4 3 2 1
Ratings13
Average rating4.3
15
Ratings13
Average rating4.3
"Paul Auster's greatest, most heartbreaking and satisfying novel -- a sweeping and surprising story of birthright and possibility, of love and of life itself: a masterpiece. 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."--
"A sweeping family saga (with a bit of a twist) about the life and loves of Archie Ferguson, a Jewish boy born to second-generation immigrants in the United States just after World War II"--
Reviews with the most likes.
2.5 stars. It was long. Loooooonnnngggg. Long. I loved the premise, one protagonist living 4 different possible lives. Yes please! The writing was decent, but it was just too damn long. I stopped caring about the characters and just wanted to get it over with.
Really conflicted about this book. I think it started off well and I could get on board with the premise, but ultimately it felt over-stuffed. It was way too long, I think that the author tried to do far too much and the second half just trailed off. I don't have a problem at all with long books, but this didn't really managed to sustain the storyline and it got a bit confusing. Due to the focus being on the first half of the protagonist's (plural) lives, and having to avoid making the book even longer, Archie ended up a quite insufferable child prodigy at times, and world events and cultural references ended up as large lists of books that he read, women he slept with or things that happened. I would've given it four stars but I HATED the ending, it was just too smugly clever for it's own good (much like the protagonist I suppose).
4321 is quite a read. Auster's biggest, most ambitious novel to date, this semi-autobiographical tale follows the trials and growing pains of one Archie Ferguson as he lives, and loves, in and around New York through the turbulent decades of the 50s and 60s. Well, not one Archie Ferguson. Four.
What Auster pulls off here is a huge feat of imagination as he let's his protagonist grow into a young boy, who rather precociously, wonders if there other versions of himself exist for every decision he makes or does not make. And so the story branches off into four separate tales of “Archie Ferguson”, each version shaped by his decisions and environment and the events that happen because of those events and environments. One's father dies, the others are estranged; one's mother is a successful photographer, another has his mother remarry and give up photography. The supporting cast of characters, cousins, best friends, aunts and uncles, all collide and intertwine in different ways, each having their own effect on that particular Archie.
It's a huge novel with a huge heart, with less of the affected surrealism that sometimes makes Auster a bit heavy going. Instead 4321 is immensely readable, Archie is a mostly likeable protagonist, even when his stubbornness makes his motives a bit hard to swallow. We get to see him fall in love with different women (or men in one case), go to different colleges (or not go), to live in New York, or Paris, to fail, and succeed. But what all these Archies have in common is one all consuming need - to write; to make art out of words.
Each one has a different career in writing, each one struggles with his muse, plagued by doubts, helped by friends, lovers, relations. Poetry, prose and journalism all play a part here.
What we also get is a potted history of college protest at the height of the Viet Nam war at Columbia and Princeton. The galvanising effect that conflict had on a generation of young Americans gives a political edge to the stories, with Archie more of a witness than participant. It's great writing.
The end of each Archie is different, as they stumble into the dog days of the sixties. I won't spoil what happens to each. You'll have to read the book. And I really hope you do.
Recommended.
The clever format of this book—one character with four different lives—is the draw to this book. It's a huge book, with my hardcover copy of 866 pages, but it's not only long but dense. The sentences run on and on, and the reader can't escape from the strings of words, the story of Archie Ferguson, the stories of the Archie Fergusons, wound around the story of America in the 60's. Oddly, the Archies all seem equally plausible, a boy who adores his father or a boy estranged from his father, a boy who loves Amy or a boy who befriends Amy, all the ways that life can weave and jump and pop and skip equally true and possible. I don't think I've ever come to know a single character as well as I have Archie Ferguson, and I honestly wish I didn't know him as well as I've come to know him, with some versions speaking cruel words and severing ties with others, and some versions committing destructive acts with terrible results. It was a marathon of a read; I'm both glad I read it alongside some other version of myself who is glad she didn't.
