Rating: 
Summary: against the frozen sea
Review: Auster will take you on a trip into the self. There is a great deal of wisdom and sadness in this little book, it packs quite a punch. For those who have read his "Leviathan" this book provides clues to that title, for at least some of the solitude is that spent in the whale ('leviatan' is Hebrew for whale). I picked it up as a change of pace from medical texts, and was thrown off with a book that qualifies as a Kafka-ian axe. Reading such a book pulled me into the paradox of shared solitude of reader and author...
Rating:
Summary: A Mystery, a Whale, Invnetion and Memory
Review: Autobiography -more often truer to form than substance- seems to repeal one's pretensions concerning identity while legitimizing a sense of purpose. Paul Auster's "Invention of Solitude" is perhaps one of the very best ever written: If Henry Adams attempted to offer credence to his generation than Auster is the heir apparent for the 20th c. Arranged in two parts, "Invention" and "Book of Memory," the novella-length memoirs center around two themes; familial and personal loss. The passing of a father whose mysterious motives and outlook later occupies the subplot of a mystery and the author's search for its truthful sources in "Invention," while the second (written when the author was at an all-time low) is a meditation upon his own son, which is interwoven with study of Collidi's Pinnochio and, ostensibly, Jonah. Auster is as much at home quoting a Judaic scholar as Pascal, Tolstoy or a close acquaintance. Together the book solidifies the relations while offering amazing insights for anyone who has suffered and expereienced a sense of conviction in wake of tragedy of loss. This is an astonishingly mature and compassionate book, one which I have never found anyone to whom I could not recommend.
Rating:
Summary: A Mystery, a Whale, Invnetion and Memory
Review: Autobiography -more often truer to form than substance- seems to repeal one's pretensions concerning identity while legitimizing a sense of purpose. Paul Auster's "Invention of Solitude" is perhaps one of the very best ever written: If Henry Adams attempted to offer credence to his generation than Auster is the heir apparent for the 20th c. Arranged in two parts, "Invention" and "Book of Memory," the novella-length memoirs center around two themes; familial and personal loss. The passing of a father whose mysterious motives and outlook later occupies the subplot of a mystery and the author's search for its truthful sources in "Invention," while the second (written when the author was at an all-time low) is a meditation upon his own son, which is interwoven with study of Collidi's Pinnochio and, ostensibly, Jonah. Auster is as much at home quoting a Judaic scholar as Pascal, Tolstoy or a close acquaintance. Together the book solidifies the relations while offering amazing insights for anyone who has suffered and expereienced a sense of conviction in wake of tragedy of loss. This is an astonishingly mature and compassionate book, one which I have never found anyone to whom I could not recommend.
Rating:
Summary: A Mystery, a Whale, Invnetion and Memory
Review: Autobiography -more often truer to form than substance- seems to repeal one's pretensions concerning identity while legitimizing a sense of purpose. Paul Auster's "Invention of Solitude" is perhaps one of the very best ever written: If Henry Adams attempted to offer credence to his generation than Auster is the heir apparent for the 20th c. Arranged in two parts, "Invention" and "Book of Memory," the novella-length memoirs center around two themes; familial and personal loss. The passing of a father whose mysterious motives and outlook later occupies the subplot of a mystery and the author's search for its truthful sources in "Invention," while the second (written when the author was at an all-time low) is a meditation upon his own son, which is interwoven with study of Collidi's Pinnochio and, ostensibly, Jonah. Auster is as much at home quoting a Judaic scholar as Pascal, Tolstoy or a close acquaintance. Together the book solidifies the relations while offering amazing insights for anyone who has suffered and expereienced a sense of conviction in wake of tragedy of loss. This is an astonishingly mature and compassionate book, one which I have never found anyone to whom I could not recommend.
Rating:
Summary: The book
Review: I took this book as the subject of my thesis for my MA so I think I have nothing else to say. It stands above the crowd and will remain close to my hand for quite a while I think.
Rating: 
Summary: A book of two halves that doesn't make a whole
Review: I'll go out on a limb here, diasgree with the hagiographic tone of preceding reviewers, and say that only half this book is worth reading - the first half. When Auster writes about how he feels after his father's death, he makes universal the sorrows, guilts and uncertainties of losing a parent. But the second half - "The Book of Memory" - gets very tedious very quickly. Real feeling is replaced by real showing off, with pages of literary criticism masquerading as fiction. If you thrill to "isms" - structuralism, deconstuctionism - there may be something here for you. But for the rest of us...
Rating:
Summary: Master's piece on Solitude.
Review: In "Portrait of an Invisible Man", the first part of Paul Auster's fascinating memoir "Invention of Solitude", Auster writes about his father's life as a means of helping himself come to terms with his father's death. Auster remembers his father as an elusive figure in his life, emotionally detached and disconnected from family and life itself ("he had managed to keep himself at a distance from life"). To Auster, it seemed that the world's attempts to embrace his father simply bounced off him without ever making a breakthrough - it was impossible to enter his solitude. The theme of Solitude runs powerfully through this disturbing, mesmerising memoir.Auster is conscious of how little knowledge he actually has of his father's early childhood years, how unenlightened he is with regard to his father's inner life, how few clues he has to his father's character and how little understanding of the underlying reasons for his father's immunity from the world at large. Through an amazing co-incidence involving his cousin, Auster learns of a terrible secret buried deep in his father's childhood past - the story was splashed across old newspaper reports of the time, sixty years before - of a shocking family tragedy that shattered his father's childhood world and could have seriously affected his mental outlook during his formative years, accounting for the solitariness and elusiveness that characterised the "invisible man" of Auster's childhood. Excellent, compelling writing! Dramatic revelations from a grim, distant past finally brought to light! Highly recommended! In the second part, "The Book of Memory", there is a marked shift of perspective (away from the point of view of Auster, as son, writing about his feelings and memories of his father's life, after his death) to an autobiographical account of Auster's own experience, now himself as father, writing about his son. More abstract in content and style than "Portrait of an Invisible Man", "The Book of Memory" comprises autobiographical segments interspersed with commentaries on the nature of chance interspersed with ruminations on solitude and exploration of language. As a confirmed Auster-holic, my favourite Auster book to-date is "Moon Palace".
Rating:
Summary: A Common Thread
Review: In What I believe to be one of Paul Auster's best works, the reader finds a common thread in the true account of the death of the author's father. Written in two distinct and complementary sections, "The Invention of Solitude" offers the reader a complex and compelling story in which we can all see a greater, common story. Though the work is an auto biographical account of Auster's own experiences as a son and as a father, the readers finds Auster's prose to be as symbolic and as fluid as in his novels. I highly recommend this book to the reader who is looking for something beyond the ordinary biography, beyond the ordinary novel.
Rating:
Summary: A Common Thread
Review: In What I believe to be one of Paul Auster's best works, the reader finds a common thread in the true account of the death of the author's father. Written in two distinct and complementary sections, "The Invention of Solitude" offers the reader a complex and compelling story in which we can all see a greater, common story. Though the work is an auto biographical account of Auster's own experiences as a son and as a father, the readers finds Auster's prose to be as symbolic and as fluid as in his novels. I highly recommend this book to the reader who is looking for something beyond the ordinary biography, beyond the ordinary novel.
Rating:
Summary: A Common Thread
Review: In What I believe to be one of Paul Auster's best works, the reader finds a common thread in the true account of the death of the author's father. Written in two distinct and complementary sections, "The Invention of Solitude" offers the reader a complex and compelling story in which we can all see a greater, common story. Though the work is an auto biographical account of Auster's own experiences as a son and as a father, the readers finds Auster's prose to be as symbolic and as fluid as in his novels. I highly recommend this book to the reader who is looking for something beyond the ordinary biography, beyond the ordinary novel.
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