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Audiobook5 hours
Ciudad de cristal
Written by Paul Auster
Narrated by Albert Cortés
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
Quinn, que en otros tiempos fuera poeta y cuya mujer e hijo han muerto, vive en la más absoluta soledad, escribiendo novelas policíacas, despojado de toda ambición literaria y lejos de los fastos del mundo. Alguien lo llama varias veces por teléfono en medio de la noche, tomándolo por un detective llamado Paul Auster, y solicitando con desesperación su ayuda. Quinn, entre curioso y conmovido, decide al fin personificar al desconocido Paul Auster y concierta una cita. Conoce entonces a otro pálido poeta, que cuenta una historia aterradora: cuando nació, su padre, una combinación de místico y lingüista demente, lo encerró y aisló del mundo durante años para que pudiera hablar «la verdadera lengua de los hombres», aquella que olvidaron tras la construcción de la torre de Babel. Pero el niño fue rescatado y el padre recluido en una institución un manicomio, o quizás una cárcel, de la que ahora está a punto de salir. Y el hijo, que teme por su vida, desea que el detective Paul Auster o Quinn lo proteja. Con "Ciudad de cristal" se inició La trilogía de Nueva York, un deslumbrante conjunto de thrillers posmodernos que, según los críticos, marca un nuevo punto de partida para la novela norteamericana.
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Author
Paul Auster
Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Oracle Night, The Book of Illusions, and Timbuktu. I Thought My Father Was God, the NPR National Story Project anthology, which he edited, was also a national bestseller. His work has been translated into thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Reviews for Ciudad de cristal
Rating: 4.2 out of 5 stars
4/5
25 ratings15 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I have a feeling Paul Auster (the novelist) and I would not agree on very much. I also have a feeling that, in spite of this novel's postmodern (post-existentialist?) structure, Auster most definitely made this book up as he went along (although I suppose one could argue that was in keeping with the novel's overall themes?).
Working within the broad framework of the "hard-boiled" detective novel, the real mystery Auster is investigating is that of inherent meaning: if we start to deconstruct the words, the very language that we use, what remains? How much of our society is made up of the language we use, and what does this imply for our identities, for our characteristics and relationships? And what does this then mean for the novelist?
Auster accomplishes this (if he does accomplish this) by utilising the basic building blocks of detective fiction. The nutty coincidences of the works of Raymond Chandler are parodied and recycled as our detective - Daniel Quinn/Paul Auster - comes to doubt the nature of the coincidences, but also realises that the coincidences will happen anyway. I haven't read any other Auster novels, so I'm not sure if he really champions the idea of fate and kismet, but I don't think that is the point of this novel at all. The ramblings of Paul Auster, Sr. take the central concept about words and apply them to people: can we take people at face value? Or WORD value? By the climax of the book, Quinn has taken on all the characteristics of the hard-boiled detective - vigilance, asceticism, forethought - at the expense of logic and reason. Much of the work details the geography of New York City down to the most minute element: another literalisation of how words contribute to our perception of the world.
I can't claim to have fully grasped "City of Glass". Auster's prose has an eerie beauty, and he shades in particularly well the more broken characters haunting Peter Stillman's Manhattan. Yet Auster's prose is also very talky, prioritising concepts and philosophy over plot - deliberately, yes, but occasionally exhausting over the course of the novel.
Ultimately, the most resonant moment in the book must be the the fictional novelist Auster's conspiracy theory about Cervantes' "Don Quixote". What we have here is author Paul Auster telling novelist Paul Auster's tale of Daniel Quinn (posing as detective Paul Auster) - at some points recounting the tale of Peter Stillman! Worlds within worlds, mirrors within mirrors, words within words. I'm not entirely sure what it means, but there's something about Auster's reflective world that has drawn me in. I think I shall return again. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5City of Glass as the name suggest is more about a city, characters are belonged to city, to its streets,layers of big city's spirits.Timing,pursuing and being alone.Daniel Quinn is a mystery writer who lost his wife and son and now spends an almost meaningless and boring life. Everything changes when he get a call from a scared man asking for a private detective named Paul Auster.Maybe to run from his empty life Quinn pretend to be Paul Auster and starts to follow the man's father that he believe is going to kill him. The father had been once a Professor in university and Quinn starts to read his books of strong religious beliefs.in the now madman book English immigrants to the us are described as humans following command of God to be "fertile and ... fill the earth" as is said in the book ."What more western land in all Christendom,Dark asked, than America?"So the US is become the salvation place of humanity but it's now in its down and the madman wants to create a Babel again, which words have true meaning and not only because they are only words.Quinn in playing along with the madman loses himself more and more and sink in the streets of New York.In this books words are important they do have meaning and at the same time they simply present something else as the characters. Quinn is him for a second then he is Paul Auster or even some fictional character in a book."Consider a word that refers to a thing - 'Umbrella' when I say it you see the object in your mind. You see a kind of stick,with collapsible metal spokes on top that form an armature for a waterproof material which,when opened , will protect you from rain...... what happens when a thing no longer performs its functions? is it still the thing or it become something else?When you rip the cloth off the umbrella, is the umbrella still an umbrella?...in General people do.At the very limit, they will say the umbrella is broken. to me this is a serious error, the source of our all troubles."
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wow. More later.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Six-word review: Does anyone here tell the truth?Extended review:I really don't know how to rate this. I think it was probably good, but I didn't like it: not because it was weird but because the plot, if it was a plot, changed direction so many times, and in the end I was left only with questions.In general I try hard to rate on what I consider goodness (well-done-ness) and not personal preference (how much I liked it), but in this case I don't feel qualified to separate them. The best I can do in the direction of objectivity is to say that the writing is very able and that I believe the author is in control of his material; it came out the way he meant it to.This means that the puzzlement I feel is due to the author's strengths and not his weaknesses. He chose to be mystifying, chose to play with perception and delusion, chose to leave the reader wondering. It's not from any flaw in construction or delivery. I just don't like being strung along like that, feeling as if I'd invested my attention and didn't get the payoff I was expecting. Clearly I was not the intended audience.I think I'll leave it at that.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is one of my favorite books of Auster's, and one of my favorites in general. Billed as an "anti-detective story," it uses many of the trappings of the classic detective formula, but rather than unraveling a whodunnit, it retains an aura of mystery throughout. Auster explores many of his favorite topics in this short book: loss, the nature of language, identity, obsession with intellectual concepts. While these might seem like heady or perhaps tedious subjects to some, the form he uses keeps up a narrative pace that makes it all flow naturally.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5READ IN ENGLISH
I don't know what to say about this story. I liked the beginning and was intrigued by the story, but at times and especially near the end more often than not I was thinking, stop this post-modernistic nonsense and try and complete the story.
I felt I was left with more questions than usual... - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I find that I don't know what on earth to say about City of Glass. Perhaps that will resolve itself as I read the rest of this trilogy. I was intrigued by it, at times confused; I found it easy to read, but very quiet, muted. It doesn't spark off the page and leap about, at all. It sounds as if it's going to be very strange and dramatic, and yet it quietly slims down -- in the way the main character does -- to something else entirely. And what that thing is, I haven't figured out.
Like I said, perhaps I'll understand this better when I read the rest. Or perhaps the mystery will deepen. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I have mostly read this on planes.
Perhaps it was the sleepiness, the waking and nodding off and reading interwoven, but I'm kind of scared of this book. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Q: How many Paul Austers can there be in one novel?A: Lots
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What a strange and fascinating book. A near perfect example of how fiction can say things about language and identity that theory fumbles at... I'll be thinking about this one for a long time.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A fascinating, modern story about the nature of authors and how a story can seemingly be autobiographical whilst meddling with the realities of being the writer in the book AND the character in a fictional story at the same time. A modern Jorge Louis Borges. Looking forward to reading the next two books in the series.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I place this item on a none-too-tiny list of literary Rorschach tests. Unconvinced? Please sample any ten of my fellow reviewer's estimates of the "meaning" of this book.The best parts of this book are the hero's various meetings with the two Peter Stillmans, father & son. The dialogs between Quinn and these two grotesques are very amusing. Interesting use of the author as character in his own fiction -- though not as entertaining as other masters of this specialty: Roth (P.), Vidal, Mailer.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An oddball mystery. It begins like a conventional P.I. investigation but then veers toward the Kafkaesque and the absurd. The second half reminded me of Hawthorne's "Wakefield" short story. There is to the whole thing a sort of phantom quality which also reminded me (I'm not so sure why) of Jim Jarmusch's movie "Dead Man". Chapter 8 has a stunning explanation for the seemingly random walkabouts of a character.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Starts out good but drags before its short duration is up.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Un escritor que no se considera escritor y publica bajo un seudónimo novelas que le son fáciles de escribir, pero que siente no están relacionadas con. Un error de identidades que lo lleva a asumir el nombre del propio Auster, pero como un detective. El tipo de juegos de identidad entre el personaje y quien lo narra, propios del Quijote (sobre quien el personaje Auster, que también hace su aparición en la novela, escribe un ensayo o, mejor dicho, sobre Cide Hamete Benengeli, el autor de la novela de Cervantes). ¿ En qué medida somos nosotros y en qué medida vamos dejando de serlo? Parece ser una de las preguntas latentes al fondo de la novela.