Auster Invisible

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-25556-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Auster's unforgettable coming-of-age tale from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: 'a literary voice for the ages' (Guardian) Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Invisible opens in New York City in the spring of 1967 when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born, and his silent and seductive girlfriend Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. Three different narrators tell the story, as it travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from New York to Paris and to a remote Caribbean island in a story of unbridled sexual hunger and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us to the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, authorship and identity to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers.

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Sunset Park, The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy. He and Spencer Ostrander collaborated on Bloodbath Nation. In 2006, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. His other honours include the Prix Medicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the Screenplay of Smoke, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Burning Boy, and the Carlos Fuentes Prize for his body of work. His novel 4 3 2 1 was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work was translated into more than forty languages. His final novel, Baumgartner, was published in November 2023. He died on 30 April 2024.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Auster, Paul

Leseproben

II

Back in the dark ages of our youth, Walker and I had been friends. We entered Columbia together in 1965, two eighteen-year-old freshmen from New Jersey, and over the next four years we moved in the same circles, read the same books, shared the same ambitions. Then our class graduated, and I lost contact with him. In the early seventies, I ran into someone who told me Adam was living in London (or maybe it was Rome, he wasn’t sure), and that was the last time I heard anyone mention his name. For the next thirty-something years, he rarely entered my thoughts, but whenever he did, I would find myself wondering how he had managed to disappear so thoroughly. Of all the young misfits from our little gang at college, Walker was the one who had struck me as the most promising, and I figured it was inevitable that sooner or later I would begin reading about the books he had written or come across something he had published in a magazine—poems or novels, short stories or reviews, perhaps a translation of one of his beloved French poets—but that moment never came, and I could only conclude that the boy who had been destined for a life in the literary world had gone on to concern himself with other matters.

A little less than a year ago (spring 2007), a UPS package was delivered to my house in Brooklyn. It contained the manuscript of Walker’s story about Rudolf Born (Part I of this book), along with a cover letter from Adam that read as follows:

Dear Jim,

Forgive the intrusion after such a long silence. If memory serves, it’s been thirty-eight years since we last talked, but I recently came across an announcement that you’ll be doing an event in San Francisco next month (I live in Oakland), and I was wondering if you might have some free time to spend with me—perhaps dinner at my house, for example—since I’m in urgent need of help, and I believe you’re the only person I know (or knew) who can give it to me. I say this not to alarm you but because of the enormous admiration I have for the books you have written—which have made me so proud of you, so proud to have once counted myself among your friends.

By way of anticipation, I enclose a still-not-finished draft of the first chapter of a book I am trying to write. I want to go on with it but seem to have hit a wall of struggle and uncertainty—fear might be the word I’m looking for—and I’m hoping that a talk with you might give me the courage to climb over it or tear it down. I should add (in case you’re in doubt) that it is not a work of fiction.

At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I should also add that I am not well, am in fact slowly dying of leukemia, and will be lucky to hang on for another year. Just so you know what you’re getting yourself into, in case you choose to get into it. I look a fright these days (no hair! thin as a twig!), but vanity has no place in my world anymore, and I have done my best to come to terms with the thing that has happened to me, even as I fight on with the treatments. A couple of centuries ago, sixty used to be considered old, and since none of us thought we would live past thirty, reaching the double of that isn’t half bad, is it?

I could go on, but I don’t want to take up any more of your time. Sending you this manuscript was not an easy decision (you must be inundated by countless letters from cranks and would-be novelists), but I’ll be glad to fill you in on my comings and goings of the past four decades if you decide to accept my invitation—which I fervently hope you will. As for the ms., save it for the plane trip to California if you’re too busy between now and then. It’s short enough to be consumed in less than an hour.

Hoping for a response.

Yours in solidarity,

Adam Walker

It hadn’t been a close friendship—no shared confidences, no long one-on-one talks, no letters exchanged—but there was no question that I admired Walker, and I had no doubt that he looked on me as an equal, since he never failed to show me anything but respect and goodwill. He was a bit timid, I remember, a trait that seemed odd in a person of such keen intelligence who also happened to be one of the best-looking boys on campus—handsome as a movie star, as a girlfriend of mine once put it. But better to be shy than arrogant, I suppose, better to blend in delicately than to intimidate everyone with your insufferable human perfection. He was something of a loner, then, but amiable and droll whenever he emerged from his cocoon, with a sharp, offbeat sense of humor, and what I especially liked about him was the broad range of his interests, his ability to talk about Cavalcanti, say, or John Donne, and then, with the same acumen and knowledge, turn around and tell you something about baseball that had never occurred to you before. Concerning his inner life, however, I knew nothing. Beyond the fact that he had an older sister (a remarkable beauty, by the way, leading one to suspect that the entire Walker clan had been blessed with the genes of angels), I knew nothing about his family or background, and certainly nothing about the death of his little brother. Now Walker himself was dying, a month past his sixtieth birthday he was beginning to say his farewells, and after reading his hesitant, touching letter, I couldn’t help thinking that this was the start, that the bright young men of yore were at last turning old, and before long our whole generation would be gone. Rather than follow Adam’s advice and ignore his manuscript until I was on the plane to California, I sat down and read it immediately.

How to describe my response? Fascination, amusement, a growing sense of dread, and then horror. If I hadn’t been told it was a true story, I probably would have plunged in and taken those sixty-plus pages for the beginning of a novel (writers do, after all, sometimes inject characters who bear their own names into works of fiction), and then I might have found the ending implausible—or perhaps too abrupt, which would have made it unsatisfying—but because I approached it as a piece of autobiography from the start, Walker’s confession left me shaken and filled with sorrow. Poor Adam. He was so hard on himself, so contemptuous of his weakness in relation to Born, so disgusted with his petty aspirations and youthful strivings, so sick over his failure to recognize that he was dealing with a monster, but who can blame a twenty-year-old boy for losing his bearings in the blur of sophistication and depravity that surrounds a person like Born? He had shown me something about myself that filled me with revulsion. But what had Walker done wrong? He had called for an ambulance on the night of the stabbing, and then, after a momentary lapse of courage, he had gone and talked to the police. Under the circumstances, no one could have done more than that. What ever revulsion Walker felt about himself could not have been caused by how he behaved at the end. It was the beginning that distressed him, the simple fact that he had allowed himself to be seduced, and he had gone on torturing himself about it for the rest of his life—to such an extent that now, even as his life was ending, he felt driven to march back into the past and tell the story of his shame. According to his letter, this was only the first chapter. I wondered what could possibly come next.

I wrote back to Walker that evening, assuring him that I had received his package, expressing concern and sympathy over the state of his health, telling him that in spite of everything I was happy to have heard from him after so many years, was moved by his kind words about the books I had published, and so on. Yes, I promised, I would adjust my schedule to make sure I could go to his house for dinner and would gladly discuss the problems he was having with the second chapter of his memoir. I don’t have a copy of my letter, but I remember that I wrote it in a spirit of encouragement and support, calling the chapter he had sent me both excellent and disturbing, or words to that effect, and telling him I felt the project was well worth seeing through to the end. I needn’t have said anything more, but curiosity got the better of me, and I concluded with what might have been an impertinence. Forgive me for asking, I wrote, but I’m not sure I can wait until next month to find out what happened to you after we last saw each other. If you’re feeling up to it, I would welcome another letter before I head for your neck of the woods. Not a blow-by-blow account, of course, but the gist, what ever you care to tell me.

Not wanting to entrust my letter to the vagaries of the U.S. Postal Service, I shipped it by express mail the following morning. Two days later, I received Walker’s express mail response.

Gratified, thankful, looking forward to next month.

In answer to your question, I’m more than happy to oblige you, although I’m afraid you’ll find my story rather dull. June 1969. We shook hands, I remember, vowed to stay in touch, and then walked off in opposite directions, never to meet again. I went back to my parents’ house in New Jersey, planning to visit for a couple of days, got drunk with my sister that night, tripped, fell down the stairs, and broke my leg. Bad luck, it would seem, but in the end it was the best thing that could have happened to me. Ten days later, Greetings!, and an invitation from the federal government to show up for my army physical. I hobbled into the draft board on crutches, was given a I-Y deferment because of the...