PAUL AUSTER Invisible ***(*)

I think this book is brilliant, but I didn't always like reading it.

To start with it seems very straightforward. Adam Walker tells the story of his life in 1967, when as an undergraduate and aspiring poet, he meets in New York the devilish Professor Rudolf Born and his girlfriend Margot. Out of the blue Born offers to finance a literary magazine with Adam as editor, which is very flattering to Adam, who is at the same time starting an affair with Margot. Born's amoral and violent nature is always evident, but it comes to the fore when he murders a mugger. Adam, who's witnessed it, decides he wants no more to do with him.

We then discover that all we've read so far is the text of the first part of a memoir Adam has handed to an old college friend in 2007. And we start doubting the truth of what we've been told. The friend, a publisher, suggests writing in the second person could release Adam's writer's block. And it seems to work, and the story unfolds some more, with some lurid reminiscences of sexual shenanigans with this his sister - if he's telling the truth.

The last section is in the third person. So it's all clever clogs literary stuff. But Auster (who I was reading for the first time) gets away with it and you keep turning the pages.