Sixteen. City of Glass: The Graphic Novel by Paul Auster

Adapted to graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli

2004, Am Oved publishing, 140 pages. Written in English, read in Hebrew.

“City of Glass” was the first novella Paul Auster published under his own name, back in 1985, later to be collected into the New York Trilogy. It originated, he explained in the introduction to “The New York Trilogy”, with a phone call he received in which the voice at the other end asked if he was Paul Auster, the private detective. In the novella, he gives this further artistic freedom by providing the protagonist, Daniel Quinn, the will to decide at the third attempt of the voice on the other end of the line to ask if he was Paul Auster, the private detective, to reply that yes, it was indeed him, a lie which sends him on the kind of tumbling adventure we are familiar with from other Paul Auster novels. Paul Auster enters himself to the story as well, when Quinn looks for the private detective for answers, reassurance, and a way out.

In this particular novella, most of the adventure happens in the protagonist’s head. It is driven as much by the what-could-have-been of the story, as by the occurrences that actually took place. This kind of presentation is, on the one hand, a perfect source for a graphic novel, and on the other hand, makes the graphic novel very hard. But then Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli who have created the graphic novel based on the novella were completely ready for a challenge, which can be seen in the fact this is not a regular graphic novel. This is the kind of graphic novel that extends beyond the genre and the art form and tries to find ways to tell the story with all means possible — including, for example, using the entire grid on the page to communicate additional messages, beyond those provided in the squares themselves; or setting the sequential squares to portray something that zooms out into something else and then into something else entirely; or doing away with the grid entirely and communicating everything through a series of notes, floating in mid-air.

The graphic novel treatment gives this novella more of the freedom that it deserves — instead of locking it into a visual interpretation, as a movie would do, the graphic novel provides some details but holds back on others, leaving the reader to continue and determine by himself what it is that he wants to perceive in each additional square.