Paul Auster shares heartfelt and personal meditations on fatherhood that “integrates heart and intellect, sensation and speculation . . . as it relentlessly tries to make sense of the shocks of living”
Portrait of an Invisible Man
This first section of The Invention of Solitude is about the sudden death of Samuel Auster, Paul’s father, who lived a reclusive life for fifteen years after divorce in a big house in New Jersey. Without a warning sign, he died suddenly. The story is about an absent father as the (son) author felt remote, un-noticed and disconnected. The relationship was marred with pathetic indifference, neutrality and lack of bond. He writes:“One day there is life. . . . And then, suddenly, it happens that there is death.” With no choice but to deal with the sudden loss of a distant, cold man, aloof, indifferent, disengaged, an outsider devoid of emotions, a burden and pang, Paul Auster carries throughout in “The Invention of Solitude.”
The son examines memories, living with shock with a sense of desperation and frustration. The news of father’s sudden death on a Sunday morning, he ''could not muster a single ennobling thought.'' But then, ''I knew that I would have to write about my father. I had no plan, no precise idea of what this meant. ... I thought: my father is gone. If I do not act quickly, his entire life is gone. “One day there is life. . . . And then, suddenly there is death. For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural; to be satisfied no more than surface to others. Life will vanish along with him.”
Looking at the dead body of the father who hardly cared for him, Paul writes: “This is the body of X, not this is X. We are talking about two things instead of one, implying that the man continues to exist, but only as an idea, a cluster of images and memories in the minds of the other people. As for the body, it is no more than flesh and bones, a heap of pure matter.”
Embrace Solitude
''It was not that I felt he disliked me. It was just that he seemed distracted, unable to look in my direction. And more than anything else, I wanted him to take notice of me. ... I realized that even if I had done all the things I had hoped to do, his reaction would have been exactly the same. Whether I succeeded or failed did not matter to him. ... his perception of me would never change ... we were fixed in an unmovable relationship, cut off from each other on opposite sides of a wall……I realized that none of this had anything to do with me. It had only to do with him. Like everything else in his life, he saw me only through the mists of his solitude.''
The author uncovers a sixty-year-old family murder mystery that sheds light on his father’s elusive character in the second section: “The Book of Memory,” which shifts from Auster’s identity as a son to his role as a father. Digging through documents, images, coincidences, and intricate associations, the narrator, “A,” contemplates his “separation from his son, his dying grandfather, and the solitary nature of storytelling and writing.”
Father is solitary: “Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself. Or being seen by anyone else.” His father is eluding himself and the others, doesn’t want to be seen as real himself by others or even himself. He invents, fabricates, hides his skin in disguise to himself as well as with others. This façade is as real for himself as the people who knew him.
“What people saw when he appeared before them, then, was not really him, but a person he had invented, an artificial creature he could manipulate in order to manipulate others. He himself remained invisible, a puppeteer working the strings of his alter-ego from a dark, solitary place behind the curtain.”
Looking for connection, communication and a bond he writes: “Memory comes as a voice. It is a voice that speaks inside him, and it is not necessarily his own. It speaks to him in the way a voice might tell stories to a child, and yet at times this voice makes fun of him, or calls him to attention, or curses him in no uncertain terms. At times it willfully distorts the story it is telling him, changing the facts to suit its whims, catering to the interests of drama rather than truth. At other times it whispers. And then there are the times it merely hums, or babbles, or cries out in pain. And even when it says nothing, he knows it is still there, and in the silence of this voice that says nothing, he waits for it to speak.”
The Book of Memory
Narrated in the third person, in the second part of the book, Auster calls himself "A." The experimental literary techniques Auster uses is influenced by French writing of the time and passages about creators such as Carlo Collodi.
Rummaging through his father's belongings, he discovers: ''One very big album, bound in expensive leather with a gold-stamped title on the cover - This is Our Life: The Austers - was totally blank inside'' and that a photograph from his father's childhood (of his brothers, sister and mother) had the image of Auster's grandfather torn out of it. Shockingly he discovers the woman in the picture, Mr. Auster's grandmother, had shot and killed her husband in 1919 and had been acquitted. The murdered man's brother had tried and failed to kill the woman in revenge. The violence occurred when Paul's father was an infant. The impact of the shock and awe Paul goes through are not easy to put in words - devoid of bond between father and son, the remoteness, speechlessness, the revelation of mystery is grim, painful and troubling. The complexity of emotions the author is going through are challenging no doubt. ''When I first started, I thought it would come spontaneously, in a trancelike outpouring. So great was my need to write that I thought the story would be written by itself. But the words have come very slowly so far. ... No sooner have I thought of one thing than it evokes another thing, and then another thing, until there is an accumulation of detail so dense that I feel I am going to suffocate. Never before have I been so aware of the rift between thinking and writing. I have begun to feel that the story I am trying to tell is somehow incompatible with language…….he seemed to lose his concentration, to forget where he was, as if he had lost the sense of his own continuity.''
Paul’s words flow with honesty, earnestness and intelligence. His subject proved to be complex and daunting as he entered the second half of his book - ''The Book of Memory''. A third person informs the readers the angst and struggles of this decision. ''He walks back and forth between the table and the window. He turns on the radio and then turns it off. He smokes a cigarette. Then he writes. ''It was. It will never be again.'' He struggles!
Moving, delicately narrated portraits of lives and relationships commentaries on Collodi and Pinocchio, in particular, on Jonah and Vermeer are effective and skillfully crafted. Having found both his father and his grandfather to be invisible in the first section, the account of his maternal grandfather's life and death in the second part is a clear and evocation of a caring, touching, likable man who is deeply committed to his young son.
He powerfully evokes his search for continuity of life in an aging process as he is looking at one of the paintings' Madelaine a 18 mois (18 months)’. “For a moment without being aware of it, Madelaine (real person now an old lady, stood in front of it, which had been painted nearly 80 years before, and A saw, as through leaping incredibly across time, that the child’s face on the painting and old woman’s face before him were exactly the same. For that one instant, he felt cut through the illusion of human time and had experienced for what it was: as no more the blink of the eyes. He had seen an entire life standing before him, and it had collapsed into that one instant.’
Auster was wandering inside himself and he was lost. “Far from troubling him, this state of being lost became a source of happiness, of exhilaration.” Internal struggles filled with a sense of vacuum, pain, joy and a relief, an emotional cocktail the reader goes through with the turbulent flow of words!
Invention of Solitude:“Integrates heart and intellect, sensation and speculation . . . as it relentlessly tries to make sense of the shocks of living.”—Newsday
“Moving, portraits of lives and relationships.”—The New York Times
“Eloquent . . . Paul Auster’s memoir combines the subjects of time, language, and family into a moving and intelligent mosaic.”—Charles Baxter
