All Auster books reveal something about the writing of the novel itself. They at once place the "author" in the extreme role of power, and make him vulnerable (and invisible) at the same time by exposing the underpinnings of the plot.
Invisible is no different. It is Auster at his best. It is a book within a book, a narrator giving voice to a story that he himself doesn't quite understand. The story is simultaneously one of youth and sexual awakening, and death and disillusionment, of truth and the art of storytelling and of memory and instability of the past.
The plot of Invisible, an older man writing down his youth and the year that changed his life forever belies the stronger force of the book which lures the reader in, the way in which the narrator makes the reader culprit to the secret stashes of his history. And, by changing the tenor of the story from I to You, he steals "you" into the seemingly lucid but suspect retelling of the past with him. You become both voyeur and participant in a novel way.
FOUR STARS
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