Invisible

by Paul Auster

Book Overview

"One of America's greatest novelists" dazzlingly reinvents the coming-of-age story in his most passionate and surprising book to date 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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805090800
• ISBN13: 9780805090802
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 308 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.9" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Many Voices, One Mind

Paul Auster has long been fascinated by popular fiction; THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS for instance, my personal favorite among his works, is about an old-time film-maker. Like Michael Chabon (author of THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY), Auster has a hankering for the good old yarns they don't tell any more: adventure stories more startling, romances more compelling, or mysteries more sinister than are now the fashion in this more nuanced age. Not that either author is devoid of nuance; Chabon burrows beneath his stories to reveal human depth; Auster erects a scaffolding around them to study the nature of story-telling itself, and what it reveals of our secret natures. Auster is the more abstract author, but that doesn't stop him from being hugely enjoyable. This latest novel gripped me from the very beginning and didn't let go until almost the end. The book is in four parts; the first three of these take place in 1967; the fourth is an addendum from forty years later. Each of the 1967 sections is told in a different voice, using the first, second, and third person respectively. So the opening is the first-person narrative of Adam Walker, a junior English major at Columbia and would-be poet. He meets a visiting professor from France, Rudolf Born, who offers to invest some family money in a literary magazine that Adam would edit. It seems a young writer's dream come true, but it doesn't feel entirely real and there are disturbing undertones. Gradually Adam gives in to a seduction that is simultaneously intellectual and erotic, until the situation blows up in an encounter which makes him see Born in a different light. The second part continues Adam's story with Born temporarily out of the picture. Auster is brilliant at capturing both the hot, lazy atmosphere of New York in summer and the loose-end feeling of a university student during the long vacation. The erotic element now takes center stage, and might well shock some readers by its explicitness and subject matter, yet Auster also seduces the reader with a romantic yearning that goes beyond the physical. The third part follows Adam to Paris in the fall, the Rive Gauche of the sixties being captured as beautifully as Morningside Heights had been. There Adam meets a brilliant young woman whose mother is about to marry Born; it is a touching and almost innocent relationship, but the elements of eroticism and menace from earlier in the book intervene here too. The final part ties up several of the loose ends, but also questions the veracity of others. In the end, one is left wondering whether any of this supposedly factual narrative is true. Hang on -- isn't it absurd to question levels of truth in a work of fiction? Only if you forget that even fiction reflects someone's truth, that of the author. The invisible presence of the title here is the author himself, hidden behind pseudonyms and layers of narrative. Walker sends part 1 of his story to an old college friend, now a famous novelist,

Masterful. A Masterpiece.

He's back. Paul Auster incorporates all of his favorite themes (language, identity, reality, translation, intersecting paths of characters, literature and a literary approach, all things French, schemes, suspense, and mystery) into a new novel like and unlike his past works. He throws you for loops that become challenging but quite satisfying for your brain to wrap around. The prose is beautiful. The flow is gorgeous. A very mature story this time (i.e., sex). I've read almost all Auster published, and I can definitely say, "He's back." The book features the character Adam Walker, a student in 1967, and the satellite of characters that surround him and the events that play out (or don't): Rudolf Born, Margot Jouffroy, Helene and Cecile Juin, friend from college James Freeman, sister Gwyn, lost (invisible) brother Andy, Cedric Williams, and others. I mention the names because if you're reading this review after you've read the book, just hearing and reading the names will conjure up memories and distinct emotions, as I'm sure Auster wants. The reverberations are powerful. True to Auster craft, he has spent a good bit of time weaving a tight thread - and then, suddenly, we find that he begins to unravel it, as we can only watch and wonder. The mind is amused and confused by these tricks! Just beautiful. What is truth? What is novelization? You leave this book asking yourself questions, wishing heartily that you could sit with other readers and/or especially the author, and ask him. For instance, the meaning, the symbolism of the hammer and chisels at the end. What could this mean? His stories within stories (common tactics for Auster) amaze and intrigue. Paul Auster, if you're reading this - can we meet over lunch sometime and talk about these things??? Just a few small things to note: I'll BET Dewey Decimal isn't the classification system used in the Butler Library at Columbia! At least not in 1967. (I'll confess - I'm a librarian, and will research this.) But - it's a novel. So creative license is allowed, and it doesn't matter what classification scheme is used there. The difficulty of containing hundreds or millions of volumes in lowly Dewey defies logic, but it was fun to read about anyway. Secondly, the book, particularly the island Quillia and the character of Rudolf Born, had a very "Heart of Darkness" feel. Rich, and delicious, and dark, and disturbing - *meant* to disturb. What a curious and interesting way to end the book - the maze winding into a place from which we just barely escape. As mentioned, I've read quite a bit of Auster and have been *so* hooked. While I loved "Brooklyn Follies" for its contemporary themes and humor, some of the other more recent Auster books ("Oracle Night," particularly) failed for me. I had trouble getting into "Night at the Scriptorium" also. After such postmodern classics as "The Book of Illusions," "In the Country of Last Things," and another favorite, "Moon Palace," I

Memoirs & Memories, The Truth & Not The Truth

Writing: Strong and Clear Plot: Easy to follow; all about relationships Suspense Factor: Strong Entertainment Value: Compelling Narration: Terrific "Invisible" is a novel about memoirs and memories. There are so many characters trying to find out the "truth" about events that after awhile you almost forget you're reading fiction. The novel unfolds so beautifully in Auster's hands that it goes down easily, like comfort food. I have to borrow a line from the New York Times review: the writing is so good there's an "illusion of effortlessness that comes only with fierce discipline." I listened to this book on audio CD and Auster is the narrator. Auster's writing here is sharp, immensely clear and seductive. His delivery on the CD? Captivating from the first sentence. His delivery is grounded, dry and sober, the voice of a keen-eyed narrator looking back over the years. One quick cautionary note: if the thought of a brother and sister falling in love and having a long-lasting physical relationship is something that would make it difficult for you to read a novel, "Invisible" may not be for you. Many of the scenes would be rated R (at least) in the movies, but they are tantalizing, not graphic. The book is neatly structured. It's divided into four parts, using three narrators and four different narrative perspectives . (Sound hard to follow? It's not.) The characters in "Invisible," ironically, are extremely well drawn. They will stay with you. You will care about all four, even the irascible and erratic Rudolf Born. If you are a guy (as am I) you will have no problem connecting with the intriguing Margot or the beguiling Cecile. If you want to read about the plot ahead of time, that should be easy to find. I'd recommend against it. Don't even read the book jacket. Suffice it to say that "Invisible" is about the parts of a human being you can't see, the emotions and yearnings that drive decisions and actions. It's about controlling others, it's about accepting others. It's about fiction and it's about people's real memories and how those memories drive personality. It's about yearning and it's about managing with what you've got. It's about telling the truth and it's about finding ways to bend the truth, to satisfy yourself and justify your actions. It's a terrific story on its own, it's also about what makes other works terrific stories. There are many references to other works of literature and poets and poems but you can read this without feeling like you're not in the inner circle of an English department at some elite liberal arts college. From New York to Paris to a small tropical island, "Invisible" is enjoyable from start to finish.

A novel in which the story and how it is told are fascinatingly inseparable

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

an instance of the fingerpost

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, esp