Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel, Invisible, is a story about a man trying to tell a story. We see him as a twenty-year-old, and then as a sixty-year-old, struggling to get the story of his twenty-year-old self out. But a life cannot be bound to words, and will have to remain an enigma, invisible forever and ever. Auster explores this impossibility, this essential truth about ourselves and story telling, with all of the artistry of his sixty-three years.

In the early half of the eighteen hundreds the French Neo-Classical painter Ingres sneeringly described the younger Romantic painter Delacroix as “a disciple of ugliness”. A century later the French novelist Jean Genet claimed that “Ugliness is Beauty at rest.” Between these two events stretches the Romantic revolution in art.

You tried grabbing the moon when I was holding you, arm outstretched, small hand clutching for night sky. I laughed, said, you can do it, and there it was in your palm, opaque ball humming like an electric heart.

All experience becomes raw material for that moment when a painting happens.

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