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Knighting Gale
Poozer
Joined: 28 Jan 2009
Posts: 91
Sun Aug 23, 2009 4:30 pm |
 Post subject: City of Glass |
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City of Glass by Paul Auster
adapted by: Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli
(what the careless whisper is this. so much for the 500-word minimum. even with the quotes taken away it's like.. yeah. :9 I THINK I AM TOO USED TO WRITING PAPERS)
'It was a wrong number that started it...'
Daniel Quinn writes mystery novels. Of course, as far as the world is concerned, it isn't really Quinn spinning out the adventures of detective Max Work. It's William Wilson. Quinn's own identity is lost somewhere between Wilson and Work, strung out like a tenuous thread linking otherwise completely unrelated beings together. With his family gone, Quinn searches for purpose in his own creation's life.
One night, Quinn gets an unusual call, searching for a detective named Paul Auster. 'This is a matter of utmost urgency,' says the voice on the other end of the line. It's not unlike something out of one of his own mystery novels. The phone rings once more, this time for Quinn to hear nothing more than the dull buzz of a disconnected line.
The third time his phone rings in the middle of the night, Quinn has his answer ready: 'This is Auster speaking.'
And so the strange tale of Daniel Quinn-- part film noir, part love letter to the English language, part myth-- begins.
From the first page, even the most uneducated of readers can guess that Paul Auster's City of Glass is far from being a typical detective story. Based off the novel of the same name (which in turn is part of a trilogy) City of Glass can be seen as a deconstruction not just of crime fiction, but the very conventions that fiction of any kind is built upon-- language itself. Ostensibly a story fashioned after classical noir tropes and cliches, paying homage to the genre, it becomes evident fairly quickly that this isn't the case.
As with any work translated from one medium into another, the translation of City of Glass from a work of prose into a graphic novel comes with its own strengths and weaknesses. Not having read the novel, it's difficult to imagine it in any other medium but David Mazzucchelli's stark panels. In his prose, Auster is straightforward about the nature of his story from the start, making an observation on the reason Quinn takes comfort in his predictable, logical mysteries:
| Quote: | | There is no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not, it has the potential to be so. Everything becomes essence: the center of the book shifts, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the end. |
The unspoken premise of every mystery novel is that events within it operate on (for lack of a better term) a logical level. Everything within the story answers to this higher purpose; events that may seem nonsensical and disjointed are deftly threaded together at the climax, the moment of the detective's triumph and the proverbial 'eureka.' As a deconstruction of this well-worn genre, City of Glass substitutes a chaotic world for the orderliness of the detective novel; one where no action is imbued with meaning and no hidden author is lurking in the wings to leap forth and bring sudden clarity to the maelstrom of life. There is no stunning climax, no clean and neat resolution, only unanswered questions and the realization that there may never be an answer forthcoming.
Personally, I don't find delving into the elaborate construction of an enormous red herring all that appealing, so I'll go on to what I did enjoy about City of Glass: its metafictional (and frequently heavy-handed) probing into language. There's almost a speechlike cadence to the story's rhythm, taking a breath between every sudden onslaught of speech. The narrative is peppered with monologues, and there's a sense of repetition that, near the end of the story, becomes all too eerie just before it falls apart.
Managing such a feat in prose is one thing, but what's so wonderful aboutCity of Glass is that its art works with the text instead of against it, turning weighty analogies and metaphors into simple (if often non-self-explanatory) images that hit the reader like a punch to the gut. This is why it's difficult to see it being told in any other form. Peter Stillman's monologue, taken in and of itself, is hardly one to send shivers and down your spine, or stir visceral emotion. Paired with Mazzucchelli's uniformly-shaped, sequential panels (and the strange but effective visual choice of having Stillman's words appear to come from somewhere other than his mouth) and neatly penned illustrations, the effect is absolutely chilling-- especially as Stillman's monologue comes to a close and the same nine-by-nine panels that have been repeated across the last three pages become the bars to a cage.
Mazzucchelli provides each 'monologue' with its own style of illustration (such as the use of public sign-type block figures-- what are those even called?-- for Virginia Stillman's explanation of her husband's state really works for how matter-of-fact she is about it). Stillman the elder's lecture on the conventions of language in the park is surreal, while the allusion to Through the Looking Glass pleased me far too much. I'm horribly fond of the Alice books. That it's referenced in a discourse on words at all is both appropriate and strangely out of place at the same time-- the Alice books were written for the children, and are unapologetically nonsensical, with their author playing hard and fast with language to create a strange, bizarre world entirely suspended from common sense.
To expect rules from a mad world to apply to the 'real' one seems ridiculous, and yet there's an odd kind of sense in it-- and you have to wonder just how mad our world must be for that to be so.
All in all, City of Glass isn't a light read, nor will it appeal to everyone. It might take a few reads to completely digest, and a lot of going back to see things you may have overlooked the first time. If you're fond of metafiction and geeking out over the odd conventions we've built around language, you'll probably thoroughly enjoy it. It's not a comic you'll want to take to bed and whisper sweet nothings to, but you could probably stand to have it eating off your plates and purring on your lap.
If you pick it up expecting a lot of detectivework, you'll be sorely disappointed; this book doesn't deliver much in the way of mystery or tension once it gets the literary allusions in full gear, obsessively spiraling down to its ultimate (some might say inevitable) conclusion. Personally, I found the ending less than satisfying, but it has an odd and pleasant way of coming full circle: the book ends the same way it begins, with a few words on a dark page.
"Each day is new, and each day I am born again," Peter Stillman says. In much the same way, City of Glass is never quite the same every time you revisit it, and you take away something different every time you return to Daniel Quinn's strange, darkly-lit city.
And perhaps that's just as it should be.
(TL;DR: 'Cool story, bro.') |
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Job McBadass
Douche (Retired)
Joined: 01 Dec 2008
Posts: 920
Location: In the Moment
Sun Aug 23, 2009 4:59 pm |
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WORDS WORDS WORDS
In any case, fantastic review, Knighting Gale. Deftly written, detailed but not gushingly so, highlighting interesting specifics in the art and prose, but not completely spoilerrific. You're the first one to submit, too. You get a pip for that. I'll send it in the mail.
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love,
Job |
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taonggyera
You Can't Stop The Anger
Joined: 13 Jan 2009
Posts: 324
Fri Sep 25, 2009 2:17 pm |
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Looks like a comic that doesn't need to be another medium to live. Good.
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Gonna trash your careless whisper' lights ! |
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