The Music of Chance

I am usually not a fan of trilogies, I like to be taken over by a book so completely that when I am finished, it lingers...I like that lingering feeling. I don't immediately want to go out and delve back into the next part. Incidently, Paul Auster is on his way to changing my mind. He's my featured author of the month! Check him out!

Auster gained renown for a series of three experimental detective stories published collectively as The New Youk Trilogy (1987). These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues.

Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, creating his own distinctively postmodern form in the process.

The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between men and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Leviathan). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes.

Many of his texts are based on his own life experience:

"If all these books were put together in one volume, they would form the book of my life so far, a multifaceted picture of who I am."