The Invention Of Solitude (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
I don't think I would have finished this had I not read Auster's 'Winter Journal', his second 'memoir', written 30 years after 'The Invention of Solitude'. 'The Invention of Solitude' is divided into two sections, "Portrait of an Invisible Man' and 'The Book of Memory'. The first one deals with the death of Auster's father, and is more or less a collection of memories, family stories, incidents, descriptions of the house he lived in and how it was found after his death; essentially, Auster is trying to make sense of his relationship with his father, weaving everything he knew about him together in an attempt to find meaning and to fully grasp his father's being, before letting go. The second part grows more abstract, initially starting with Auster turning to his own relationship with his son, after having dealt with the one he shared with his father, but eventually wandering off into musings about life in general, the nature of coincidences and chance and the death of his grandfather. The second part becomes progressively abstract, with the final 60 pages being constantly interspersed with literary extracts and quotes, brought parallel to Auster's daily thoughts.I found the first section moving, not only because I recognised Auster's voice from Winter Journal and could see how age has changed his perception of the world, but also because of the topic, and I was moved to tears by the end of it. To a certain extent I'd say this was rather depressing, but told with a slightly detached tone that looks into the beauty of life every day and shows an implicit understanding of the fact that despite all the bleakness, this is not a general outlook but rather a lens through which the past can be seen, if we let ourselves indulge in it.example quote- "I remember a day very like today. A drizzling Sunday, lethargy and quiet in the house: the world at half-speed."The second section tired me. The more it wandered off into extracts of Pinocchio, The Thousand and One Nights, Freud, Pascal and Proust (and many others, leading to an entire page of references at the end), the more abstruse it became for me. Also, the disjointed, fragmentary manner in which the thoughts of A, a third person narrator representing Auster, flow, didn't work for me, and neither did the third person narrator (hence the shift to a second-person narrator in 'Winter Journal', I believe). I think this would have worked much better in fiction, to reflect a perplexed character's psyche, but in this case it perplexed me, the reader, instead, along with Auster. Reading the second section felt like wading through very thick mud. Hopeless, and never ending, and nothing like the beautiful meditation on life that is his second memoir.example quote- "He means to say what he wants. He wants to say what he means. He says what he wants to mean. He means what he says."'The Book of Memory' was a disappointment. 'Portrait of an Invisible Man' was much closer to making sense, but again, this book as a whole felt much more fogged and uncertain than Winter Journal. Is that a wisdom, a clarity of thought that came with age? I don't really know. What I do know is that where 'The Invention of Solitude' stumbles and fumbles and goes around in endless, confusing, dizzying cycles of loose structure, 'Winter Journal' gravitates towards a very stable axis, that of time, and that makes it the gem that 'The Invention of Solitude' failed to become.
At first, "The Invention of Solitude" had me thinking, “oh god…this is the ultimate ‘My (Famous) Upper-Middle/Ruling Class Parent/s Was Cold/Uber-Religious/Absent/Drunk Which Is Why I Chose to Live off My Inheritance in [Insert European City Name Here] While I Write this Amazing Memoir’ memoir.” Luckily, that (ahem) banal plot quickly morphs into a critical ancillary function supporting the memoir’s exploration of memory and its effect on knowing, story-telling and understanding."The Invention" treats memory as a constituent of our realties: landscapes, homes, cities, architecture, people, lives, culture, etc. For Auster, they are all partially a product of memory while they mirror the process of remembering: “It occurred to him that perhaps he was wandering in the circles of hell, that the city had been designed as a model of the underworld, based on some classical representation of the place. Then he remembered that various diagrams of hell had been used as memory systems by some of the sixteenth century writers on the subject” (84). Memory manifests itself everywhere, significantly.This memoir attempts to examine the multiple dimensions of these entities while also exposing the processes and connections that occur in an act of recollection. In the attempt to do so, "The Invention" exhibits an almost stream-of-consciousness urgency in which the author, or narrator, tries to capture and document every connection and influence that seems relevant to an understanding. Therefore, the purposeful and recurring intertextuality in "The Invention" serves as a sustained/repetitious reminder of the deluge of coercion the human subconscious undergoes constantly. “It is not that it begins with the story. Rather, in the act of remembering it, he has become aware that something is happening to him. For the story would not have occurred to him unless whatever summoned its memory had not already been making itself felt. Unknown to himself, he had been burrowing down to a place of almost vanished memory, and now that something had surfaced, he could not even guess how long the excavation had taken” (77-78). In the narrator’s “long moment of inwardness,” his desperation to find and document all his triggers to recollection, he isolates himself. Subsequently, many parallels emerge with the story of his solitary father and grandfather, blurring the lines of memory and raising further questions about cultural and "familial" memory.As a way of exploring the nature of recollection, the memoir interrogates the possession of truth: “The funeral director kept telling me how he had known my father “in the old days,” implying an intimacy and friendship I was sure had never existed. As I gave him the information to be passed on to the newspapers for the obituary, he anticipated my remarks with incorrect facts, rushing ahead of me in order to prove how well acquainted he had been with my father. Each time this happened, I stopped and corrected him” (66). At first, the narrator refuses to accept his father as a multi-faceted individual. He acts as sole proprietor of truth. If anything, I think "The Invention of Solitude" is successful in proving that there is no such thing.Ultimately, this is a coming-of-age story and a dealing-with-loss story (in the true memoir sense), but it incorporates a meaningful exploration of what it means to live with and among memories.
What do You think about The Invention Of Solitude (2007)?
This is a memoir told in two parts--the first half dealing with Auster trying to come to terms with his father's death and seemingly nonexistent existence, and the second half dealing with Auster's experiences as father himself. I loved the first half and would give it 5 stars. Auster's account of trying to find an identity for his father might be the best of the author's writing that I've read. The second half, though, had no connection for me, felt too experimental and nonlinear, and detracted from the overall book.
—Chris Dietzel
نحوه ی خرید اختراع انزوا این طوری بود: عید امسال با میلاد رفته بودیم شهر کتاب ونک، آن جا بین کتاب ها پرسه می زدیم که این کتاب را دید میلاد و گفت کتاب خوبی است و بعد نگاه کردیم به "نقد" کتاب و دیدیم نقد خوبی دارد: 4800 تومان. این شد که یکی یک دانه از کتاب خریدیم!کتاب دو بخش دارد: پرتره ی مردی نامرئی و کتاب خاطره. بخش اول منسجم تر و راحت خوان تر است. از خواندن آن لذت بردم.بخش دوم، پیچیده و در هم برهم است. البته حرف های خیلی خوبی در آن هست، آدم را به فکر فرو می برد، باعث نگاه نو به خیلی چیزها می شود... اما در نهایت این پراکندگی آن است که بر همه ی این ها غلبه می کند. انگار استر حرف های زیادی برای زدن داشته اما طرز مرتب بیان کردنشان را نمی دانسته وبه ناچار در قالبی پیچیده و شلخته آورده آن حرف ها را. این جوری سخت است اعتراض کردن به او! زیرا نمی شود حرف ها و اندیشه های زیبا و خارق العاده ی او را در کتاب خاطره نادیده گرفت. اما باید به یاد داشت که نادیده گرفتن شلختگی این بخش هم، به نوعی تسلیم "پز روشنفکری" استر شدن است. ترجمه ی کتاب هم خوب انجام گرفته بود.
—Amir Mojiry
The first section of Paul Auster’s 'The Invention of Solitude' is a moving meditation on fatherhood. 'Portrait of an Invisible Man' gives expression to Auster’s feelings following the death of his father. Auster’s memories of his father are fragmentary. Auster writes to save his elusive father’s life from vanishing with him. The account is a brief scrap-book like collection of miniature essays, incomplete thoughts and even lists of unconnected memories. There is a strong emphasis throughout both parts of the book on coincidence. There are dramatic coincidences, such as a family album that is totally blank inside (Auster’s father also appears to be somewhat empty on the inside) and incredible coincidences such as the odometer of his father’s car reading 67, the age at which his father died. Auster makes interesting observations about death.He remarks that following death we say ‘this is the body of X, as if this body which had once been the man himself, not something that represented him or belonged to him, but the very man called X, were suddenly of no importance. When a man walks into a room and you shake hands with him, you do not feel that you are shaking hands with his hand, or shaking hands with his body, you are shaking hands with him.’ The book is motivated by Auster's fear that, ‘If I do not act quickly, his [Auster's father's:] entire life will vanish along with him.’ The result is a moving collage of the life of a largely absent father.
—Carys
