Drawing in the Red Notebook

City of Glass

by Paul Auster
adaptation by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli

Comic trade paperback, 134 pages. Published 2004 (originally 1994). Acquired August 2006. Previously read October 2006. Reread October 2011.

This past spring, I taught my students Paul Auster's "City of Glass" (I forced them to apply Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics to it, defying all reason), instilling in me a desire to 1) reread the graphic novel adaptation and 2) reread the rest of The New York Trilogy. So, ages later, I finally did both.

I like Paul Auster, but I find his brilliance difficult to put into words; with this graphic adaptation of the first volume of The New York Trilogy, the problem is even more difficult. All of this is appropriate, of course, for a story where the main theme is the inability (or unreliability) of language to capture truth. When I first read this comic back in 2006, I hadn't yet read the prose novel; upon reading the prose novel some months later, I could not find anything in it that had been subtracted for the comic. Furthermore, the addition of a visual dimension meant that there was a whole new layer of meaning.

All I can do, then, is praise Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli's artwork; their simple, stark style suits the narrative perfectly, and their use of transitions between panels is astounding, showing a complete mastery of the comics medium. City of Glass is heavy with meaning in the best of ways.