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Paul Auster

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Invisible (Rough Cut) Hardcover – Deckle Edge, October 27, 2009

by Paul Auster (Author)

4.1 498 ratings

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“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 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. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us into the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, between authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.”

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Henry Holt and Co.
Publication date

October 27, 2009
Dimensions

5.81 x 1.15 x 8.43 inches
ISBN-10

0805090800
ISBN-13

978-0805090802
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Editorial Reviews

From Bookmarks Magazine

Invisible contains many of the hallmarks of Auster's trade: formal literary devices and stylistic high jinks, psychological depth, elegant prose, and the manipulation of information, voices, and stories. Told against the background of 40 years of history, with shame and colonial guilt ever present, Invisible feels "warmer and more human than the stuff he's famous for" (San Francisco Chronicle) as well as less contrived and more hopeful. Indeed, notes the New York Times Book Review, it's "a love story, or a series of intertwined love stories," with Walker at the core. A few critics thought that Auster's technique overwhelms the story, and one thought the characters uninteresting. But most agreed that Invisible is Auster's finest—and perhaps most accessible—novel to date.

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Sunset Park, Man in the Dark, Travels in the Scriptorium, The Brooklyn Follies, and Oracle Night. I Thought My Father Was God, the NPR National Story Project anthology, which he edited, was also a national bestseller. In 2006, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Literature. His work has been translated into thirty-five languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by by Jeff Turrentine Paul Auster is best known as a writer of lean, genre-tinged novels whose unaffected prose belies their philosophical complexity. But he's also one of our most playful novelists, a lover of narrative labyrinths on par with Borges, to whom he has often been compared. For some, Auster's penchant for romantic irony is a distracting tic; for others, it's why they enjoy reading him in the first place. His latest novel, "Invisible," finds him returning to the same thematic territory he has long occupied -- the four-way intersection of memory, language, fate and self-discovery -- with that playfulness very much intact. His subject here is the memoirist's subjective truth, and his object is to get us thinking about the ways in which it is constructed, edited and processed into what we think of as objective reality. In the first of the novel's four sections we meet Adam Walker, an undergraduate at Columbia University with writerly aspirations who likes to translate French verse in his free time. Already we think we can hear the hum of the metafictional machinery starting up: Walker reminds us not only of Marco Fogg, the hero of Auster's 1989 novel "Moon Palace" (same university, same proclivities) but also of Auster himself, who attended Columbia during the late 1960s and translated French poetry as he dreamed of becoming a writer. If we also happen to know that Auster has written novels in which characters from his previous books make appearances ("Travels in the Scriptorium"), as well as novels in which he interpolates himself into the plot ("City of Glass"), then we suspect we may be headed once again into the hall of mirrors. Are we? Of course we are. As we learn of Adam's relationship with Rudolf Born, a supercilious Columbia professor, and Margot, Born's lover, everything reinforces our belief that we are reading a tale narrated in the first person by Adam, about events that have taken place in his past. In fact, as we learn in the next section, we have actually been reading a fragment of Adam's unpublished memoir -- a fragment that is being shared with us by a successful novelist named James Freeman, who knew Adam when they attended Columbia together 40 years ago. Adam, now sick and dying, has asked his old friend to look at the chapter and share his opinion. When Freeman writes back encouragingly, Adam admits to him that he's having trouble continuing. Freeman responds by suggesting that Adam try writing the next section in a different narrative voice -- the bifurcation of voices being a trick that had liberated Freeman from his own writer's block when composing his own memoir years earlier. Do I even need to mention that Auster's first book was a memoir ("The Invention of Solitude") divided into two parts, with the first part employing the first-person voice and the second part employing the third-person voice? By this point in "Invisible," we have traveled so deep into the hall of mirrors that we may be feeling dizzy. "If I hadn't been told it was a true story, I probably would have plunged in and taken those sixty-plus pages for the beginning of a novel," Freeman tells us, before adding parenthetically that "writers do, after all, sometimes inject characters who bear their own names into works of fiction." (Auster must have taken the rest of the day off after typing those words, and he deserved to.) Later in the novel, Freeman becomes the editorial custodian of his old friend's uncompleted memoir. Auster's final bit of mischief is to make Freeman himself unsure as to what he's holding in his hands. Was Adam telling the truth about Rudolf Born? Was he making things up, projecting his own skittering subjective truth onto the stone tablet of objective reality? Freeman's only choice, he decides after consulting with Adam's sister and the other women in his life, is to publish the memoir under his own name, as a hybrid of fiction and memoir. (And his own name, it will come as no surprise, is not really James Freeman.) "I sometimes confuse my thoughts about the world with the world itself," says one character at the end of "Invisible." "I'm sorry if I offended you." Some undoubtedly will be offended; you either enjoy the dizzy feeling you get from being lost in the funhouse, or you feel queasy and head for the exit. One hopes that, in this case, readers will stay for the duration. The pleasures found inside are well worth the labor required to uncover them. For good measure, Auster ends his novel with an image that seems borrowed from his 1990 novel "The Music of Chance": people hard at work chiseling large stones into smaller ones -- laboring, like readers, like writers, to reduce unwieldy, monolithic life into memories and stories that can be passed around and shared. bookworld@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition (October 27, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0805090800
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0805090802
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.81 x 1.15 x 8.43 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #691,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #7,285 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #20,307 in Memoirs (Books)
- #32,972 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.1 498 ratings

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Paul Auster

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Paul Auster is the best-selling author of Man in the Dark, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions, The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other honours are the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix Medicis Etranger for Leviathan. He has also been short-listed for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions) and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (The Music of Chance). His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Dean Monti

one of Auster's best. Really.

Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2009

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Invisible is definitely Auster at the peak of creative storytelling powers.

My first and favorite remains Music of Chance, but I also liked the amazing story-within-a-story, narration-within-narration (and accomplished so seamlessly, I might add) of Oracle Night and Book of Illusions. I admit, I thought perhaps that 'device' (if that's even the right word here) might be played out. Or that Auster might re-visit old themes. But not so. This is all new terrain and I can't think of another Auster novel that raises so many possibilities for interpretation and yet doesn't leave you with the feeling you've been left hanging out to dry (unless you're a person who needs big neon answers and tidy happy endings. I'm not).

For the first time, I bought the audio version before the print version. I think Auster's only "weakness" is dialogue. Not monologue, which he has perfected and practically reinvented, but simple interactive dialogue; which sometimes comes off sounding trite or unnatural, maybe in the context of such strong narrative. Whatever the case, it works better (for me) when I hear him narrate it.

I also avoided reading any reviews -- and as little as possible about the plot -- before jumping in, and I suggest others new to this book do likewise. This book has the power to jolt you, if you come to it without knowing the plot turns. And it can jolt both in the story and in the telling, so I'm not sure it's for the uninitiated. But... who knows.

After completing it, I was anxious to read what others had said, and I think the four and five star reviews are right on the mark. And I appreciate the fact that very few have attempted to ... um... explain what this book is all about. Good luck.

This book also reminds me of what I remember Robert McKee saying about writing: don't complicate when you can use complexity. Assuming you're paying attention, Auster's narratives are *not* hard to follow; he does an outstanding job moving the story forward so that you are not lost and confused about the action at hand. But complex ... oh my gosh, yes.

Auster fans tend to make camps around certain books that they feel represent the true (or best) Auster. But I can't imagine any Auster fan -- no matter which Paul Auster you like -- who would be disappointed by this one.

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reader 451

Now you see it, now you...

Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2009

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I have to admit that one reason I enjoyed Invisible so much was that I found in it echoes of John Fowles's The Magus. If Auster has room for references to obscure twelfth-century provençal poets, it seems inconceivable he wasn't aware of Fowles's bestseller when he penned his latest novel. But perhaps this is mere fantasy on my part - Invisible's ending suggests so, taking a tangent from the book's earlier drift, and to me a little disappointing - perhaps this is simply a case of an unsurprising consonance in themes. Indeed, while in Fowles it is only the protagonist who gets lost in a labyrinth of carefully crafted illusions, Auster's book is multi-layered. The novel moves back and forth between first and second narrator, between third-party voice and subject, forcing the reader to confront the ambivalent roles of narrative as substitute for experience, of memory for self-perception, and of fiction for an elusive reality. In this sense, indeed, it is closest to Auster's own New York Trilogy. It is more or less constructed along three parts, told in the first, then second, and third person, and its vision of writing as a contradictory exercise is a metaphor (I suppose) for the clashes inherent in our own self-constructed identities.

Invisible has Adam Walker, a young literature student and poet, drawn into the warped orbit of Rudolf Born, ostensibly just a Columbia university visiting professor, and his licentious girlfriend Margot, also French. At some stage, the story veers into Walker's own complex family inheritance, with explicit scenes I won't betray here to avoid spoilers. But it resumes with revelations of Born's long-foreshadowed violent nature, and a confrontation in which everyone seems to fit increasingly less into what he or she at first appeared to be. Adam Walker is Nicholas Urfe and Born is Conchis (Fowles again, sorry). But then a meta-narrator arises, Auster himself under another, assumed identity. And `invisible', it is explained, is for the unseen first person, the voice forever barred from turning upon itself, forever incapable of true perspective. Yes, this is all true-to-form Paul Auster, but it is one of his most engaging novels in a long while.

5 people found this helpful

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John Bridges

Interesting But Not Much More

Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2010

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An interesting novel written in an interesting style. But for me, that's about it. I somewhat liked finding out about the characters in the novel and the journeys their lives took over 40 years, but I wasn't particularly drawn to nor interested in any of them. The main villain, Rudolf Born, was the least interesting character - a two dimesional guy with few surprises. The novel reads very quickly and is not very demanding on the reader's ability to pay attention and/or figure things out. I'm not sure what the point actually is of the novel other than the joy and work that went into changing the voices/perspectives of the narrator. It reminded me of a young writer attempting to mimic the intricacies of a classic novel like Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury."

2 people found this helpful

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John Mathai

A distinct narrative style.

Reviewed in India on December 29, 2023

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An absorbing read. It's not so much the plot as the style of storytelling. Puts you in the thinking zone. The book could have been a thriller or a tragedy. The character building is, again, not so elaborate. However, it's the positioning of the traits and the weaving of it in the narration that leaves an imprint on the mind of the reader.

Terens S.

Non arrivato nell'edizione prevista

Reviewed in Italy on October 30, 2023

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Il libro mi è stato consegnato in un edizione anteriore a quella dell'immagine descrittiva.

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Janie

Invisible lo que somos

Reviewed in Mexico on October 2, 2020

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Excelente libro !
Lo recomiendo

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Cliente Amazon

Excelente!

Reviewed in Spain on January 16, 2020

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Esta novela me enganchó tanto que cuando me quise dar cuenta ya la había terminado. Como dice alguien en una critica, ni bien llegas al final de la historia ya quieres volver a leerlo!

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Soxley

Brilliant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 11, 2019

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Simply put an amazing novel...please read it!

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