City of Glass), thanks to clues left by Quinn himself.
The “friend” of Auster decided to make that into a book. But the “friend”, just as Cid Hamete Benengeli, is a cover for the author, who is Auster himself. And Auster here is the naïve reporter of the “true” story he found in a manuscript (the red notebook), a bunch of lies invented by Daniel Quinn (whose initials are tellingly “DQ”) with a view to become the hero of a detective novel.
The resulting detective novel is City of Glass, which we find in bookstores with the name of Paul Auster on the cover, dupe of his own creation.
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