The title of this study is drawn, in part, from the middle novella of Auster's The New York Trilogy. Ghosts inhabit Auster's work as literary influences from Europe and America and from the nineteenth century to high modernism. The trilogy is itself also very “knowing” about literary theory and Auster teases the well-informed reader with Derridean language games and Barthesian questions about authorship and interpretation. As a consequence, many critical studies have explored both Auster's intertextuality and his engagement with theories of literary postmodernism.

María Laura Arce Álvarez takes Maurice Blanchot's interest in these concerns to shed new light on some aspects of Auster's seminal postmodern, anti-detective stories. Part of her justification for opening this new critical front is Auster's translation of Blanchot's work while working in Paris in the 1970s and the subsequent correspondence between the two authors. Arce Álvarez calls this intertextuality a “translating influence” and places it alongside the more familiar influences of literary inheritance, described here as either “explicit” – appearing directly in the text, or “implicit” – influencing some aspect of character, plot or structure (or all three).

The study is split into two distinct parts. The first three quite brief chapters deal with an “explicit” intertextuality, tracing the presence in each part of the trilogy of a key influence – Poe, Melville and Hawthorne – represented here by their stories “William Wilson” (1839), “Bartleby” (1853) and Fanshawe (1828). Melville is described as an “implicit” influence, though I would argue that there are enough direct references in the text to make Bartleby's presence in the text an “explicit” one. Arce Álvarez adds a sustained critical attention to the source texts which has been lacking from much of the earlier criticism, which will certainly help readers without a deep knowledge of nineteenth-century American literature. The discussion of Hawthorne's Fanshawe adds to our understanding of this obscure and often ignored novel (a text suppressed as a juvenile irrelevance by Hawthorne himself). There should be room, however, to nuance this interesting reading with a more detailed account of the importance of Hawthorne's short story “Wakefield” (1835), as each part of the trilogy is essentially a retelling of this story (a man steps outside his own life by moving a few streets from his home in a busy city and quickly loses his place, becoming an “Outcast of the Universe”), but representing a different understanding of it. The rigid structure of the argument, relating one novella to one influence, discourages parallel developments.

The study is dominated by two much more substantial chapters, one on the implicit intertextual presence of Samuel Beckett's 1950s trilogy of novels (Molloy (1955), Malone Dies (1956) and The Unnamable (1958)) and the other on Blanchot's translation influence. Arce Álvarez describes how “the intertextual relationship between Auster and Blanchot is evident mostly in terms of understanding Auster's trilogy as a fictionalization of the construction of a literary space” (109), leading to some interesting interpretations where Auster's characters and writer–characters attempt to occupy the same imaginary spaces. The triangular relationship between the three writers is completed with Blanchot's own writings on Beckett informing the analysis of Beckett's influence on Auster. That the earlier chapters are so brief and mostly gather existing scholarship and previously well-mined critical perspectives suggests that a more sustained focus on the less well-explored influence of Beckett and the innovative approach to Blanchot's work would have made for both a more consistent and a more interesting argument. In addition, because the focus is only on The New York Trilogy, repetition becomes inevitable and the reader is left with the feeling of covering familiar territory a number of times. There would be much to say about Auster's earlier poetry, which shares many concerns with Beckett's literature of silence, absence and disappearance and Blanchot's interest in language and the creation of imaginary spaces (hinted at by the title of Auster's 1988 collection of poems, Disappearances). Equally, Auster's later novels demonstrate the development of both the influence and the themes discussed here, particularly the silence and repetitions of The Music of Chance (1990), the introspective and claustrophobic self-referentiality of Travels in the Scriptorium (2006) and the recursive structures of The Book of Illusions (2002).

Overall, this study represents a reliable summary of the scholarship on intertextuality in The New York Trilogy and some interesting developments, with the discussion of Blanchot's influence being the most innovative and incisive.