Adult Summer Reading Book Review: Invisible by Paul Auster

(4/5 stars – really liked it) Invisible has four parts. It begins being told in first person with “Spring.” This is where we get to know the main character, Adam, from his own account, in a very personal way. He’s at Columbia University (very knowable area for many of just-outside-of New-York-New-Yorkers) and experiencing life from a young student’s point of view-world is at his fingertips and he is just coming alive to his future possibilities. Something awful happens during this time with a love triangle and a Columbia Professor that he is caught in a terrible situation that he had no control over, and didn’t see coming. This event will affect the rest of his life.

Then comes the next part, “Summer.” Here the story is told in second person, by Adam’s successful writer friend Jim, who has received writings from Adam. Here you learn about the love between Adam and his sister. This is an interesting part and almost feels like an entirely different book has begun.

And then in “Fall” the story is told in third person, after Adam’s death, put together with various bits and pieces of others accounts of Adam’s life, from their views and interviews. The constant thread of Adam’s life pulls you into forward through the book trying to find out what the TRUTH is of what really happened, and who Adam really is/was. I was a little disappointed that the ending left me still wanting answers, but I thoroughly enjoyed the journey of storytellers in all their glorious perspectives. I feel “Invisible” refers maybe to the writer not being a constant, not a tangible, solid, character but rather a conglomerate of what others know of him and what they did to him hence making his story more of a vaporous cloud that forms and reshapes depending on who is doing the speaking. Is one a person in his own right or is one how others perceive him? – Trine G., Adult Summer Reading Participant