The Invention of Solitude

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.

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, emotionally detached and disconnected from family and life itself ("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".

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.

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.

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...