reading response

           Interesting novel but not so easy to read, the author also admits his novels are not the easiest to read by comparing himself to Thoreau and Walden, he initiates you have  to read his work slowly to get a deeper understanding. The story appears somewhat simple at first, like the part when he hires Blue to watch Black and report each week about what has done. I am not so pleased with this book by Paul Auster, his use of color names for all of his characters to differentiate them instead of actual names like John, Paul or even Peter would have been nice and  would have made it more easy to read. He could have been using the color as metaphor, as in white being the absence of substance, Black is the combination of all the light colors put together , while Blue stands for the shadow of Black if you want to look at it that way.

         The way i see  the plot of this novel is that the character White hides his true identity and hires a young private eye in Blue to sit in an apartment across the street  from  his own apartment  to spy. While Blue is duped into thinking he is tailing someone named black and obligingly sends off weekly reports to white  on Blacks actions  Blue had always been a man of action, so doing nothing is difficult for him. Blue’s discovery of stories distracts him from his mission. He becomes more intrigued by the stories he imagines for Black than the activities of Black himself.  Blue often pulls himself back from fantasy to the reality of his mission, but it becomes more and more difficult for him to separate the false from the true as read in the book. It took Blue a long time to realize what is really going on, as it took me the reader a a while to figure out what was really happening. This is not the type of novel you try and read quickly even though it is short but you still have to pay close attention and analyze everything that went on between all the characters to get a better understanding of what the author is trying to derive at.

       There seem to be many  hidden meanings in this novel as there are in most of all Auster's work. He derives joy in making his works complicated and somewhat lunatic. You can argue that , that's his style but I'm not a big fan of it,