Ghosts

I really enjoyed the book, Ghosts by Paul Auster. It was very engaging and caught my attention from the beginning, making it a really easy read. This book was very different from the previous novel, which had absolutely no story line. This story was a myster about the main character Blue, who was a private investigator on a case. He didn’t know what he was actually investigating and it seemed pretty boring. Black, the person he was investigating spent most of his time in his room just writing. He never did anything out of the ordinary; he just went shopping, got haircuts and usual things. As the book continues we see that Black is connected to Blue and that they both know about each other. Black turns out to be White, who was the person that sends Blue to spy on Black. In the beginning of the book, Blue mentions what White seems to be in some type of disguise, so this makes more sense. Since this book is part of a trilogy I feel that there might be more to it than what we get by just reading this book. There was a lot of hidden symbolism in this book along with a few interesting things that stood out to me.

            One of the most obvious things that stood out to me was the fact that almost all of the characters in the book were represented by colors. We don’t get any type of description from them or any type of identity. Although this is how the book is written, with just the color I was able to make a description of what the character might actually be like.

            I also noticed that sometime in the book the author writes about something but then transitions into something else. For example on page 29 when Blue is following Black on the bridge, he starts to think about his father, then the bridge itself and then about a different case he was in a magazine. Although these are all different ideas the author does a good job with transition so that all of these separate ideas make sense together.

            Another thing that I found interesting was the mentioning of Walt Whitman, first on page 9 and then again further into the book. It’s always cool when a book mentions something that you knew about.

            On page 64, is the first time where the title of the book is mentioned. On the next page Auster writes “We always talk about trying to get inside a writer to understand his work better. But when you get right down to it, there’s not much to find there—at least not much that’s different from what you’d find in anyone else.” I feel that this quote is important because in this scene Blue begins to realize that Black knows who he is. It might also be describing Black as a writer or even Auster himself. On the next page Black compares writers to Ghost, which was interesting considering that it’s the title of the book.