This is a book about memory, which is like

a place, a sequence of columns, cornices, porticoes.
The body inside the mind, going from one place to another, and the sound of our footsteps as we walk, moving from one place to the next

.
The occasion to address memory arises from the death of the author’s father (the first part of the book): a man who had always lived a solitary life, not physically, but because he was somehow detached from everything taking place around him.
The writer recounts his father’s life, evoking various episodes and tracing back as far as the murder of his grandfather by his father’s mother.
What emerges is how memory constitutes an assemblage of fragments and images one strives to preserve: “the anecdote as a form of knowledge.”
Can writing about a loved one bring them back to memory, enabling us to know them better and to know ourselves better? The book is also the search for a father never truly known to the depths of his being, the chronicle of a profound nostalgia, but also of a discovery.

The rampant, totally mystifying force of contradiction.
I understand now that each fact is cancelled out by another fact, that each thought brings with it another and opposite thought.
Impossible to say anything without reservation

.
Like all of Auster’s books, it is written in an elegant and lucid English, set within a paradoxical context that delves deep into emotions and states of mind, verging on philosophy.

The invention of solitude