Word: walker
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...crisis: Walker’s point of view (one among three) varies from first- to third-, and even second-person. The story opens in the first-person, from Walker’s perspective, on the streets of New York City in 1967: a student and writer at Columbia University, Walker meets at a party the inscrutable Rudolf Born—a professor who soon thereafter offers to finance a literary magazine that would have Walker at its helm. This role provides Walker with a definitive, if transient, identity—as he realizes: “It was the first...
...second and third parts of the novel, entitled “Summer” and “Fall” respectively, are written by Walker himself and edited by Freeman. It’s here that the narrative person-shifts take place; Walker, after finding himself stuck, follows Freeman’s advice: “By writing about myself in the first person, I had smothered myself and made myself invisible, had made it impossible for me to find the thing I was looking for. I needed to separate myself from myself.” Walker?...
...Life is too short for dawdling” and “What about me? Haven’t these days meant anything for you?” and “She taught me not to be afraid of myself anymore” leave Walker and his fellow characters trapped in two dimensions. This stands in opposition, however, to the time and space Walker traverses—in such a multilayered, diligently designed novel, clichés seem strangely out of place. Perhaps, then, their presence is meant to highlight the futility of Walker’s quest...
...literary magic, or of any real beauty. And it’s not because the words themselves are simple, but instead because they are used so formulaically, without experiment. There is plot, there is description—but there is no poetry; and so the novel itself, like Walker, melts away...
This melting, however, doesn’t obscure the fact that Auster is a master of crafting intricate tales within tales. His novels are supremely readable and enticing. But even though his characters search for identity, like Walker in “Invisible,” they remain just that—invisible. Like Courbet, Auster has managed to create a work of art out of the awareness of tradition. He just never manages to break from...