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Summary
Summary
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 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.
Author Notes
Paul Auster was born on February 3, 1947, in Newark, New Jersey. He received a B.A. and a M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. In addition to his career as a writer, Auster has been a census taker, tutor, merchant seaman, little-league baseball coach, and a telephone operator. He started his writing career as a translator. He soon gained popularity for the detective novels that make up his New York Trilogy. His other works include The Invention of Solitude; Leviathan; Moon Palace; Facing the Music; In the Country of Last Things; The Music of Chance; Mr. Vertigo; and The Brooklyn Follies. His latest novels are entitled, Invisible and Sunset Park. In addition to his novels, Auster has written screenplays and directed several films. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a French Prix Medicis for Foreign Literature.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In his latest, Auster is in classic form, perhaps too perfectly satisfying the contention of his wearied protagonist: "there is far more poetry in the world than justice." Adam Walker, a poetry student at Columbia in the spring of 1967, is Auster's latest everyman, revealed in four parts through the diary entries of a onetime admirer, the confessions of his once-close friend, the denials of his sister and Walker's own self-made frame. With crisp, taut prose, Auster pushes the tension and his characters' peculiar self-awareness to their limits, giving Walker a fractured, knowing quality that doesn't always hold. The best moments from Walker's disparate, disturbing coming-of-age come in lush passages detailing Walker's conflicted, incestuous love life (paramount to his "education as a human being," but a violation of his self-made promise to live "as an ethical human being"). As the plot moves toward a Heart of Darkness-style journey into madness, the limits of Auster's formalism become more apparent, but this study of a young poet doomed to life as a manifestation of poetry carries startling weight. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
Paul Auster has created what amounts to his own, self-referential fictional world over the years, and Invisible is packed with typical Auster tropes. This is his 13th novel, and at times he seems to be both celebrating and lightly mocking his own oeuvre. There is the oddly detached male narrator roaming New York; a random dramatic incident that alters the course of a life; ruminations on the nature of writing, language and identity; multiple narrators; stories within stories; and general intertextual gadding about. And, as ever, fragments of Auster himself seem to feature - in this case, divided into two characters. Invisible concerns the young Adam Walker, "a tormented Adonis", a notably gorgeous and intellectually gifted Jewish American born in the same year as Paul Auster, who studies at the same university. Or does it? And is he? And does he? As so often with such playful meta-fiction, we are increasingly uncertain. As is later revealed, there are different takes on the past, as well as projections of desire that warp or reveal, and Invisible is not so much a tale told by an unreliable narrator as a series of harmonising and clashing testimonies. However, this makes the novel sound more arcane than it is. It is so well paced that it rocket-charges the reader through all its games and structural devices, and is a tantalising page-turner of great - if deceptive - lucidity. If we follow the initial and most persuasive version of the story, we are in Manhattan in 1967, where Adam Walker, Columbia undergraduate and aspiring poet, meets visiting professor Rudolf Born and his girlfriend Margot. The subject of Vietnam is ever present, and Born is a man of contradictory and frequently explosive political opinions. Born flatters Adam by proposing that he finance a literary magazine to be edited by the gifted student, and so begins an alliance that sees Adam engage in an affair with Margot and witness the increasingly unstable Born murder a young man who threatens him. The book segues within moments from dinner party chatter to calculated slaughter. This is the incident on which the novel turns, and which skews Adam's life, its legacy of guilt and fury determining the direction he will take. Born, "a burnt-out soul, a shattered wreck of a person", evades arrest by decamping to Paris. Shortly thereafter, Adam follows, clearly subconsciously impelled to seek retribution, and soon he's back in Margot's bed and on Born's radar. Born, with his "blur of sophistication and depravity", is such an extravagantly creepy character, given to brilliance, manipulation and rage, that both his presence and absence cast a shadow over the entire novel. Adam's plot to exact revenge on him is so ill devised that it fails to be entirely convincing. The story is unexpectedly taken up in 2007 by an acquaintance of Adam's at Columbia, who is now a famous author. Enter Paul Auster Mark II (possibly). Decades are covered in a sketch: the happily married Adam Walker has never achieved literary success, working instead in legal aid as a result of his role in Born's escape from justice, and he is now writing his memoir as fast as he can before he dies. In the chapters and notes he sends to the author, he writes about the death of his brother in childhood, and his own consensual sexual relationship with his sister, an episode that is later reinterpreted by the sister herself. With the satanic Born still at large, a desperate need to know - that primitive but vital fictional engine - sends the reader scurrying to a conclusion that is more satisfying in terms of its ideas than its emotional resolution. By this time, the voices of the two possible Paul Austers have merged into one, the tale returning to the first person via the second and third, the momentum of menace increasingly powerful. Some of our assumptions come clattering down around us in a strangely satisfying way and, in exposing the mechanics of his storytelling, Auster paradoxically achieves an intensely felt authenticity. This is a fascinating and highly accomplished novel. Joanna Briscoe's novel Sleep with Me is published by Bloomsbury. To order Invisible for pounds 15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-auster.1 The book segues within moments from dinner party chatter to calculated slaughter. This is the incident on which the novel turns, and which skews [Adam Walker]'s life, its legacy of guilt and fury determining the direction he will take. [Rudolf Born], "a burnt-out soul, a shattered wreck of a person", evades arrest by decamping to Paris. Shortly thereafter, Adam follows, clearly subconsciously impelled to seek retribution, and soon he's back in Margot's bed and on Born's radar. Born, with his "blur of sophistication and depravity", is such an extravagantly creepy character, given to brilliance, manipulation and rage, that both his presence and absence cast a shadow over the entire novel. Adam's plot to exact revenge on him is so ill devised that it fails to be entirely convincing. - Joanna Briscoe.
Kirkus Review
Many readers familiar with the work of Paul Auster consider him to be one of the most profound and provocative of contemporary novelists, a literary magician, a master of making fiction about the artor the sleight-of-hand illusionof making fiction. Auster attracted a loyal following in the mid-1980s for what was subsequently known as his New York Trilogyan elliptical trio of genre subversions and meditations on identitybut his reviews have been mixed in the two decades since the subsequent Moon Palace and The Music of Chance. Now comes Invisible, a novel of such virtuosity and depth that it should not only unite the faithful in a hallelujah chorus, it deserves to draw legions of converts as well. More than a return to form, this might be Auster's best novel yet, combining his postmodern inquiries into the nature of fiction and the essence of identitythe interplay between life and artwith a thematic timelessness in its narrative of virtue and evil, guilt and redemption. If this isn't quite Auster's Crime and Punishment, it could be his Notes from the Underground. It's also a novel he couldn't have written a couple of decades ago, during what was previously considered his peak. Though it concerns a 20-year-old, literary-minded student at Columbia University in 1967when the literary-minded Auster was the same age at the same universityits narrative reflects the autumnal perspective of four decades later, with a protagonist whose life has taken different turns than Auster's. In fact, there are three distinct narrative voices, as sections employ the first-person "I," the second-person "you" and the third person "he" in relating the story of how the student's encounter with a visiting professor from Paris and his silent, seductive girlfriend changes the lives of all three and others as well. The labyrinth of plot and narrative also includes the student's beautiful sister, a mother and daughter in France through whom he seeks atonement and a fellow Columbia alum who has become, like Auster, a successful writer. There are sins, obsessions, a corpse and a thin line between fantasy and memory. To reveal more would rob the reader of the discoveries inherent within this novel's multilayered richness. Auster writes of "the obsessive story that has wormed its way into your soul and become an integral part of your being." This is that story. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Trapped and cornered like a rat in a maze. So it is for Auster's brooding loners. In this edgy bildungsroman, this tightly focused tale of treachery, Adam Walker, an introspective young man, a poet no less, and a student attending Columbia University in 1967, meets his nemesis at a party. Rudolph Born, a professor in the School of International Affairs, is commanding, volatile, and dangerous. Adam knows he shouldn't trust him, yet he cannot resist Born's astonishing offer to bankroll a literary magazine and put Adam in charge, nor can he spurn the advances of Born's sexy lover. Witness to Born's capacity for violence, Adam first seeks justice, and then settles for revenge, but he is in over his head and harboring his own toxic secret. In this erotic, archly philosophical thriller, Auster, seductive and masterly, pilots readers from New York to Paris to California to a fortresslike island in the Caribbean, as he slyly contrasts the subtle pleasures of the mind with the wildness of the body, and delves into the repercussions of guilt, the unfathomable power of desire, and the insidious consequences of narcissism and debauchery. With fascinating characters, a spiraling structure, and a Heart of Darkness-like conclusion, this is a sublimely suspenseful, insightful, and disquieting novel.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AS soon as you finish Paul Auster's "Invisible" you want to read it again. And not because, as sometimes with his novels - as with the novels of Georges Perec, one of a handful of other real authors mentioned in the book - you suddenly suspect, at the very end, that you haven't properly understood a word of what has gone before. You want to reread "Invisible" because it moves quickly, easily, somehow sinuously, and you worry that there were good parts that you read right past, insights that you missed. 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. I was not a fan of Auster's last few books. "Invisible" is his 15th novel, and I was afraid that this would be, as I felt with his recent work, another instance of Auster playing Auster - a kind of arch exercise in the clever but cloying metaphysics of textual irony, a cat-and-mouse toying with the fiction and the reader reminiscent of German Romanticism and falling victim to what both Hegel and Kierkegaard called "infinite absolute negativity" (this attack on the German Romantics was one of the few times those two were ever in agreement). One leaves the text and feels that one has been left with nothing. The irony vacuums out the content and, with it, our interest. Like the ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a dragon swallowing its own tail, the book consumes itself, and disappears. But "Invisible" - however the title might threaten the contrary - suggests a new Auster. It's a love story, or a series of intertwined love stories, with one young man, Adam Walker, at the center of them all. It's 1967, and we learn on the first page that Adam is "a second-year student at Columbia," a "know-nothing boy with an appetite for books and a belief (or delusion) that one day I would become good enough to call myself a poet." So we know we are dealing with a bildungsroman, and as I read the novel I was frequently reminded of the greatest Romantic novel of education about love, Goethe's "Sorrows of Young Werther" (and relieved that "Invisible" does not end with a suicide). We follow Adam, through the eyes of various narrators, from his youth to reminiscences about him late in his life. 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 Cécile, 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. That, I suspect, is one of Auster's reasons for his well-known textual legerdemain - not only to make the aesthetic point that one shouldn't expect to learn about life and the world from novels, in some sort of practical or moral way (as we suspect his naïve young hero, the failed poet Adam, might have hoped to do); but also, like an ancient skeptic, to have a therapeutic effect on his reader, to bring you to the point of epoché, when your ordinary dogmatic opinions about the external world and literature's relationship with it are suddenly suspended. For the 20th-century phenomenologist Edmund Husserl - one always hears the voices of philosophers in Auster's novels, though he keeps them hidden - epoché was the state we had to reach before we could truly examine anything, before we could appreciate and understand our experience. Otherwise you see, as we all too often read, with the eyes of habit. 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. For years now there have been two Austers waiting to embrace: the psychologist/storyteller of novels like "Leviathan," and the metatextual trickster of "The New York Trilogy." Freud once claimed that our greatest frustration was that we could never kiss ourselves - well, Auster has knotted the pretzel, he has brought his two loves together (it is, after all, a novel about incest). So if, like me, part of why you read is the great pleasure of falling in love with a novel, then read "Invisible." It is the finest novel Paul Auster has ever written. Auster wants to pull the rug of realism out from beneath your feet so he can bring you a little closer to reality. Clancy Martin's first novel is "How to Sell."
Library Journal Review
Auster himself narrates his 15th novel-following Man in the Dark (2008), also available from Macmillan Audio and BBC Audiobooks America-which deals with incestuous love, the magnetic power of intelligent evil, injustice, and self-discovery. His use of intertextuality and his crisp, simple prose will keep listeners fully engaged from beginning to end. However, his temperate and fluid narration makes it at times difficult to distinguish among the many characters, especially during dialog. For all appreciators of contemporary literature. ["If you've never read Auster, this is a great place to start," read the review of the Holt hc, LJ 10/1/09; fans, too, "will not be disappointed."-Ed.]--Isela Pena-Rager, San Dimas, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
