Reading again

It's pathetic really the way I am (not) managing this blog. I think it's because I'm the only follower (je suis meaning I am and I follow quite appropriate here I think, are you there Karen?) and there's no pressure to write. But also because until this morning, I have not read anything that made me really want to write. Until this morning.

OK. The book in question is Paul Auster's Invisible and it was absorbing from the first page as all good books should be. He's difficult to describe in terms of literary affiliations, lots of Henry James, a little of JMC (or perhaps JMC takes his cue from PA?) something of Ian McKewan. Maybe, all the male writers of a certain age (late fifties, early sixties), the baby boomers, are all circulating around similar themes including the BIG one which is what we are doing to our planet. Ian M has done this directly in Solar, Auster does this very indirectly in Invisible. But as I reluctantly but furiously came to the last pages of the book this Sunday morning, I did what I always do when a book knocks my socks off. I say "Jesus". Then I read the passage in question again, and I repeat. Then I do a lot of gazing out of the window, then I read it again. Then I look to the back cover (note my copy has a beautiful and relevant photograph of a young couple sitting on the edge of the Seine in Paris)to see if some clever critic has said something clever (no such luck here) and i look at the cover, then I put the book down very gently and get typing on my Macbook.

This is a very illusive book about the invisibility of authors and authors within authors but it tells a cracking good yarn at the same time through multiple authors who seamlessly glide into each other while being controlled meticulously by the "REAL AUTHOR".

The ending brought me to tears. It was so utterly unexpected, not in terms of the plot which it seemed to abandon as if it was of little importance but because of the subtlety of its vision of an oh so cruel and imperfect world.

Read it and see.