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Jackson. Dearest. How are you? I am fine.
I want to tell you something I read the other day.
Why?
Because he needs me, says Black, still looking away.
He needs my eye looking at him. He needs me to prove he's
alive.
Isn't it funny, how sometimes, our need to be
proven existent swallows us whole. I just thought it
was funny, that.
Yours. Chan
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Paul Auster's New York Trilogy comprises three self-conscious stories
revolving around the theme of identity. More specifically, losing one's
own. They pay tribute to the genre of
detective novella made exemplary by pulp writers such as Chandler,
but lead the reader into unfamiliar territory with the use of
curve-ball like literary devices. Each story is carefully written, each
word is meticulously chosen and the ideas behind them subtly fade in and
out of the background. I am disturbed by the actions and sheer
lunacy of his characters, but also find delight in this. That somehow,
there should be a world where people speak in riddles and their actions
made precision cogs in an oddly ordered universe.
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She sat there for some time afterward, watching ink soak into
the fibres of translucent paper, observed how some of the curves had
smudged a little under an obtrusive finger and now
the flat side of her flesh was covered with faint smears of black. She
took a right index, licked it and rubbed at the tarnished skin.
There was no sound, none at all, but she only noticed after she'd
examined her words carefully for misspellings and grammatical wrongs.
Then she sat up, straightened her shoulders a little and realized there
was no sound, heard that the room was completely silent.
She shifted in her seat and heard the ruffling of space-age man-made
late-twentieth-century fabrics echo through her empty surrounds
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