Invisible

I have to admit that I haven’t read a lot of Paul Auster, besides The New York Trilogy almost a decade ago and Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story. Although I have several of his books on my To Be Read pile, I just never get round to it because newer fiction always gets in the way. Now as luck would have it, one of my latest additions just happened to be his new novel Invisible which I started and finished almost immediately.

Invisible is Adam Walker’s fragmentary memoir which is divided in 4 parts and each is told by a different narrator.

In the first part, Adam Walker, an American poet tells us about an encounter that changed the course of his life. In 1967 during his second year at Columbia University, he meets Rudolf Born, a Swiss visiting professor at the university’s School of International Affairs, and his intense French companion Margot at a party. Adam and Rudolf join forces and start a literary magazine during which Adam becomes enthralled by Margot but this frivolous threesome is soon broken up by a random act of violence perpetrated by Born and witnessed by Walker.

38 years later, Adam is dying and asks his old university friend Jim to write his memoir which will be sent to him in installments that contain more sordid details of Adam’s youth and a disastrous stay in Paris where he encountered the man that turned his life upside down and once again he got caught up in a tangled web full of deceit, passion and murder.

I loved Invisible and it was as the cover predicted, a real page-turner. Auster’s prose is elegant and filled with self-referential innuendo’s that intrigue and intoxicate. The male characters ranging from tortured hero to evil genius are spectacular but sadly, the women are purely ornamental and pawns to be played out against each other.

The story is simple, shocking and keeps you in a tight strangle hold until the very last page. Yet despite my initial awe, I have to admit that the more I think about it, the less sense it makes. Auster is on a quest for the truth but with so many conflicting characters, there are no definitive answers which makes Invisible an electrifying enigma to unravel.

An oddly detached male narrator roaming New York, language and identity, a random dramatic incident, multiple narrators, ruminations on the nature of writing and several stories within stories make this a quintessential Auster novel and a joy to read.