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."
Book Reviews
BookBrowse - Amy Reading
When you pick up a Paul Auster novel, a spell descends over you. As if you are in a funhouse car, you are hooked onto the tracks of the story and pulled into its depths... His abiding love for frame narratives places Auster in the company of metafiction novelists like Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, or Italo Calvino, yet he is not a flashy, fancy, or difficult writer. Invisible sounds exactly like someone talking to you about something astonishing that happened to him when he was young. It is impossible not to listen. Full Review (members only, 1057 words).
Publishers Weekly
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
Library Journal
If you've never read Auster, this is a great place to start ... If you've been a fan for a long time, you will not be disappointed.
Booklist
Starred Review.
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. Auster writes of 'the obsessive story that has wormed its way into your soul and become an integral part of your being.' This is that story.
Time Out New York
[A] winningly elliptical mystery that’s at once textbook Auster and a satisfying departure.
O, the Oprah Magazine
[A]n intricate and compelling construction... Even as the pages fly by, you feel [Auster's] seriousness and his deep sense of the mysteries that attend human loneliness and desire.
The Independent (UK)
...its narrative strands are not sufficiently developed to engage... the deliberately congested authorship, which seems the novel's greater emphasis, remains self-referential and unrewarding.
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Invisible
(members only, 1057 words).
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