Rating: 4/5, good
The back cover of The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster reads (at least the 2007 Penguin edition of the book first released in 1982):
“’One day there is life… and then, suddenly, it happens there is death.’
So begins The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster’s moving and personal meditation on fatherhood. The first section, ‘Portrait of an Invisible Man,’ reveals Auster’s memories and feelings after the death of his father, a distant, undemonstrative, almost cold man. As he attends to his father’s business affairs and sifts through his effects, Auster uncovers a sixty-year-old family murder mystery that sheds light on his father’s elusive character. In ‘The Book of Memory,’ the perspective shifts from Auster’s identity as son to his role as father. Through a mosaic of images, coincidences, and associations, the narrator, ‘A,’ contemplates his separation from his son, his dying grandfather, and the solitary nature of storytelling and writing.”
I picked this up at City Lights in San Francisco in 2013 (I know because I have the 60th anniversary bookmark) shortly after learning my father had colon cancer. I didn’t begin reading it until just after he passed away in 2020. I think I was looking for something to guide me through the grief that on some level I felt coming. My dad was a little bit distant—not quite as much as A.’s dad, but not the most present either. There were a couple of things that reminded me of him in this book (they were both very practical-minded and emotionally held back) and some things that differed (my dad never had any affairs as far as I know).
I didn’t know until about a quarter into The Invention of Solitude that Paul Auster is Jewish and that this is a very Jewish book. I think it’s a funny coincidence that I only read the back cover copy and happened to pick a grief book about a complicated relationship with a Jewish dad (our family is Jewish). The Invention of Solitude is also about these types of coincidences—how life sometimes feels interconnected like art despite not being orchestrated in the same way.
The Invention of Solitude was my “pandemic book”—a slim volume that I kept in my bag to read when I was stuck waiting somewhere outside the house, that I didn’t read inside because it was the designated “germy” book. It was another a strange coincidence that my dad was a doctor and he died in late January 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic. Our family has wondered many times what he would have thought of COVID and how it was handled. It was interesting how it lined up that I was experiencing my own whirlpool of grief within an ocean of worldwide suffering.
The first part, “Portrait of an Invisible Man”, details A.’s experiences with his father. It was written soon after his death and represents an effort to get everything down on paper before memory fades. A.’s father was extremely frugal, practical, a bit insensitive, and resided in his own head most of the time. Some of this was due to trauma in his own childhood, which relates to the murder mystery mentioned on the back cover.
There are many insightful and evocative passages in the first part.
I liked this part about grief and writing:
“There has been a wound, and I realize now that it is very deep. Instead of healing me as I thought it would, the act of writing has kept this wound open. At times I have even felt the pain of it concentrated in my right hand, as if each time I picked up the pen and pressed it against the page, my hand were being torn apart. Instead of burying my father for me, these words have kept him alive, perhaps more so than ever. I not only see him as he was, but as he is, as he will be, and each day he is there, invading my thoughts, stealing up on me without warning: lying in the coffin underground, his body still intact, his fingernails continuing to grow. A feeling that if I am to understand anything, I must penetrate this image of darkness, that I must enter the absolute darkness of earth.”
Does writing about grief bring closure or does it keep wounds from closing? Writing can be a safe and private place to express difficult feelings, but it can also lead to excessive rumination on negative feelings. I talk about my dad occasionally and I feel like it helps me process and contextualize things, but I find it really hard to write about him without exaggeration. Writing in solitude means there’s no one to check what you’re saying, which can be a good thing when you’re expressing inner truths others can’t or won’t allow space for, but a bad thing when it’s just spiraling into depression.
It can be therapeutic to work through and share trauma, but you don’t want to dwell in it either. Too much focus on trauma can turn into living in the past or retreating into the self. I don’t think Paul Auster is necessarily doing that, but the experience of reading The Invention of Solitude is a lot. It’s very dense with thought and emotion related to his father, to trauma, and to death. It’s easy to skim over the depths because there’s almost too much painful stuff to engage with.
There’s also an ethical problem with a lot of these posthumous-parental-trauma-based memoirs in that the dead can’t defend themselves. That should be balanced against the child’s right to speak about their trauma, the comfort reading these narratives gives to other people who grew up with abusive or neglectful parents, the practical value of other parents reading these memoirs and working on their parenting skills, the societal value of normalizing discussion of childhood abuse and neglect so that victims feel empowered to share, and the societal value of discussing problems and ways to make the balance of power within families more equitable.
Auster is aware of this too. He wrote (of sorting through his father’s physical items):
“Each time I opened a drawer or poked my head into a closet, I felt like an intruder, a burglar ransacking the secret places of a man’s mind. I kept expecting my father to walk in, to stare at me in disbelief, and ask me what the hell I thought I was doing. It didn’t seem fair that he couldn’t protest. I had no right to invade his privacy.”
I’m also very careful when writing about my dad and try to really think about whether what I’m saying is true and helpful before posting it in a public forum. Like Auster’s dad, he met the basic criteria society expects from fathers (he provided for and stayed with our family), but he was kind of standoffish. I often felt like he had an unrealistically high standard of behavior for me. He would often say I was smart, but then dismiss my suggestions, ideas, and knowledge. I think he was insecure about himself and saw me as both an extension of his ego that he extended his perfectionism over and a threat to his position at the top of the family hierarchy. I think he saw his value as a person mostly in terms of his objective abilities and the practical good he could do for other people rather than having a strong sense of his inherent value as a human being.
My fondest moments with my dad were mostly of following him quietly through natural places while we were on vacation or staying up late to watch The Simpsons, South Park, or Family Guy. We had occasional moments of genuine connection but it was often at someone else’s expense, like when his hospice nurse fell asleep and started snoring and we shared a conspiratorial smile.
Paul Auster has some really great parts in The Invention of Solitude talking about his father’s narcissism, quirks, and possibly autism.
This is from a part talking about his younger sister’s struggles with her mental health:
“My mother, however, saw what was happening. When my sister was five years old, she took her to an exploratory consultation with a child psychiatrist, and the doctor recommended that some form of therapy be started. That night, when my mother told my father the results of the meeting, he exploded in a violent rage. No daughter of mine, etc. The idea that his daughter needed psychiatric help was no different from being told she was a leper. He would not accept it. He would not even discuss it.
This is the point I am trying to make. His refusal to look into himself was matched by an equally stubborn refusal to look at the world, to accept even the most incontrovertible evidence it thrust under his nose. Again and again throughout his life he would stare a thing in the face, nod his head, and then turn around and say it was not there. It made conversation with him almost impossible. By the time you had managed to establish a common ground with him, he would take out his shovel and dig it out from under your feet.”
“In those crazy, tensed-up moods he sometimes got into, he would always come out with bizarre opinions, not really taking them seriously, but happy to play devil’s advocate in order to keep things lively. Teasing people put him in buoyant spirits, and after a particularly inane remark to someone he would often squeeze that person’s leg—in a spot that always tickled. He literally liked to pull your leg.”
When Auster was an adult he stayed in his father’s house for a couple of weeks while he and his wife were moving. It was dark, so they opened the curtains, but when his father came home he flew into a disproportionate rage.
“Anger of this sort rarely came out of him—only when he felt himself cornered, impinged upon, crushed by the presences of others… Nevertheless, this anger was inside him—I believe constantly. Like the house that was well ordered and yet falling apart from within, the man himself was calm, almost supernatural in his imperturbability, and yet prey to roiling, unstoppable force of fury within. All his life he strove to avoid a confrontation with this force, nurturing a kind of automatic behavior that would allow him to pass to the side of it. Reliance on fixed routines freed him from the necessity of looking into himself when decisions had to be made; the cliché was always quick to come to his lips (“A beautiful baby. Good luck with it”) instead of words he had gone out and looked for. All this tended to flatten him out as a personality. But at the same time, it was also what saved him, the thing that allowed him to live. To the extent that he was able to live.”
A.’s father has a lot of unresolved childhood trauma. I wonder if he’s also autistic because he shows a reliance on social scripts and sensitivity to small changes.
I felt A.’s sister might be autistic too because it describes her living in an inner world and having meltdowns over simple routines:
“She spent much of her time alone, a tiny figure wandering through an imaginary land of elves and fairies, dancing on tiptoe in lace-trimmed ballerina costumes, singing in a voice loud enough to be heard only by herself. She was a miniature Ophelia, already doomed, it would seem, to a life of constant inner struggle. She made few friends, had trouble keeping up in school, and was harassed by self-doubts, even at a very young age, that turned the simplest routines into nightmares of anguish and defeat. There were tantrums, fits of terrible crying, constant upheavals.”
One thing I didn’t particularly like about this book is that the women play smaller roles than the men. A. seems to feel pity towards his sister, but not empathy. I think if he were more empathetic, he would show himself attempting to help her with her struggles instead of only observing his parents trying to deal with them. He’s a child too and I can’t say I was any better as an oldest child with my two younger siblings, but the way the book doesn’t really show him interacting with his sister still made me lose some sympathy for A.’s character. A.’s wife has one important scene and there are a couple of A.’s female friends that have a line or two, but all of the important mentor or interactive roles are filled by men.
In the second half of the book, it references Solitude by Billie Holiday and then says “First allusions to a woman’s voice. To be followed by specific reference to several. For it is his belief that if there is a voice of truth—assuming there is such a thing as truth, and assuming this truth can speak—it comes from the mouth of a woman.” Then it talks about Jonah, and then Cassandra, Pinocchio, a male film producer, a male writer… where are the “several”? It makes this grand pronouncement about women speaking the truth, but then goes on to mostly talk about men.
I wonder what the title means: The Invention of Solitude… invention, therefore intentional, not accidental. And new, previously nonexistent? Who invented solitude? A’s father, or A himself? Is it a lifestyle they both choose, A because it gives him space to think and write and A’s father because it gives him room to avoid facing his past? Does everyone have to invent their own solitude?
Is solitude fake (an “invention”)? Maybe we’re never really alone, even in solitude because other people experience solitude too. Or in the case of readers and writers, our solitude is interpenetrated by our experience of making and consuming art created by others within their own solitudes.
Auster says as much on page 135:
“Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close and its words represent many months, if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude.”
Much of the second half is about meaning vs meaninglessness. The world isn’t constructed like art, but its coincidences suggest meaning, however those constructed meanings don’t withstand scrutiny, yet we feel the need to create those meanings anyway. I guess that’s the human condition as it relates to stories.
How is the creation of meaning related to solitude? Solitude enables the creation of meaning by making space for art and processing of experience. Art ends solitude by allowing the viewer to experience the artist’s experience and the artist to share their experience with the viewer, but at the same time many forms of art are made and consumed in solitude, so the meeting of minds doesn’t fully break the solitude of either, yet it feels like it does.
The above two paragraphs are my best attempt to encapsulate the themes and philosophical meaning of The Invention of Solitude.
I don’t know if I would recommend this book. There were some neat parts, but I think it’s a bit pretentious. It is deep, but it’s hard to judge if it’s really deep or if it’s obscuring a simple meaning by fancy language and breaking up and rearranging the narrative structure and interspersing it with other texts like letters and Biblical analyses. But perhaps some of the meaning is found in the subtle way the pieces are arranged.
It is rather frustrating, though, and I wish some parts were a little clearer. The bits about fatherhood and sonhood cohered well. The bits about meaning were pretty coherent. The parts about solitude a bit less so. The Jewish aspects were some of the most elusive, I’m not quite sure if there was a thesis Paul Auster was trying to communicate or if it was just an important part of his and his father’s life.
Maybe even in his solitude in his room in Paris that his dad lived in while he was hiding from Nazis, he was connected both to his father and to his people? And then his son sharing the same name as his friend’s uncle who spoke against the internationalization of Jerusalem at the UN? Furthering the connections and coincidences theme like Jewish geography…
… what does it mean? Maybe it doesn’t mean anything other than what we make of it.
Experience itself is its own meaning.
Note: Paul Auster passed away on April 30th, 2024 (the last day of Passover) due to complications from lung cancer.
Jews read Deuteronomy 15:19-16:17 on the last day of Passover, which says:
“You shall rejoice before your God יהוה with your son and daughter, your male and female slave, the [family of the] Levite in your communities, and the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow in your midst, at the place where your God יהוה will choose to establish the divine name.”
– Deuteronomy 16:11
That’s an interesting coincidence that on the day of his passing, it’s tradition to read a parshah that talks about rejoicing with the fatherless, considering the themes of this work.
While I was trying to figure out the themes of The Invention of Solitude, I wrote some quick notes to summarize all the events that happened in the second half. I think they might be helpful for other people writing essays about this book, so I’ll include them here:
The second half of The Invention of Solitude titled “The Book of Memory” is where things get weird. It details the life of a blocked writer named A. remembering being a blocked writer in a tiny apartment in New York in 1979. M. moved into the same Paris apartment where his father hid from the Nazis during WWII. A gloss on Jonah: Gepetto refuses to speak, stuck in belly of whale. Pinocchio saves him. Do you have to dive to the depths of the sea and save your father to become a real boy? When the father dies, the son becomes his own father and lives in memory instead of the present. M. goes to the Anne Frank museum and cries. Israel Lichtenstein with his smart daughter Margalit writing last testament in Warsaw Ghetto 1942. A’s friend T’s uncle had the same name as his son, Daniel Auster. The uncle represented the Jewish case against the internationalization of Jerusalem at the UN in 1948.
A. caring for his grandfather in the hospital. When he was 18, A. met S. (Erik Satie? A student of D’Indy. Or Ivan Wyschnegradsky, who Auster met in Paris), a composer with a tiny room that was like the belly of the whale where he created. He allowed his orchestral works to be played in France during the Nazi occupation and was blackballed for being a collaborator even though he wasn’t—no one asked him, just shut him out of cultural life. A. compares S.’s solitude to shipwreck. S. fills the role of father for A. After A. moves to New York, he stops contacting S. Even when he returns to Paris, he doesn’t contact S. He realizes that he is afraid that because his dad died, S has died. He feels if he stays away, then S. will stay alive. Holderlein being saved by the room/belly of the whale, withdrawing into a speaking madness. Quotes from Jerome and St. Augustine, Christian philosophers.
A.’s marriage collapsed two months after his father died. He stays in New York City during the week and visits his son in the country on weekends. His grandfather confesses that he was in love with his secretary. His son gets pneumonia. His wife gets frustrated with the son, and he gets angry at her and storms back to son’s bedside. In the weeks before his grandfather dies he goes to a topless bar and gets his dick sucked by a prostitute. He cums and thinks of how the amount of semen in a cum is about the same as all the people in the world, so every man contains a Leibniz irreducible monad. Baseball transcends time (memory). The grandfather liked to do magic tricks and tell jokes.
If there is a voice of truth, it comes from the mouth of a woman. G-d puts words in Jeremiah’s mouth, Jonah refuses to speak. Oblomov curled on his couch. p. 125, Jonah runs away from G-d because if he were to warn the Ninevites and they heeded him, they would have been spared and he would be a false prophet. Rather than save them, he chooses to protect his own ego, and that’s why G-d made him alone. He and his high school friend D. prophecy something extraordinary will happen on a certain day every year but it doesn’t. Cassandra translated by Royston recommended by Q when A. was 24 in Paris. Royston died in a shipwreck. He says a book unread is like a shipwreck. In the book, Pinocchio offers to carry Geppetto to safety, saying that if they die at least they die together. Disney misses the poignancy of this moment by having P. make the whale sneeze them out. Wanderings of Aeneas after Troy and before Rome are like the wanderings of the Jews. The son saves the father, puer aeturnus (peter pan syndrome).
A. meets S.’s younger son P., who is working with a powerful French film producer. A. would later work for the same producer doing odd jobs (translation, ghost writing). A. later took his son to see the Superman movie they made and his son was overwhelmed with the flying and A. carried him out into a “violent hailstorm” and his son said “We’re having quite an adventure together, aren’t we?” A.’s son gets obsessed with Superman, wearing Superman shirt. P 135 everything starts to remind A. of something else, living in the past/memory rather than the present (the S. on his son’s shirt makes him think of his friend S. rather than Superman). Contrast of son’s innocence and seeing the thing itself vs A.’s experience being reminded of something else.
Reading is the act of being alone with another person (the writer) p 135. You puncture the author’s solitude and the voice of the author punctures yours. A. says everything he’s writing is a translation of what he felt in that room alone on Christmas Eve. A meets Francis Ponge at a dinner in New York with his future wife and her family and participates more because Ponge only speaks French and her parents only speak English. He meets Ponge at a party later and Ponge remembers everything about the house the first party was at, which stuns A. Writers must see, forget themselves and focus outward, so that they can remember.
A. remembers seeing paintings as an adolescent with a girl he met on study abroad in France. He visits her in England where she is from and lives and where she is making wood sculptures that she destroys before letting anyone see. He says her solitude has “turned in on itself and dried up” where the pregnant woman in Vermeer’s Woman in Blue represents “the fullness and self-sufficiency of the present moment.” He randomly ran into her weeks later in front of a shoe store in London. He feels he has willed her to appear and goes up to her and speaks her name.
He visits the widow of Jean Follain (poet), daughter of Maurice Denis (painter) and sees her next to a picture that her father painted of her as a baby and sees time collapsing into one instant. O. tells A. about aging, “What a strange thing to happen to a little boy.” Speaker says people don’t change as they age (145). After A. gets married the key breaks off in the door. A.’s wife’s piano has a key break and they go to play piano in a disused hall and the same key breaks. Meditation on how there’s no symbolic significance in reality as opposed to fiction (146).
Thesis on p.147. He says he can accept the fact that life is meaningless in his braver moments. Is “the invention of solitude” meaning that the creation of “stories of life and death” (149) cuts us off from the rest of humanity? We make ourselves the heroes and think the world revolves around us? He retells the Sheherazade story, saying that every story ends with death, we speak or we die. The king decides not to kill her because he wants to hear the rest of the story. If the meaning is made explicit and complete, the story ends and S. dies. Therefore the possibility of meaning has to be hinted at but never given in order that life may continue.
S. tells a story about a man who threw away a date stone and accidentally killed a genie’s son. He pleads his case and the genie lets him live another year, telling him to return then to be executed. “For this is the function of the story: to make a man see the thing before his eyes by holding up another thing to view.” Three men pass by and wait for the genie to see what will happen. Each man offers to tell the genie a story in exchange for a third of the merchant’s blood (to save him). Here, stories help the king come out of his solitude by seeing his experience reflected in a story. His mind is set about reality, but more flexible in story, so it works better than if S. plead her case straight.
The first man (also a merchant) says that his jealous wife turned his concubine and her son into cows. The concubine was slaughtered but the man spared the cow from being sacrificed. The herdsman’s daughter turns the son back into a human and marries him and turns the jealous wife into a beast for the man. All three men have animals that are actually people dear to them (reality vs imagination – narrator says to deny either one is to kill both on 153).
“In the stories of the three old men, two mirrors face each other, each one reflecting the light of the other. Both are enchantments, both the real and the imaginary, and each exists by virtue of the other.” At the end, S. bears the king three sons, tells the king to spare her life for their sakes. The king agrees and they marry. Stories soften the heart of the king.
A. tells stories to his son Daniel: “if a child is not allowed to enter the imaginary, he will never come to grips with the real. A child’s need for stories is as fundamental as his need for food, and it manifests itself in the same way hunger does.” “Once upon a time there was a little boy named Daniel, A. says to his son named Daniel, and these stories in which the boy himself is the hero are perhaps the most satisfying to him of all. In the same way, A. realizes, as he sits in this room writing The Book of Memory, he speaks of himself as another in order to tell the story of himself. He must make himself absent in order to find himself there. And so he says A., even as he means to say I.”
A. is reading about the suffering of children during the collapse of Cambodia. He goes to dinner with his female friend P., the editor of a large weekly news magazine. She tells him about Mrs. Carter visiting Cambodia and taking pictures with Cambodian children to protest a situation that America played a role in creating. They came, trampled hands and IV lines, and then left because their tour was behind schedule.
The world makes A. despair, but his child (or any child) gives him hope for the future and a feeling of responsibility and duty to keep going. The idea of children suffering robs the world of its one consolation. “He can go no further than this.” p. 157 comparing Cambodian children to Anne Frank.
Revisiting Jonah story. Narrator says Jonah ran away to Spain and tried to drown himself not to disobey G-d but in service of Israel, because the Ninevites were Assyrians, enemies of Israel. Narrator says it would be like sending a Jew to preach in Nazi Germany. Rabbi Akiba said Jonah was jealous for the glory of the son (Israel), not the glory of the father (G-d). Jonah preaches to Ninevah and goes to the outskirts to sit and watch (perhaps still hoping it will be destroyed), where G-d makes him a castor plant. G-d takes it away the next day and Jonah gets suicidal over it. G-d says “weren’t the people of Ninevah and their cattle my creations as well?” The moral is “If there is to be any justice at all, it must be a justice for everyone.” Not just Jews, all G-d’s creatures.
Talking about the magical power of word transformations: womb, tomb, breath, death, live rearranged to evil (160). But he knows this is a “schoolboy’s game” and these shallow “truths” are exclusive to English. However, similar magic feelings are present in other languages too. He says language is like a body, no word can exist on its own, it’s all integrated. He says to enter any word is to enter the whole of the language (so it’s a Leibniz monadology). Every body is part of the monad of the world too. “Playing with words in the way A. did as a schoolboy, then, was not so much a search for the truth as a search for the world as it appears in language. Language is not truth. It is the way we exist in the world.” “A. would contend that it is possible for events in one’s life to rhyme as well. A young man rents a room in Paris and then discovers that his father had hid out in this same room during the war.”
The book of memory ends with a letter sent by Nadezhda Mandelstam to her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, while he’s imprisoned for opposing Stalin.
Then there’s a bit about A. writing about the sky being like the earth, which might be a dream because A. “wakes up” from it, and then A paces back and forth and writes “It was. It will never be again. Remember.”
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