Customer Reviews

The invention of solitude

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It's hard for to say which is Auster's greater achievement: "The New York Trilogy" or this, but I think I side with this book. Has anyone taken as strikingly original and also successfully realized approach to the memoir? I just know that when I came to the dramatic revelation of the first half of this book, I was so shocked I dropped the book. I am a little suspicious of Auster's artistry--he is such an absorbing, fascinating, mesmerizing writer that I wonder what tricks he may be playing on me. But with each of his books, and this one in particular, there is always a sensation having been taken out of the world, slightly disturbed, and then placed back into it. For a while, you see things differently, and any writer who can shake us up that effectively deserves our praise and attention.

In "Portrait of an Invisible Man", the first part of Paul Auster's fascinating memoir "Invention of Solitude", Auster writes about his father's life as a means of helping himself come to terms with his father's death. Auster remembers his father as an elusive figure in his life, a truant from life emotionally detached and disconnected from family ("he had managed to keep himself at a distance from life"). To Auster, it seemed that the world's attempts to embrace his father simply bounced off him without ever making a breakthrough - it was impossible to enter his solitude. The theme of Solitude runs powerfully through this disturbing, mesmerising memoir.

Auster is conscious of how little knowledge he actually has of his father's early childhood years, how unenlightened he is with regard to his father's inner life, how few clues he has to his father's character and how little understanding of the underlying reasons for his father's immunity from the world at large. Through an amazing co-incidence involving his cousin, Auster learns of a terrible secret buried deep in his father's childhood past - the story was splashed across old newspaper reports of the time, sixty years before - of a shocking family tragedy that shattered his father's childhood world and could have seriously affected his mental outlook during his formative years, accounting for the solitariness and elusiveness that characterised the "invisible man" of Auster's childhood. Excellent, compelling writing! Dramatic revelations from a grim, distant past finally brought to light! Highly recommended!

In the second part, "The Book of Memory", there is a marked shift of perspective (away from the point of view of Auster, as son, writing about his feelings and memories of his father's life, after his death) to an autobiographical account of Auster's own experience, now himself as father, writing about his son. More abstract in content and style than "Portrait of an Invisible Man", "The Book of Memory" comprises autobiographical segments interspersed with commentaries on the nature of chance interspersed with ruminations on solitude and exploration of language. As a confirmed Auster-holic, my favourite Auster book to-date is "Moon Palace".

Autobiography -more often truer to form than substance- seems to repeal one's pretensions concerning identity while legitimizing a sense of purpose. Paul Auster's "Invention of Solitude" is perhaps one of the very best ever written: If Henry Adams attempted to offer credence to his generation than Auster is the heir apparent for the 20th c. Arranged in two parts, "Invention" and "Book of Memory," the novella-length memoirs center around two themes; familial and personal loss. The passing of a father whose mysterious motives and outlook later occupies the subplot of a mystery and the author's search for its truthful sources in "Invention," while the second (written when the author was at an all-time low) is a meditation upon his own son, which is interwoven with study of Collidi's Pinnochio and, ostensibly, Jonah. Auster is as much at home quoting a Judaic scholar as Pascal, Tolstoy or a close acquaintance. Together the book solidifies the relations while offering amazing insights for anyone who has suffered and expereienced a sense of conviction in wake of tragedy of loss. This is an astonishingly mature and compassionate book, one which I have never found anyone to whom I could not recommend.

The first half of this slender book, "Portrait of an Invisible Man", is Auster's memoir of his cold golem of a father on the occasion of his death. Auster writes in chillingly clear prose about a loved and hated parent in a way that reminded me of Milan Kundera's cooly anguished meditations on history and family. Plus, Auster finds what so many of us don't--a possible explanation for his tortured past. He discovers the old, half-buried tale of how his grandmother murdered his grandfather. There are a couple of haunting photographs in the book: the one on the cover is Auster's young father, multiplied by trick photography. The other is an old picture of the grandparent's family that contains a secret not unlike that of the photo at the end of Roman Polanski's film "Repulsion." I have not been a fan of Auster's fiction--I find it mechanical--but this fine work has me wanting to read his other essays and memoirs.

Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude, split as it is between a half that could be great fiction and a half that could be pure philosophy (or, if you'd like, pure rambling), is unlike anything I've ever read. In its first half, "Portrait of an Invisible Man," he not only gives a compelling, fully human rendering of a cold, unexpressive father, he makes us fully aware of the consciousness watching him, struggling to make sense of the place he still occupies in Auster's mind as he attemps fatherhood himself. The second half, "The Book of Memory," takes that death into the most mystical realm possible, discussing the way motifs, rhymes, themes, and coincidence merge to create a life, and in its brain-scrambling way of taking quotes, allusions, and personal tales into describing the ramblings on life after personal upheaval, it responds in a way most writing never can to understanding the whole complex fabric of existence. Auster's literary expertise is extensive and his prose is transporting, together these halves, moving from corporeal to penetratingly ethereal, respond to questions and evoke emotions in a way that neither fiction nor poetry can, making the book a transcendent experience - a vivid rendering of a mind hurtling, with precise diction, into the depths and implications of why and how we have lives in the first place.

Auster will take you on a trip into the self. There is a great deal of wisdom and sadness in this little book, it packs quite a punch. For those who have read his "Leviathan" this book provides clues to that title, for at least some of the solitude is that spent in the whale ('leviatan' is Hebrew for whale). I picked it up as a change of pace from medical texts, and was thrown off with a book that qualifies as a Kafka-ian axe. Reading such a book pulled me into the paradox of shared solitude of reader and author...

I read some four or five novels by Auster and nothing got beneath my skin more then The Book of Memory, a second part of Invetion of Solitude. The humour, the style, the twists and obvious but secret connection to quotidian life and biographical facts, tasted like a delicious cake. A cake one doesn't eat at once but rather chip by chip, like a gourmet, to get all the 'prana' from Austers words. I especially like his interest in tangible life, the life around us (that of course is within us-that's why a Slovenian guy like me can like his writings). The only time i got bored is when he gets into the baseball. For such a stuff one needs to be closer to America, which I'm not. So, if you still wonder wheather you'll like Auster or not, just grab one of his books and let him take you to the rich and beautiful trip of imagination

The missing father, the poignant chance events, the lonely writer, the meaningless world that seems far too fraught with meaning: these are the themes that wind themselves through Paul Auster's novels, surfacing and echoing one another in the lives of his diverse characters. With Invention of Solitude Auster has stepped out of fiction for a moment and examines his own life. And here the same themes are reflected. In the unsearchable life of his distant father presented in Memoir of an Invisible Man; in the stories of chance and fate that haunt his alter-ego, A, through the Book of Memory; in the life that eventually adds up to Paul Auster. The book is particularly recommended for writers or potential writers, for its unglancing depiction of solitude. Not only the physical separation, but the spiritual and mental as well. To end with this.

I'll go out on a limb here, diasgree with the hagiographic tone of preceding reviewers, and say that only half this book is worth reading - the first half. When Auster writes about how he feels after his father's death, he makes universal the sorrows, guilts and uncertainties of losing a parent. But the second half - "The Book of Memory" - gets very tedious very quickly. Real feeling is replaced by real showing off, with pages of literary criticism masquerading as fiction. If you thrill to "isms" - structuralism, deconstuctionism - there may be something here for you. But for the rest of us...

This book's first half is gorgeously vulnerable. Auster creates his father as a fascinating character, and the reader learns about him through Auster the adult writer/man finding his father through the objects he's left behind and also through Auster's memories as a boy. What's so strange, then, is the second half of the book, which becomes overly artificed. Auster writers about himself in the third person, calling himself "A.", and what follows is a distanced meditation on what memory might be. All of the vulnerability of the first half gives way to a nearly solipsistic second half. It's like Auster has decided to turn himself into his father and let the reader view him, but the reader is no longer allowed to sympathize with him. Truly, this second half seems a total intellectual invention of, alas, solitude, as the reader is held perpetually at arm's length. Buy a used copy and read the first half.