[The Invention Of Solitude Book Pdf
Abdul Soumphonphakdy
This image, which has been cropped down from the original, speaks to me of solitude, loneliness, travelling into the unknown, a completely empty train platform, with no train, no sign posts, no destinations, and no human connection. Perhaps this is the premise in part of the book, delving into unfamiliar territory and a voyage of discovery, with a hint of danger.
I want to speak concretely, deeply, about intimate human experience of the body, so as perhaps to open up for us a deeper and healthier living of our own bodiliness. Indeed, I hope to get a glimpse of the beauty of what awaits us in the new creation, when our experience of the body will be healed, renewed, and transformed by the redeeming grace of Christ. However, I am going to have to take a step back and speak philosophically at first, to provide some groundwork. Therefore, the first things first: the basics of biblical and Catholic teaching, and some philosophical reflection on this.
Indeed,Saint John Paul II says in the Theologyof the Bodythat it is in a way precisely thebodythat reveals to man both his inherent solitudeasa being different from all other visible creatures, as well as theorientationof this solitude toward loving relationshipwith another. It is precisely because he is a body immersed in theworld, in the context of creation, that he becomes aware of himselfas a person,as a being who can think and choose unlike any of the other creatureshe encounters. He experiences, through the living, bodily contactthat he has with the world in which he is placed, hisownsubjectivityas inherently open to relationship with what lies outside of him.
"The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born."
Ranging from fiction to film, poetry to philosophy, memoir and more, Austers lengthy list of works includes The Invention of Solitude, City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room, In the Country of Last Things, Disappearances: Selected Poems, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, The Art of Hunger, Leviathan, Mr. Vertigo, Smoke & Blue in the Face: 2 Films, Why Write?, Translations, Hand to Mouth, and Lulu of the Bridge.
The Book Of Illusions is his tenth novel. Kirkus Reviews praised the book as "one of his finest" And The New York Times says, "Mr. Auster's elegant, finely calibrated Book of Illusions is a haunting feat of intellectual gamesmanship Mr. Auster delivers an invitingly complex puzzle that promises to deliver Zimmer [the main character] from his malaise and loneliness."
For those of you who've always wondered just where failbetter.com actually is, we can tell you that our headquarters are but a few blocks from the beautiful brownstone home of one Paul Auster. Of course, Auster is not merely our neighborhood's most prominent littrateur. He is a world-renowned novelist and screenwriter, and indeed one of the most celebrated American authors of our age. He also happens to be a hell of a nice guy, and he graciously agreed to not only share his thoughts on his latest work, The Book of Illusions, and the life and heritage of its fascinating protagonist, David Zimmer, but also his own long-standing obsessions
Every writer is trapped by his obsessions. You don't choose your subjects - they choose you, and once you enter a book, you're powerless to escape. Writing novels isn't a science, after all. You grope your way forward, eliminating and adding material as you go along, changing your mind, discovering what you are attempting to do in the process of doing it. And in the end, all you really discover is yourself. Again and again.
Still, every time I set out to write a novel, I make a conscious effort to reinvent myself, to work against the books I've written before. No matter how far I think I'm getting away from myself and my past, however, I can never really escape. The thumbprint of my obsessions is all over the final result.
So yes, in answer to your question, The Book of Illusions explores many of the same ideas and subjects I've dealt with before. It's recognizably a novel by the same author who wrote my previous novels. Where it differs somewhat form those earlier books, I think, is in the mournful, grief-stricken tone of the narration. David Zimmer is a man literally fighting for his life, looking for a way to go on living. But I've known him for a long time, and this isn't his first appearance in one of my novels. He was Fogg's friend in Moon Palace, and in that book the reader also learned that he was the person Anna Blume was writing to in In The Country of Last Things. (There's a subtle reference to Fogg in The Book of Illusions: Zimmer's second son, Marco, is named after him.)
Another difference in this book, perhaps, is the emphasis placed on imaginary works - Hector's films and David's book about them. There have been "fictive novels" in my books before - stories within stories, so to speak - but never so fully fleshed out as in this one. In The Book of Illusions, Hector's films are an essential part of the narrative.
Hector Mann is a pure invention. He appeared in my head one day about ten or twelve years ago, and I've been walking around with him ever since. My original plan for the book - which was born about twenty seconds after Hector was born - was simply to make a collection of his silent comedies, to describe the movies in words. That impulse remains in The Book of Illusions, but a large and complex story grew up around it.
As for Hector's characteristics - the handsome face, the white suit, the black mustache - I believe those were inspired by Marcello Mastroianni in Divorce Italian Style, a film from the 60s. His performance made a great impression on me, producing what I would call a kind of perpetual inner grin. If I had to choose one actor that I preferred above all others, I think it would be Mastroianni. For the depth of his humanity, for the uncanny way in which he can simultaneously embody the serious and the comic. Like Cary Grant, he's an Everyman who remains a distinct individual.
But Mastroianni's influence is only a guess. I can't be absolutely certain. Hector also shares characteristics with Max Linder, the earliest of the great silent comedians. And there's a touch of Raymond Griffith in my portrayal of Hector as well. Most of Griffith's work has been lost, so he's become a rather obscure figure. But he played a dapper man of the world - just as Hector does - and he also had a mustache. But Hector's movements are crisper and more artfully choreographed than Griffith's.
Movies have always been a great passion of mine. When I was 19 or 20, I seriously considered going to film school and trying to become a director. But I felt I had the wrong personality for the job. I was too timid, to afraid to speak in front of others, and I decided that I probably wasn't cut out for it.
The irony is that once I started publishing novels, I was brought into contact with the film world. Directors approached me wanting to adapt my books into movies or to ask me to write original screenplays for them. The first time I ever visited a movie set was when Philip Haas was shooting a screen version of my novel The Music of Chance. And then, of course, I became involved with director Wayne Wang, who had read my piece on the Times Op-Ed page, "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story." That led to work on two films together, Smoke and Blue in the Face. We spent two solid years on those projects, and that was when I learned everything I know about filmmaking. By the time I wrote and directed my own movie, Lulu on the Bridge, I knew exactly what I was getting myself into.
Fiction writing and screenwriting are very different activities. In both cases, you're trying to tell a story, but the means at your disposal are totally dissimilar. Novels are pure narration; screenplays resemble theater, and as in all dramatic writing, the only words that count are the dialogue. As it happens, my novels generally don't have much dialogue, and so in order to work in film, I had to learn a completely different way of writing, to teach myself how to think in images and how to put words in the mouths of flesh-and-blood human beings.
Each form has its strengths and weaknesses, the things it can do and the things it can't do. The question of time, for example, works differently in books and films. In a book, you can collapse a long stretch of time into a single sentence. "Every morning for twenty years, I walked down to the corner and bought a newspaper." It's impossible to do that in film. You can show a man walking to a corner to buy a newspaper on one particular day, but not every day for twenty years. Films take place in the present. Even when you use flashbacks, the past is always presented as another form of the present.
What intrigued me about The Book of Illusions was that I had set up a story in which I had to use both kinds of writing in the same book. It was an immense challenge, and I must say that describing Hector's films, especially the silent films in chapter two, took a great deal of work. All the visual information had to be there, the physical details of the action - so that the reader could "see" what was happening - but at the same time, the prose had to move along at a quick pace, in order to mimic the experience of watching a film, which is rushing past you at twenty-four frames per second. I had to go over those passages many times before I felt I had them right. Too many details, and you get bogged down. Not enough, and you don't see anything. It was all a question of striking the proper balance.
The Book of Illusions is unabashedly about loss. It is obvious that you come to this subject with the experience of an older, more seasoned author. Could you have written this book ten years ago?
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