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Search - Invisible

Invisible
Author: Paul Auster

Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught i... more »n a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life.Three different narrators tell the story of Invisible, a novel that travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from Morningside Heights to the Left Bank of Paris to a remote island in the Caribbean. It is a book of youthful rage, unbridled sexual hunger, and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us into the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, between authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.” Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Man in the Dark, Travels in the Scriptorium, Brooklyn Follies, and Oracle Night. I Thought My Father Was God, the NPR National Story Project anthology, which he edited, was a national bestseller. His work has been translated into thirty-five languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girlfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life.

Three different narrators tell the story of Invisible, a coming-of-age novel that travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from Manhattan's Morningside Heights, to the Left Bank of Paris, to a remote island in the Caribbean. It is a book of youthful rage, unbridled sexual hunger, and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us into the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, between authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.” (The Times Literary Supplement (UK)) "His latest novel, Invisible, finds [Auster] returning to the same thematic territory he has long occupied—the four-way intersection of memory, language, fate and self-discovery—with that playfulness very much intact. His subject here is the memoirist's subjective truth, and his object is to get us thinking about the ways in which it is constructed, edited and processed into what we think of as objective reality . . . 'I sometimes confuse my thoughts about the world with the world itself,' says one character at the end of Invisible. 'I'm sorry if I offended you.' Some undoubtedly will be offended . . . One hopes that, in this case, readers will stay for the duration. The pleasures found inside are well worth the labor required to uncover them."—Jeff Turrentine, The Washington Post "[Invisible] moves quickly, easily, somehow sinuously . . . The prose is contemporary American writing at its best: crisp, elegant, brisk. It has the illusion of effortlessness that comes only with fierce discipline. As often happens when you are in the hands of a master, you read the next sentence almost before you are finished with the previous one. The novel could be read shallowly, because it is such a pleasure to read . . . It’s a love story, or a series of intertwined love stories, with one young man, Adam Walker, at the center of them all . . . Adam learns about love from four very different characters. There is Rudolf Born, the father figure, a domineering, elemental masculine force who is a professor but most likely also connected with the French or American intelligence underworld, and perhaps a savage killer (the novel relates a brutal murder that may or may not have taken place). There is Born’s lover, a beautiful Frenchwoman named Margot, who is the classic older instructor of Adam as eager young pupil. In Paris, Adam meets at, an innocent, bookish girl, the daughter of a woman Born plans to marry: Cécile falls in love with Adam but the feeling is unreciprocated, so he comes to know that side of it. But how Adam truly climbs the ladder of ta erotika is with his sister, Gwyn. Adam is about to leave Columbia for a year abroad in Paris, but before he leaves, Adam and Gwyn play a little game they haven’t tried since they were adolescents. 'So you test the waters cautiously, baby step by baby step, grazing your mouths against each other’s necks, grazing your lips against each other’s lips, but for many minutes you do not open your mouths, and although you have wrapped your arms around each other in a tight embrace, your hands do not move. A good half hour goes by, and neither one of you shows any inclination to stop. That is when your sister opens her mouth.' At the very heart of the book, at the end of Part 2—the novel is divided into four parts, using three narrators and four different narrative perspectives—Adam and Gwyn have a monthlong love affair (she later denies the affair ever happened) that permanently defines Adam’s personality. It’s five or 10 exceptionally beautiful, disturbing pages, and it is occasioned by their mourning the loss of a long-dead younger brother. But this is a love that really dares not speak its name, and it is the key to what is invisible in the novel. Love is always invisible, and in our world of hard-nosed materialists it’s important to remember that our highest good is something we can never really see or grab hold of, much less understand by passing enough people through an f.M.R.I. machine to look at their brainwaves. What we take as the real world is not the world that matters most to us: the substance of our lives takes place in an invisible realm . . . One always hears the voices of philosophers in Auster’s novels, though he keeps them hidden . . . Auster wants to pull the rug of realism out from beneath your feet so he can bring you a little closer to reality. But in Invisible the technique does not overwhelm the story. The characters are not placeholders for philosophical gambits, they are real people. We learn about them, we care about them, we worry about them, we want to know more about them . . . It is the finest novel Paul Auster has ever written."—Clancy Martin, The New York Times Book Review

"Paul Auster is best known as a writer of lean, genre-tinged novels whose unaffected prose belies their philosophical complexity. But he's also one of our most playful novelists, a lover of narrative labyrinths on par with Borges, to whom he has often been compared. For some, Auster's penchant for romantic irony is a distracting tic; for others, it's why they enjoy reading him in the first place. His latest novel, Invisible, finds him returning to the same thematic territory he has long occupied—the four-way intersection of memory, language, fate and self-discovery—with that playfulness very much intact. His subject here is the memoirist's subjective truth, and his object is to get us thinking about the ways in which it is constructed, edited and processed into what we think of as objective reality. In the first of the novel's four sections we meet Adam Walker, an undergraduate at Columbia University with writerly aspirations who likes to translate French verse in his free time. Already we think we can hear the hum of the metafictional machinery starting up: Walker reminds us not only of Marco Fogg, the hero of Auster's 1989 novel Moon Palace (same university, same proclivities) but also of Auster himself, who attended Columbia during the late 1960s and translated French poetry as he dreamed of becoming a writer . . . We may be headed once again into the hall of mirrors. Are we? Of course we are. As we learn of Adam's relationship with Rudolf Born, a supercilious Columbia professor, and Margot, Born's lover, everything reinforces our belief that we are reading a tale narrated in the first person by Adam, about events that have taken place in his past. In fact, as we learn in the next section, we have actually been reading a fragment of Adam's unpublished memoir—a fragment that is being shared with us by a successful novelist named James Freeman, who knew Adam when they attended Columbia together 40 years ago. Adam, now sick and dying, has asked his old friend to look at the chapter and share his opinion. When Freeman writes back encouragingly, Adam admits to him that he's having trouble continuing. Freeman responds by suggesting that Adam try writing the next section in a different narrative voice—the bifurcation of voices being a trick that had liberated Freeman from his own writer's block when composing his own memoir years earlier . . . We have traveled so deep into the hall of mirrors that we may be feeling dizzy. 'If I hadn't been told it was a true story, I probably would have plunged in and taken those sixty-plus pages for the beginning of a novel,' Freeman tells us . . . Later in the novel, Freeman becomes the editorial custodian of his old friend's uncompleted memoir. Auster's final bit of mischief is to make Freeman himself unsure as to what he's holding in his hands. Was Adam telling the truth about Rudolf Born? Was he making things up, projecting his own skittering subjective truth onto the stone tablet of objective reality? Freeman's only choice, he decides a...

ISBN-13: 9780571249510
ISBN-10: 0571249515
Publication Date: 5/6/2010
Pages: 320
Rating:

Currently 2.5/5 Stars.

2.5 stars, based on 1 rating

Publisher: Faber and Faber
Book Type: Paperback
Other Versions: Hardcover, Audio CD
Members Wishing: 1
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

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