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56 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A novel in which the story and how it is told are fascinatingly inseparable, November 2, 2009
Paul Auster may have a reputation as a "writer's writer" --- one whose technical expertise and mastery of his craft is viewed with alternating envy, inspiration and despair by less skilled writers. But he also knows how to tell a darn good story as he has demonstrated time and again in novels such as CITY OF GLASS, ORACLE NIGHT and MAN IN THE DARK. In his 15th work of fiction, INVISIBLE, Auster dazzlingly displays both his technical and storytelling talents in a mature novel that skillfully brings together many of the themes of his life's work.
In many ways, what is important in INVISIBLE is not so much the story itself but how it is told. The novel is divided into four parts with three different narrators, who write in three different voices (the first, second and third person points of view). The issue of narrative voice --- how and why writers choose to tell a story in that particular voice --- is at the heart of the novel: "By writing about myself in the first person, I had smothered myself and made myself invisible, had made it impossible for me to find the thing I was looking for. I needed to separate myself from myself..." So maybe the claims of Auster being a writer's writer is true after all, but he is also one who can get readers thinking about how the way stories are told influences the way we read them.
The central figure of the novel --- and the primary narrator of the first two sections --- is Adam Walker, an aspiring poet who is in his second year at Columbia University in 1967, the year in which the story opens and from which everything else sprouts. A chance encounter at a party draws Walker in to the gravitational orbit of beguiling Frenchman Rudolf Born and his alluring companion, Margot. Born promises Walker certain things --- certain desirable things that shake Walker out of his undergraduate torpor and show him a different way of living. Ultimately, however, a series of betrayals by Walker, by Margot, and, most notably, by Born changes the stakes for Walker and alters the course of his life.
What happens in the subsequent sections is both difficult to describe and largely irrelevant to this review; suffice it to say that the events force Walker to solicit the help of Jim, a former classmate of his at Columbia. Jim's role is to help Walker tell the story of what happened after that pivotal spring, of how his ongoing obsession, revulsion and fascination with Born shaped everything that happened after. And as good stories tend to do, Walker's manages to draw Jim into his tale, and, as events unfold, both Jim and, eventually, the reader ask the question: "What is truth? What is story? What exactly is this collection of words that I hold in my hand?"
At times, reading INVISIBLE can feel like riding in a fast-moving taxi steered by an eminently capable driver who nonetheless tends to take corners so fast that passengers don't feel like they've caught up until blocks later. Nevertheless, the passengers are thrilled and grateful that they've signed up for the wild ride. Auster's constantly shifting parameters demand a lot from readers, but they also provide both rigorous intellectual stimulation and the joy of a well-told story. INVISIBLE is a page-turner; readers keep reading because they want to know not only what's going to happen but also how the author is going to get us there.
Ultimately, that is one of the biggest themes of the novel: how the telling of stories --- how they're told, to whom they're told, when they're told --- has the power to alter circumstances far outside their original realm. Sure, Auster's postmodern sensibilities are still very much on display here (as an inside joke to long-time readers, he mentions that some unnamed authors insert characters with their own names into their fiction), but INVISIBLE is a forceful demonstration that the mature Auster can marry his "writerliness" with surprising, compelling narrative. The result is a novel in which the story and how it is told are fascinatingly inseparable.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
To know wisdom, madness and folly, October 30, 2009
I love The New York Trilogy and keep reading Paul Auster because of that, even though no other work of his reaches that level for me. In the same way, I read all of Heller after Catch 22 and much of Mailer after Naked and the Dead. In those cases as well, I was disappointed more often than not. It may be that other works of those authors suffered by comparison to their more iconic efforts. If it had not followed Catch 22, Heller's Something Happened may have received more measured response from critics and readers. For Mailer, Executioner's Song may have been recognized as his masterpiece, had his novel of war not been written
Considering all of this, while reading Invisible, I tried to put aside the expectations I have that are a product of my familiarity with The New York Trilogy. As a result, I think that I enjoyed it more than many recent offerings by Auster. Invisible seems, on the surface, to be a straightforward story about Adam Walker's need to make up for what he perceives to have been an act of personal cowardice early in his life. But it is also an arresting analysis of the way in which people manipulate truth to create a personal narrative to meet emotional needs. In the end, the reader must decide which character's memories are truer, which are fashioned to convince the self and which are lies to deceive others. The title of the book and the final paragraphs require some working out by the reader as well.
In describing himself, main character Adam Walker quotes Ecclesiastes: "And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly." It seems an unequal trade. His achievement of wisdom is suspect; his loss of passion is not. As usual, Auster's world can be bleak, ambivalent, unjust and more familiar than the reader would like to admit.
This is a difficult book to review without providing plot information that could make it less enjoyable. Among its strengths is consistent tension in the narrative which creates continuing curiosity and interest for the reader. Watching the characters and events unroll is one of the joys of Invisible.
These are strange people Auster is writing about here. But part of the author's art is to convince us, by the time we finish, that his characters may be less extraordinary than we first assume. Their actions and the mechanisms they use to interpret reality become more familiar and less aberrant as the book unfolds, depending of course on what the reader decides actually happened.
I would love to give this a three and a half star rating but slid back to three since that is not an option. It is definitely worth reading, however, and gives me another reason to check in with Paul Auster each time he releases a new volume.
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21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
an instance of the fingerpost, November 1, 2009
I was in my freshman year of college when I read Paul Auster's masterpiece, "The New York Trilogy" in three slender white Penguin paperbacks (this was before it was available in a single volume) that seemed to contain an entire world or mind. I was shocked by the prose, clean like a boiled skeleton, barren of all fat or connective tissue, and perfectly transparent, intrigued by the elegance of the structure in which the narrator of the third book turned out to be the author of the first two, and awed by the genre-transformative magic trick that turned a detective mystery's search for an unknown into an exploration of the unknowable not via interpolated passages of philosophical discourse (a la European writers like Kundera) but through the (vigorously American was my impression at the time) twists and turns of the plot.
In the decades since, those twists and turns have become Auster's signature, dutifully interpolated into novel after novel, they turned familiar, then generic, and ultimately became his shtick. Meanwhile, he became too self-conscious of his Americanness (perhaps by reading flattering European reviews) and that aspect of his oeuvre turned into kitsch. The nadir was "Timbuktu", a charmless "Marley and Me" as written by a Vassar freshman. The follow-ups were not much of an improvement, though I can't vouch for the last two: I couldn't read them.
The Kirkus review above, heralding a return to form, compelled me to read "Invisible." I'm glad I did, though I wasn't sure at first. The opening chapter (of four) I found thin, labored and plodding. The second was compelling, but sensationalist: it felt like Auster was pushing buttons to keep my attention. But things did pick up. It became possible that instead of merely toying with plot, Auster was building an elaborate structure.
The magic happened in chapter three. The resurrection promised at the end of chapter two actually happened (it's not supernatural, but it's real: pay attention, or you might miss it like the protagonist,) but more than that, all the characters and the situation came to vivid, menacing life, perhaps in part because the chapter takes place in Paris. (I'm not entirely sure, but this may be the first of Auster's fictions that is set there.)
The fourth chapter is a miracle.
Auster plays many games in this novel--origami timelines, multiple narrators, first, second AND third person narrations, at least two sets of twins or dopplegangers, etc.--all to a single end: that the book's true subject not be revealed until the final paragraph. And when it is revealed, invisible, inevitable, but after all, the only thing this book could, should possibly be about, it's not just the sound of one hand clapping, but that hand slapping you across the face.
"The New York Trilogy" was Auster's personal masterpiece. This book is his American masterpiece. It combines literary intricacy with moral weight, with the former fully in the service of the latter.
You have to read it, especially if like me, you've given up on him.
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