The Invention of Solitude

by Paul Auster

Unlike this orgy of egotism, Auster’s The Invention of Solitude is a story whose strength lies in its very simplicity. Through this apparent banality the reader finds himself, and narrative regains its true identity. It is once again a homeland open to all without distinction, a place of welcome: “I don’t feel that I was telling the story of my life so much as using myself to explore certain questions that are common to us all,” Auster says in an interview. Auster’s hero is not someone who prefers himself, to repeat Brecht’s definition of the bourgeois, but someone who doubts and communicates this doubt to the reader. Readers identify less with the protagonists’ adventures than with the strangeness they feel about themselves—for whom being or becoming someone constitutes the ultimate difficulty. Auster does not condemn, like classical writers, the self’s wretchedness in the face of God’s grandeur. He does worse: he dissolves this self, declares it a nonentity.