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Summary
Summary
* * * Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize * * *
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post , The New York Times Book Review,
NPR, The Globe and Mail , Kirkus Reviews , Huffington Post , and The Spectator UK
"An epic bildungsroman . . . . Original and complex . . . . A monumental assemblage of competing and complementary fictions, a novel that contains multitudes ."-- Tom Perrotta , The New York Times Book Review
"A stunningly ambitious novel, and a pleasure to read . . . . An incredibly moving , true journey." -- NPR
New York Times Bestseller, Los Angeles Times Bestseller, Boston Globe Bestseller, National Indiebound Bestseller
Paul Auster's greatest, most heartbreaking and satisfying novel--a sweeping and surprising story of birthright and possibility, of love and of life itself.
Nearly two weeks early, on March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning, Ferguson's life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four identical Fergusons made of the same DNA, four boys who are the same boy, go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives. Family fortunes diverge. Athletic skills and sex lives and friendships and intellectual passions contrast. Each Ferguson falls under the spell of the magnificent Amy Schneiderman, yet each Amy and each Ferguson have a relationship like no other. Meanwhile, readers will take in each Ferguson's pleasures and ache from each Ferguson's pains, as the mortal plot of each Ferguson's life rushes on.
As inventive and dexterously constructed as anything Paul Auster has ever written, yet with a passion for realism and a great tenderness and fierce attachment to history and to life itself that readers have never seen from Auster before. 4 3 2 1 is a marvelous and unforgettably affecting tour de force.
Author Notes
Paul Auster was born on February 3, 1947, in Newark, New Jersey. He received a B.A. and a M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. In addition to his career as a writer, Auster has been a census taker, tutor, merchant seaman, little-league baseball coach, and a telephone operator. He started his writing career as a translator. He soon gained popularity for the detective novels that make up his New York Trilogy. His other works include The Invention of Solitude; Leviathan; Moon Palace; Facing the Music; In the Country of Last Things; The Music of Chance; Mr. Vertigo; and The Brooklyn Follies. His latest novels are entitled, Invisible and Sunset Park. In addition to his novels, Auster has written screenplays and directed several films. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a French Prix Medicis for Foreign Literature.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Almost everything about Auster's new novel is big. The sentences are long and sinuous; the paragraphs are huge, often running more than a page; and the book comes in at nearly 900 pages. In its telling, however, the book is far from epic, though it is satisfyingly rich in detail. It's a bildungsroman spanning protagonist Archie Ferguson's birth in 1947 to a consequential U.S. presidential election in 1974. Some warm opening pages are dedicated to the romance of the parents of Ferguson (as the third-person narrator refers to him throughout), Rose and Stanley. In its depiction of the everyday life of its hero, the book also gives a full history of America during this period through the eyes of Ferguson who, not coincidentally, is roughly the same age as Auster. He roots for the nascent Kennedy administration, sees Martin Luther King's peaceful resistance, and recognizes both the greatness and the iniquity in L.B.J.'s actions as president. These national events are juxtaposed against Ferguson's coming-of-age: he goes to summer camp, has a sad first love with a girl named Anne-Marie, and gets an education via his beloved aunt Mildred. One of the many pleasures of the book is Ferguson's vibrant recounting of his reading experiences, such as Emma Goldman's Living My Life, Voltaire's Candide, and Theodore White's The Making of the President, 1960. Auster adds a significant and immersive entry to a genre that stretches back centuries and includes Augie March and Tristram Shandy. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Auster has been turning readers' heads for three decades, bending the conventions of storytelling, blurring the line between fiction and autobiography, infusing novels with literary and cinematic allusions, and calling attention to the art of storytelling itself, not with cool, intellectual remove, but rather with wonder, gratitude, daring, and sly humor. Strands of his own experiences run throughout his novels, as do recurring tropes, characters, and themes. Beginning with his cherished mid-1980s New York Trilogy and on to his sixteenth novel, Sunset Park (2010), Auster's fiction is rife with cosmic riddles and rich in emotional complexity. He now presents his most capacious, demanding, eventful, suspenseful, erotic, structurally audacious, funny, and soulful novel to date. Auster's hero and narrator is Archibald Ferguson, born to Rose and Stanley, children of Jewish immigrants, in 1947 Newark. His father and uncles run an appliance-store empire. His father owns a small repair shop. His father dies. His parents divorce and remarry. His loving mother is a small-town portrait photographer; she is a famous, museum-grade photographer. Ferguson attends public school. He attends private school. He plays baseball and basketball. He struggles with unbridled lust and loneliness. He is enthralled by Laurel and Hardy; he publishes a handwritten newspaper in grade school. He's a stellar student; he's a delinquent. At 14, he writes a precociously knowing story titled Sole Mates (presented here in full) about a pair of shoes owned by a cop. He freaks out his English teacher. He loves summer camp; summer camp is catastrophic. He has many brilliant mentors. He attends Princeton; he attends Columbia; he refuses to go to college and moves to Paris. He becomes a sportswriter, a film critic, a fiction writer. He is sexually involved with men and women. He is obsessed with Amy Schneiderman, his friend, cousin, stepsister, lover, and polestar. Confusing? That's because there are actually four Archie Fergusons. Each Ferguson is precisely the same at the genetic level and, to a large degree, in temperament and passions. His narrative voice is consistent, as is his fierce attention to life, from sensuous nuance to the spinning roulette wheel of city life to war and profound social upheavals. But the particulars circumstances, events, accomplishments, and losses vary in ways great and small. Told in alternating chapters, these four variations on a character's life are disorienting until the novel establishes a quadraphonic rhythm, and it becomes clear that Auster is conducting a grand experiment, not only in storytelling, but also in the endless nature-versus-nurture debate, the perpetual dance between inheritance and free will, intention and chance, dreams and fate. This elaborate investigation into the big what if is also a mesmerizing dramatization of the multitude of clashing selves we each harbor within. Two other prominent Jewish American male writers together, with Auster, they form a nearly three-generational spread have lately written loosely autobiographical, socially and historically conscious family sagas narrated by a boy becoming a man: Michael Chabon's Moonglow (2016) and Jonathan Safran Foer's Here I Am (2016). For Auster, 4 3 2 1 is his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his The Adventures of Augie March. A paean to youth, desire, books, creativity, and unpredictability, it is a four-faceted bildungsroman and an Ars Poetica, in which Auster elucidates his devotion to literature and art. He writes, To combine the strange with the familiar: that was what Ferguson aspired to, to observe the world as closely as the most dedicated realist and yet to create a way of seeing the world through a different, slighting distorting lens. Auster achieves this and much more in his virtuoso, magnanimous, and ravishing opus.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
DEVILS BARGAIN: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising, by Joshua Green. (Penguin, $17.) Green's deeply reported account explores Bannon's origin story and how he helped pull off a major political upset: the election of Donald J. Trump. Their partnership - and shared talents for whipping up spectacle and outrage - ushered in what Bannon saw as the culmination of a global populist uprising. RUNNING, by Cara Hoffman. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) It's 1988 in Athens, and a group of hustlers roam the city's underbelly. Bridley, who has left the United States behind, joins a British couple, Jasper and Milo, and is soon folded into their relationship. Our reviewer, Justin Torres, praised these "memorable antiheroes," calling them "tough and resourceful, scarred, feral and sexy." STALIN AND THE SCIENTISTS: A History of Triumph and Tragedy 1905-1953, by Simon Ings. (Grove, $19.) For the founders of the Soviet Union, science was always a pillar of the state. But for scientists, the stakes were higher: If they published research the government did not endorse, they faced jail, exile or death. Ings offers a fascinating look at this establishment, which he calls "the glory and the laughingstock of the intellectual world." NEW BOY, by Tracy Chevalier. (Hogarth, $15.) In Chevalier's retelling of "Othello," part of Hogarth's series of novels revising Shakespeare plays, the events unfold over a single day on a Washington playground. When O, a sixth grader from Ghana, arrives at his new school in the 1970s, Dee, the most popular girl, is immediately drawn to him. As children and teachers alike weigh their unease with a black student in the school, a malicious classmate tries to torpedo the friendship - with a shocking conclusion. A HOUSE FULL OF FEMALES: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. (Vintage, $18.) The author, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, draws on diaries, letters and even quilts to understand how women reacted to their church's controversial embrace of polygamy. But even as Mormon women strained under domestic responsibility, they were able to become political actors. 4 3 2 l, by Paul Auster. (Picador, $18.) After Archie Ferguson, the novel's central character, is born, Auster offers up four distinct versions of his life, with characters and themes that recur across his different lives. Our reviewer, Tom Perrotta, called the story "a work of outsize ambition and remarkable craft, a monumental assemblage of competing and complementary fictions, a novel that contains multitudes."
Library Journal Review
Auster (The Brooklyn Follies) offers four possible renderings of the life of Archibald Isaac Ferguson, born March 3, 1947, in Newark, NJ. In rotating narratives, Archie tells the listener of his coming of age in New York, New Jersey, and Paris. Characters recur, often taking differing roles in the four narratives: sometimes lovers, sometimes relatives, for example. Archie, too, is a different person in each piece. These complex tales are told with much humor and much insight into the tumult of the 1960s: the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK; the Vietnam War; college life and activism; race riots; the arts; young love and sexuality; and writing and publishing. This long novel is ably read by the author. Those who wish to revisit previous narratives for clarification as the work progresses should also consider hard copy. VERDICT Highly recommended for adult audio collections. Listeners who also came of age in the 1960s may most enjoy this work. ["Auster illuminates how the discrete moments in one's life form the plot points of a sprawling narrative, rife with possibility": LJ 1/17 starred review of the Holt hc.]-Cliff Glaviano, formerly with -Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.