This posture could be unnerving, and it took me a long time to learn that what was good for Fanshawe was not necessarily good for me. If he did well, it was always in spite of himself, with no struggle, no effort, no stake in the thing he had done. Fanshawe remained aloof from all that, quietly standing in his corner, paying no attention. It mattered to me that I do well, that I impress people with the empty signs of my ambition: good grades, varsity letters, awards for whatever it was they were judging us on that week. I wanted too much of things, I had too many desires, I lived too fully in the grip of the immediate ever to attain such indifference. I would get so close to Fanshawe, would admire him so intensely, would want so desperately to measure up to him-and then, suddenly, a moment would come when I realized that he was alien to me, that the way he lived inside himself could never correspond to the way I needed to live. Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this uniquely stylized triology of detective novels begins with City of Glass, in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. More than anything else, it was this quality that sometimes scared me away from him. The New York Review of Books has called Paul Auster's work one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature. “No matter how remarkable his behavior was, you always felt that he was detached from it.
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