The Glass City, A City of Anywhere and Nowhere...

Babelplatz, Berlin, Book Burning MemorialWhat struck me most about Paul Auster’s “City of Glass” was how absent the “city” seemed to be from the narrative itself. Especially for a book titled as Volume One of “The New York Trilogy”, an anthology that based on the title would seemingly be very rooted in place, Auster story could really take place in any city. Perhaps this is where the title comes from, a city of glass implying a see-through city, one without distinctive character or feeling. It isn’t until addresses and street names are included that you gain a sense of where the book is located, yet the romantic and nostalgic descriptions of New York that are found so commonly in literature about the city are missing here. As a resident of the city, I got excited during the chapter where Quinn, the protagonist, takes a long walk down Manhattan, making his way down to Washington Square and Canal Street and back up through Union Square. Though it is only because I myself can evoke an image of these places in my mind that I was able to conjure up a sense of the backdrop for the mystery, but for most readers this would not be possible. Even during Quinn’s walks where he is hired to follow Mr. Stillman, Auster does not give us much rich description of the surrounding, he instead deals more with Quinn’s inner experience of how to keep his mind focused, with the occasional drop of the name of a restaurant or coffee place or park (96). Auster’s narrative in fact is pervaded with themes of the “nowhere” and a lacking of a sense of place, or displacement. After camping out on the street for months watching the Stillman’s apartment, Quinn comes back to find his furniture and belongings gone and somebody else moved into his place, any signs of his own life once made there had disappeared. He then goes to the Stillman house to find it completely bare and empty, devoid of any signs of inhabitants. Taking refuge in a back windowless cubicle, he begins to shut himself off from all sense of place, with night and day merging, the darkness eventually taking over as he fades away. He becomes consumed in this nothingness and in himself and his writing, and it is presumed he eventually dies there, though his fate is unclear.

When I thought of this empty room within which Quinn gradually deteriorated, the first image that came to mind was the Book Burning Memorial in Bebelplatz off the Unter den Linden in Berlin. Intended to memorialize the first Nazi book burning on May 10, 1933, it is an empty underground space lined with shelves, intended to look like a library, a sealed white room that can be viewed from a glass plate in the ground. For me, the memorial always conjured up an eerie feeling of nothingness and emptiness, of isolation independent of the outside world and devoid of any identity to where it seems Quinn has disappeared into.