Very meta-fictional in approach, reflective about the nature of the process of memory and language. He lays out a piece of blank paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. The sky is blue and black and gray and yellow. The sky is not there, and it is red. All this was yesterday. All this was a hundred years ago. The sky is white. It smells of the earth, and it is not there. The sky is white like the earth, and it smells of yesterday.
All this was tomorrow. All this was a hundred years from now. The sky is lemon and rose and lavender. The sky is the earth. The sky is whi He lays out a piece of blank paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. The sky is white, and it is not there. He wakes up. He walks back and forth between the table and the window.
He sits down. He stands up. He walks back and forth between the bed and the chair. He lies down. He stares at the ceiling. He closes his eyes. He opens his eyes. He finds a fresh sheet of paper. He lays it out on the table before him and writes these words with his pen.
It was. It will never be again. 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 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.
The second half, though, had no connection for me, felt too experimental and nonlinear, and detracted from the overall book. Second time teaching this text for a nonfiction lit class, third time reading it. This time around gave me a different reading than the previous two which to me makes it a book that keeps on giving. Themes of loss and grief, the act of creation through memory and self-examination are intertwined with stories from his own life, people he's known and artists whose works or thoughts resonate as well as from texts as far ranging as Pinocchio and The Arabian Nights to Pascal snd St Augustine.
It explores numerous issues related to memory, fatherhood, solitude, the limits and power of language, and rooms, so many rooms, rooms of safety and rooms of suffering, rooms in paintings and rooms in Paris.
One of his best lines is when he draws attention to the fact that the whole Book of Memory takes place on Christmas Eve on Varick Street in in a room not with a view.. Thus it is the invention of solitude, not solitude itself, that is required for the imagination to be freed.
But this is just one way in which memory is defined in the book, through knowing or being in specific places. Memory is also viewed as "seeing" even if what one sees is no longer there bc seeing brings you into the world of things and people and places.
Auster takes many risks using a non-linear or expository rather than narrative approach to examining his own life story in The Book of Memory. He has the capacity to write in a way that mimics how the mind works through association, engagement of the senses, memory and intuition. This style while miming our thought processes is all very carefully crafted--this is no freewrite--through intertextuality combined with remembrance which eventually leads to an understanding of self.
Is that not what the best memoirs and autobiographical texts do? Find that core of understanding which is submerged and bring it into light so that we come to know and also inhabit ourselves: "Memory, then, not so much as the past contained within us, but as proof of our life in the present" Here memory is an active agent of the self, not a static presentation of the past, and in a sense it is through language that our reality is constructed or more specifically our stories.
The power of stories is most notable in his re-telling of the Arabian Nights and the use of story-telling by Sheherazade as a life-saving device. Without her capacity to tell stories, she will end up like those women before her, all executed by the king. Stories or in this case memories and aesthetic texts that conjure stories are also what keeps Auster alive: his memories are stories that join him with others "For it posits the existence of others and allows the listener to come into contact with them--if only in his thoughts" It is memory plus solitude, the creation or invention of solitude, rather than actual solitude as he states "this room is not a retreat from the world" 76 that allows him to dip his pen into the inkwell.
Without memory and language, without seeing beyond ourselves into the world we are isolated, much as his father appears trapped by his absence, always as Auster describes him, "somewhere else, between here and there" This paradox of being both and is seen in the final sentences of the book. Whereas Auster begins the book of memory with the sentence.
It never will be again," granting a finality, throwing up a wall, to the past, in the last lines these sentences are repeated only he adds "Remember," signaling that the present is always already immersed in the past.
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 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 tr 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 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.
A drizzling Sunday, lethargy and quiet in the house: the world at half-speed. 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. He wants to say what he means. He says what he wants to mean. He means what he says. 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.
Wow, again, like I touched on in my review of Hand to Mouth, what an interesting life Auster has had and his childhood is one that would definitely make a quiet and introspective child retreat even further and observe.
The father is obviously not your average run of the mill s dad. He is withdrawn most of the time - the possibility of Aspergers struck me - and is not in the least bit affectionate. In this breakthrough book Auster ponders on his childhood, the sort of father he had to grow u Wow, again, like I touched on in my review of Hand to Mouth, what an interesting life Auster has had and his childhood is one that would definitely make a quiet and introspective child retreat even further and observe.
In this breakthrough book Auster ponders on his childhood, the sort of father he had to grow up with and the memory of that father and that childhood. The Book of Memory, is a meditation on memory as a writer and a father.
The narrative has shifted from first to third and Auster now looks at what it means to be a father. He remembers the time his son almost died and juxtaposes memories of himself as a child and his son as a young child.
The father, which we can only guess is Auster or a disguised Auster is now trying to place himself in a world that has shifted perspective. He ranges far and wide in his reading or remembered reading for answers to the new problems that face him. The texts he refers to are erudite and often include the dispossessed. I really love the way he gathers those texts together looking for answers.
This one is a must read. This is the first Paul Auster book that has taken me such a long time to finish. It consists of two parts, the first one is Portrait of an Invisible Man and it's about his elusive father, his life and the loss he experienced after his death and it's truly captivating. It's more like his later books, which are so popular and loved by many. This part I finished in a day or two. The second part - The Book of Memory , though, is completely different in style.
Its fragmentary structure and rich intert This is the first Paul Auster book that has taken me such a long time to finish. Its fragmentary structure and rich intertextuality makes it really hard to follow. I can't say I didn't enjoy it, because it gives an insight into the mind of an author, whose books I admire so much. Reading it felt like peeping through the window of a genius's laboratory.
All the topics Auster explores in his later novels are synthesied in these pages. Many reviewers say that The Book of Memory is about being a father and I agree but there's also so much more to it than that - the jewish heritage, the vagueness of memory and time, the fickle nature of chance, the relativity of language, the search for identity, the mystic power of writing and constructing a narrative and so on and so forth Although The Invention of Solitude is Auster's first novel, I recommend it to people familiar with his writing, because it might be a little discouraging and hard to grasp for newly-recruited fans.
In "Portrait of an Invisible Man," you can see the process of emotional reconciliation happening directly on the page. You see the wheels turning in Auster's mind as he tries to remember his distant, enigmatic father and then deal with the loss of never being able to fully understand him.
It is the plain, moving nature of his confession that wins you over. In "The Book of Memory," however, something happens to his voice. Like his father, he himself becomes emotionally distant, referring to himsel In "Portrait of an Invisible Man," you can see the process of emotional reconciliation happening directly on the page.
Like his father, he himself becomes emotionally distant, referring to himself simply as "A. Instead of moving closer, he takes a step back, and reading the second narrative becomes an effort of chasing him from one erratic thought to the next. When you finally catch up with him, you realize that "Memory" is self-indulgent where "Portrait" was introspective.
Worse, you kinda understand why Auster's alone so much. Oct 28, J. This is a beautiful, clever meta and intriguing book. What one of my friends would call a "thought sandwich", because, at least with my experience with the book, with each read section, you find yourself pausing and thinking over the text. La escena del hijo que salva al padre de la muerte. El hijo salva al padre. Puer aeternus.
El padre salva al hijo. Y ese es el motivo por el que A. Los momentos que vive A. Como en la frase de Rimbaud: «Je est un autre» Yo es un otro.
Pero es una soledad necesaria cuando se es escritor o traductor, el artista necesita estar solo para crear.
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