by Jane Ciabattari

Paul Auster's fans know that beginning with his earliest work — his 1985-86 New York Trilogy, which revolves around a detective named Max Work — he has drawn upon the fast pacing, structure and noirish sleights of hand common to detective stories. He starts off with a mystery, sprinkles his pages with clues and constructs numerous elaborate scenarios in which Auster-like narrators find themselves randomly drawn into moments of violence or sexual pleasure.

His latest novel, Invisible, continues this tradition. It begins during the Vietnam era, a time of political turmoil and sometimes violent intergenerational conflict, when espionage and skulduggery infiltrated intellectual circles and university campuses.

Like most Auster novels, Invisible nests stories within stories. The first of four sections is set in 1967 and narrated by Adam Walker, a young poet studying at Columbia (Auster's alma mater). After a chance meeting, Adam is lured into a sexual triangle by an older man, a charismatic French visiting professor, Rudolf Born, and his girlfriend Margot.

Adam is aglow with youthful ambition, lust and self righteousness. His instinctive reaction to the enigmatic Born is to find him repellent. Yet he agrees to edit a literary magazine Born has offered to fund. Their enmeshment is in place when a random act of street violence triggers Adam's outrage at Born. His search for truth bedevils Adam for decades.

This first section of Invisible, it turns out, is the beginning of a memoir Adam is writing about his disturbing relationship with Born. In 2007, dying from leukemia, he has contacted Jim, a college classmate who became a successful author, and has asked for advice. Jim agrees to read the forthcoming sections of the memoir and is drawn into Adam's struggle to decipher the riddle of Rudolph Born.

Throughout the novel, Auster makes sure we are complicit in that search. We're with him, sifting through conflicting information, wondering who is telling the truth. Adam? Or Rudolph? After 40 years, can anyone's memory be trusted?

Some of Auster's novels are so solipsistic as to be virtually unreadable. And, indeed, there are scrappable moments in Invisible, as when Jim offers writing advice to Adam: "By writing about myself in the first person, I had smothered myself and made myself invisible. ... I needed to separate myself from myself, to step back and carve out some space between myself and my subject (which was myself) ..."

But Invisible won me over. Underlying Auster's game-playing is a powerful moral imagination. And he is superb at illuminating the ongoing reinvention of the self, and the subtle ways in which we collaborate with those who would seduce, deceive and betray us.

Read an excerpt of Invisible here.

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Philip Schultz will give a free public reading at Ithaca College on Tuesday, Sept. 15. His presentation, which is sponsored by the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series in the Department of Writing, will take place at 7:30 p.m. in Clark Lounge, Egbert Hall.

Schultz is the founder and director of The Writers Studio, a private school for fiction and poetry writing based in New York City. He has been called by Norman Mailer “a hell of a poet, one of the very best of his generation.” Despite its name, Schultz’s collection of poems titled “Failure” was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize “for distinguished volume of original verse.”

Other honors for Schultz’s poetry collections include the Lamont Poetry Selection award from the Academy of American Poets for “Deep Within the Ravine” and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for “Like Wings.”

Schultz has been awarded Fulbright, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as the Levinson Prize from “Poetry” magazine. His poems have been published in the “The New Yorker,” “Partisan Review,” “Paris Review” and “New Republic,” among other magazines.

Also giving readings in the Distinguished Visiting Writers series this fall will be National Book Award finalist Charles Baxter on Tuesday, Oct. 6, and essayist Jo Ann Beard on Wednesday, Oct. 28.

The death of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the age of 35 may have been caused by complications stemming from strep throat, according to a Dutch study published on Monday. Since the composer's death in 1791, there have been various theories about the cause of his untimely end, from intentional poisoning, to rheumatic fever, to trichinosis, a parasitic disease caused by eating raw or undercooked pork.

On his death certificate it was officially recorded that the cause of death was hitziges Frieselfieber, or "heated miliary fever," referring to a rash that looks like millet seeds.

But researchers from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands said studies on his death have generally been based on less-than-reliable evidence, like accounts from people who witnessed Mozart's final days, written decades after his death.

Their new study, reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was based on information from official death registers for Vienna in the winter of 1791 that places Mozart's death in a wider context. He died in Vienna.

"Our findings suggest that Mozart fell victim to an epidemic of strep throat infection that was contracted by many Viennese people in Mozart's month of death, and that Mozart was one of several persons in that epidemic that developed a deadly kidney complication," researcher Richard Zegers, of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, told Reuters Health.

Zegers and his colleagues said this "minor epidemic" of step throat, or streptococcal pharyngitis, may have begun in the city's military hospital.

According to witness accounts, Mozart fell ill with an "inflammatory fever," which is consistent with strep throat, Zegers and his colleagues wrote in their report.

The composer, who wrote more than 600 works during his life, eventually developed severe swelling, "malaise," back pain and a rash, consistent with a strep infection leading to kidney inflammation known as glomerulonephritis.

Zegers said it was also possible that Mozart had scarlet fever, which, like strep throat, can be caused by infection with streptococcal bacteria, but this was less likely because witnesses said Mozart developed a rash near the end of his illness and with scarlet fever, the rash appears early on.

(Reporting by Amy Norton from Reuters Health, Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)

   Known as the "red priest" because of his hair color and his membership in the clergy, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) was the most original and influential Italian composer of his generation. He wrote more than 500 concertos, which make up the bulk of his output, and the techniques he used to keep these works interesting and lively — deftly varying the texture and figuration, and favoring angular, energetic rhythms that packed extra punch — were adopted by composers all over the continent.

The concertos of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, published in 1725, demonstrate a wealth of effect using nothing more than string instruments. Their imagery — of birds in the spring, storms in summer, huntsmen in autumn and icy landscapes in winter — remains as vivid today as on the day the notes were penned.

Vivaldi wrote an illustrative sonnet as a guide to each of the concertos. Accordingly, "Spring," in the bright key of E major, celebrates the sounds of "joyful bird song," briefly interrupted as "gentle breezes give way to a passing storm." In the slow movement, a shepherd sleeps in the "pleasant flowering meadow," while a dog (the solo viola) barks. Nymphs dance a graceful gigue through the finale as the sun emerges from behind the clouds. It's all there in the sonnet Vivaldi wrote, and it's there in the music as well.

Read the full article by Ted Libbey here.