Book Review: City of Glass, by Paul Auster, Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli
City of Glass was the first Paul Auster I was introduced to, in college. I loved it; he packed so much into such a short novel.
Last month (or was it March! Yikes!) I borrowed this from amarylliss: City of Glass, the Graphic Novel.
I was intrigued and even slightly horrified at how could someone do such a thing? But amarylliss gave it a thumbs-up, and sent it home with me, and I have to say, it is successful.
The Guardian does an excellent job reviewing it. I am lazy and it is late, so I will let you read that.
I liked it; I liked the visual motifs (the childhood drawings do indeed pack more of a punch with each repetition) and Quinn's story was adapted to visuals quite well.
But when I finished, it felt... lacking something.
The novel is told by a nameless narrator, telling the story of Daniel Quinn, a writer, who is mistaken for a private eye named Paul Auster, whose identity he takes. He proceeds to meet the real novelist Paul Auster in the novel, discussing Auster's work on reinterpreting Cervantes' Don Juan to find out who the real narrator of the story was. This layering could feel trite, and fortunately neither version of the novel feel this way for me; but there was a quality to the text-only version, where the only way to untangle the layers was through mentally visualizing them, that is different when you see Daniel Quinn sitting across from Paul Auster (who looks just like his dust-jacket).
The project was conceived by Art Spiegelman, who also wrote the introduction. I'm curious whether the "Neon Lit" project stalled out at two books; the #2 in the series didn't really appeal to me.
Last month (or was it March! Yikes!) I borrowed this from amarylliss: City of Glass, the Graphic Novel.
I was intrigued and even slightly horrified at how could someone do such a thing? But amarylliss gave it a thumbs-up, and sent it home with me, and I have to say, it is successful.
The Guardian does an excellent job reviewing it. I am lazy and it is late, so I will let you read that.
I liked it; I liked the visual motifs (the childhood drawings do indeed pack more of a punch with each repetition) and Quinn's story was adapted to visuals quite well.
But when I finished, it felt... lacking something.
The novel is told by a nameless narrator, telling the story of Daniel Quinn, a writer, who is mistaken for a private eye named Paul Auster, whose identity he takes. He proceeds to meet the real novelist Paul Auster in the novel, discussing Auster's work on reinterpreting Cervantes' Don Juan to find out who the real narrator of the story was. This layering could feel trite, and fortunately neither version of the novel feel this way for me; but there was a quality to the text-only version, where the only way to untangle the layers was through mentally visualizing them, that is different when you see Daniel Quinn sitting across from Paul Auster (who looks just like his dust-jacket).
The project was conceived by Art Spiegelman, who also wrote the introduction. I'm curious whether the "Neon Lit" project stalled out at two books; the #2 in the series didn't really appeal to me.