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Invisible by Paul Auster - 3* - My Review

This book was unusual for me in that I loved parts of it and intensely disliked others. I was enthralled in the story of Adam Walker’s relationship with the mysterious and nefarious Rudolf Born, but the other chapters did not interest me at all. It is creatively structured. It starts off with Adam Walker narrating his story in first person. He meets Rudolf Born and Born’s relationship partner, Margot. Rudolf offers Adam a job in creating, publishing, and writing for a new magazine. It then shifts to another character’s point of view, a successful author who used to know Adam when the two went to college together. This narrator, called Jim, injects his observations about a manuscript that Adam has sent to him (which relates the story told in the first part of this book).

It is a novel about a moral quandary that arises from Adam’s meeting with Rudolf Born. This one event takes over Adam’s life. I think if this book had focused exclusively on the story of Walker and Born, I would have enjoyed it immensely and perhaps even rated it 5 stars, but the rest of it contains unnecessarily graphic and incestual sexual content, which I found extremely off-putting. So, I am going with a middle of the road 3 stars. Parts of it are outstanding and I will definitely be reading more from this author.

PBT Content warnings: (view spoiler)[graphic sex, a gory murder, incest, & probably more that I've blocked out (hide spoiler)]