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The Invention of Solitude
  • The Invention of Solitude
  • Author: Paul Auster
  • Binding: Paperback
  • ISBN: 0143112228
  • Pages: 192
  • Published: 2007-01-30

i liked the first half of the book better than the second. auster takes a while to get into imo. This is Auster's first non-fiction work, and when I first opened it, I was curious to see how it would differ from his very distinct voice in fiction. The answer, not a lot. In fact if I were told that this was yet another of his early short novels, I could easily believe it. Auster is often a character in his own fiction, protagonists share his name, his vocation, his hometown and his circumstances. Reviewers often note seemingly important correspondences between the names of wives and children in his novels and matchups to Auster's own life. For example, his first wife is named Sophie, his second Siri and he has a young son named Daniel, all names that frequently appear in his work.

In the first part of his debut work, Portrait of an Invisible Man, Auster tells the story of a writer, named Paul Auster, coming home to deal with the aftermath of his estranged father's death, who is also named Auster, a man barely present to his son throughout his life. "Invisible to others, and most likely invisible to himself as well". Paul Auster embarks on a reconstruction of his father's life from artifacts left behind after his sudden but quiet death, and in the process discovers a shocking family secret that may change his understanding of everything. The second part is called The Book of Memory and concerns many of the themes found in Auster's later works: the order of events, coincidence, the act of writing, absurdism and chance. It precedes The New York Trilogy by five years, but in the opening paragraphs one can already detect the latent forms that will fully emerge later, particularly in The Locked Room.

I found both of these works extremely moving and compelling. I also found myself musing on the difference between "the real Paul Auster" and the Paul Austers (or Peter Aarons, or A.'s, etc.) that appear in the pages of his novels. Is there a "real" Paul Auster? Do I know that one any better than the fictional ones? Does it make any difference? One thing I know for certain is that the more I read of Paul Auster, the more I realize that one can never truly be finished reading Auster. As soon as I complete one work and put it down, I want to pick it up again and continue the process. Having been, to some extent, in the same situation as Auster with relation to his father, I sympathize with him. What's more, I understand him. And his memories. His feeling of emptiness and sadness when he finds out that his father - who was never physically there - is gone spiritually too. It's one of his best, perhaps because it dealt with a personal theme of his life, and he didn't have to use the imagination so much...

I must sincerely say that this novel made me understand my father, and his 'absenteeism', much better. It provides a framework of memories, emotions, relics in which one can maneuver and come to realize that: we are all human, and we all need other human being, even if they have disappointed us, others, or people in general. Auster found that he had missed his father much more than he thought - he came to terms with what his father was and what he wasn't, and saw the world from his perspective.

It absolutely goes without saying that this book, this meditation on life, family, and the inevitability of the unknown is worth reading. Twice. "Portrait of an Invisible Man" starts as a reflection on the nature of life as an experience of solitude. Auster's father appears to have lived in a state of perpetual withdrawal from his self. It is for this reason that writing about him becomes eponymous with writing in an absurd world, after Becket. The task of writing has no ultimate goal; life itself is full of hollow spaces, so why would we want to transcribe it into a work of art? Why should Auster have wanted to write about his father who lived not a life inside himself? Why are we reading this book? Reading, writing and living are all part of the same ludicrous, meaningless wandering.

Fortunately, just before the hollow corridors of emptiness cease to reverberate there is something that captures our attention. A murder! One almost wants to thank Auster's grandmother for rescuing the narrative from its postmodernist drift into nothingness. And the author himself for allowing us to open his grandma's hidden trunk in the attic. Yet after this exciting brief interlude, Auster returns to muse over his father's quirks of personality, and the first section finishes.

"The Book of Memory" starts as a tract on writing: the craft of a man sitting alone in a room for long hours. Filling a room with thoughts is "real spiritual work", the result of an inner struggle in which the mind is made to conquer the dreariness of the surrounding world. It is also about finding oneself before looking for anything else.

The section is composed of various parts distinguished by different thematic links. We have the paragraphs on Memory and the reflections on Chance and assorted instalments on a number of family-related and other themes. Auster is making himself up as a writer, and trying to say something substantial about the workings of reality or European art at the same time.

To withdraw into a room does not mean that one has been madened. It is the room that restores the person, to health and to safety. The modern nothingness can be best confronted from a room or from a position of parenthood... The Book of Memory is concerned with the process of thinking, this is, with mind travel.

References to the Book of Jonah introduce the theme of sleep as "the ultimate withdrawal from the world." Is sleep an image of solitude? By eating him, the fish saves Jonah from drowning in the sea. The depth of the belly is the depth of silence, the refusal to hear and to speak. It is about seeking a separation even from the conversation with God. It is a death before a life that can speak. One learns to speak in solitude. But what is the purpose of speaking? A prophecy remains true when it isn't told. After that first silence one may die, and in death learn to speak. So that a book can be written, a book that will always be closed. 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.