From the memoir 'The Invention of Solitude', Auster's highly personal reflection on his shell of a father, and ghost of man:
"From a bag of loose pictures: a trick photograph taken in an Atlantic City studio sometime during the Forties. There are several of him sitting around a table, each image shot from a different angle, so that at first you think it must be a group of several men. Because of the gloom that surrounds them, because of the utter stillness of their poses, it looks as if they have gathered there to conduct a seance. And then, as you study the picture, you begin to realize that all these men are the same man. The seance becomes a real seance, and it is as if he has come there only to invoke himself, to bring himself back from the dead, as if by multiplying himself, he had inadvertently made himself disappear. There are five of him there, and yet the nature of the trick photography denies the possibility of eye contact among the various selves. Each one is condemned to go on staring into space, as if under the gaze of the others, but seeing nothing, never able to anything. It is a picture of death, a portrait of an invisible man."
- Reprinted in the Picador edition of Auster's Collected Prose (2003)
The memoir is disjointed, as is Auster's memory of his elusive father. He paints the portrait of solitary, distant man, which often reads as a sort of train of thought narrative - as if Auster is figuring out his relationship with his father as he shuffles through His shuttered mansion, one dusty room, and one paragraph at a time.
