The Invention of Solitude

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.

The first half of this slender book, "Portrait of an Invisible Man", is Auster's memoir of his cold golem of a father on the occasion of his death. Auster writes in chillingly clear prose about a loved and hated parent in a way that reminded me of Milan Kundera's cooly anguished meditations on history and family. Plus, Auster finds what so many of us don't--a possible explanation for his tortured past. He discovers the old, half-buried tale of how his grandmother murdered his grandfather. There are a couple of haunting photographs in the book: the one on the cover is Auster's young father, multiplied by trick photography. The other is an old picture of the grandparent's family that contains a secret not unlike that of the photo at the end of Roman Polanski's film "Repulsion." I have not been a fan of Auster's fiction--I find it mechanical--but this fine work has me wanting to read his other essays and memoirs.

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.

Is there any sub-genre of confessional or autobiographical writing more troubling and problematic for both reader and writer alike than the story of the life and death of the writer's parent? What are we poor readers to make of these tales of grief and guilt and painful confessions and embarrassing revelations in light of the fact that they were actually published, for all the world to see and to make money just like the writers' other works? And what is the poor writer to do, unable to deal with the event or make sense of it except through writing, but bring the powers and tricks of the novelist or poet to bear on this tale the same as any other that was simply imagined or invented?
"Portrait of an Invisible Man," the first piece of "The Invention of Solitude," is Auster's literary attempt to come to terms with his father's death through writing about his father's life. In doing so, he discovers how little he knows not only about his father's childhood and early married years, but about his father's mental life as well. Along the way Auster stumbles on the story of a family tragedy so full of coincidences that it begins to resemble his fiction.
The writing is never anything but splendid here. But is it seemly that we enjoy it as much as other writing by the same author that is clearly labeled fiction? I have no answer to that.
Auster's "Invisible Man," written in 1979, has its literary antecedent in Peter Handke's "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams," written in 1972 and translated into English in 1974. Handke's story of his mother's life, written immediately after her suicide, is, like Auster's piece, full of extraordinary writing, and equally devastating. The length and techniques of both works are similar, down to the ever-shorter sections toward the end and the numerous comments on the writing itself. Handke's book ends with the following: "Someday I shall write about all this in greater detail." On one of the last pages of Auster's piece we find this: "It occurs to me that I began writing this story a long time ago, long before my father died." Handke and Auster are writers; writing is what they do.
One tip: To preserve the mental taste of Auster's "Invisible Man," the reader should pause for a decent interval before taking on "The Book of Memory," the second piece in Auster's book (or skip it altogether). "The Book of Memory" is a more difficult work and quite possibly a bit more than many readers will want to tackle so soon after finishing "Invisible Man."

"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.