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A review by cherylcheng00
Invisible by Paul Auster
4.0
Each of the several floors is identical to all the others: an immense windowless space filled with row upon row of towering gray metal shelves, all of them stuffed to capacity with books, thousands of books, tens of thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of books, a million books, and at times even you, who love books as much as anyone on this earth, become stupefied, anxious, even nauseated when you consider how many billions of words, how many trillions of words those books contain. You are shut off from the world for hours every day, inhabiting what you come to think of as an airless bubble, even if there must be air because you are breathing, but it is dead air, air that has not stirred in centuries, and in that suffocating environment you often feel drowsy, drugged to the point of semiconsciousness, and have to fight off the urge to lie down on the floor and go to sleep. (99)
He is trying to write something cogent about the work of George Oppen, a contemporary American poet whom he greatly admires. He copies out these lines from Oppen's most recent book, This in Which:
Impossible to doubt the world: it can be seen
And because it is irrevocable
It cannot be understood, and I believe that fact is lethal. (182)
He finds the gloom indoors rather pleasant—a soothing gloom, as it were, a companionable gloom, a gloom one could converse with for hours. He puts down his pen, scratches his head, exhales. Unbidden, a forgotten verse from Ecclesiastes comes roaring into his consciousness. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly... As he jots down the words in the right-hand margin of his poem, he wonders if this isn't the truest thing he has written about himself in months. (201)
He is trying to write something cogent about the work of George Oppen, a contemporary American poet whom he greatly admires. He copies out these lines from Oppen's most recent book, This in Which:
Impossible to doubt the world: it can be seen
And because it is irrevocable
It cannot be understood, and I believe that fact is lethal. (182)
He finds the gloom indoors rather pleasant—a soothing gloom, as it were, a companionable gloom, a gloom one could converse with for hours. He puts down his pen, scratches his head, exhales. Unbidden, a forgotten verse from Ecclesiastes comes roaring into his consciousness. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly... As he jots down the words in the right-hand margin of his poem, he wonders if this isn't the truest thing he has written about himself in months. (201)