The invention of solitude

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The Invention of Solitude (Engl .: The Invention of Solitude ) is a partly autobiographical , partly more essayistic prose by American author Paul Auster , published 1982nd

Origin context

Paul Auster's father dies unexpectedly in January 1979. For Auster, it's a crisis-ridden phase in his life. Financial difficulties weigh on him, his marriage to Lydia Davis is about to split up, and their two-year-old son Daniel suffers from a serious lung disease.

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The book is structured in two parts, which condition and complement each other.

The first part of the book, Portrait of an Invisible Man , was written in 1979 as a direct reaction to the death of the father, as an attempt to come to terms with family history and to locate one's own position in the life of the father.

"He was invisible in the deepest, most unalterable sense. Invisible to others, and most likely invisible to himself. When he was still alive, I was constantly looking for him, constantly trying to find the absent father, and now, there he is dead, I think I still have to look for him. "

Auster describes the rapprochement and the search for clues in the parental home, in which the father lived alone for over fifteen years after the divorce. Marriage, and generally dealing with women and children, is characterized by distance and aloofness. Samuel Auster is a married bachelor , a silent man who always seems absent and about to leave. (The figure of the distant father will appear again and again in Auster's work.) His parents are descendants of Galician Jews who immigrated from Europe. With the investigation of the legacy, a large part of the family history finally unfolds.

As is often the case with Auster, chance plays a role here too, and it is revealed that Auster's grandmother shot her own husband in a jealous drama in the 1920s. The woman is not convicted, keeps her family together, the sons move together and set up a joint real estate business in later years. In their prime, the Auster brothers own over 100 apartment buildings. This is also where the unknown father reveals himself, who decreases rent or gives the children of poor tenants his son's discarded clothes. In the end, only a few houses are left, but Paul Auster can secure his literary work for some time with the inheritance.

The second part of the book, The Book of Memory , was not finished until 1982 and is more essayistic. Auster changes from the first-person narrator to the third person and counterpoints the straightforward narrative of the first part. The text becomes more fragmentary, interspersed with memorabilia, poems and quotations (Flaubert, Freud, Collodi, Tolstoy, Dostojewski etc.), in many passages the well-read critic speaks through the poet. Auster reflects on death and the things of (family) life and tries to make his own biography more general. But it is also a reflection on writing.

Classification in the overall work

The invention of loneliness marked Paul Auster's transition from poet, translator and critic to prose poet. It is the first of his autobiographical work.

In the second part of the book there are already signs of the postmodern break in later novels. The invention of loneliness thus forms an important element in the author's oeuvre, not least as a direct precursor to his well-known New York trilogy .

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literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Invention of Solitude . German by Werner Schmitz. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993, p. 13.