4 3 2 1

This book is definitely not for everyone, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's incredibly long and very slowly paced, but it's also intricately detailed, and methodically planned. On one level, it's a tale about the four different ways a young man's life could go. On another level, it's a vivid picture of life in New York in the 1960s, with special emphasis placed on political and social turmoil. It's also a bit of a love letter to literature, poetry, and the act of writing. Perhaps the most compelling part of the book to me were the vividly realized characters. It was hard to imagine that they were all simply inventions from Auster's mind and not real people. It may be difficult for some readers to commit to such a long and slow read, but if you're willing to live in this world for a long time, Auster will take you on an interesting and compelling journey.

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).

Auster's use of duration makes you deeply and uncomfortably aware of the parallel lives you're not leading. In his 4 versions of 1 life story, anything that you think should stick is on shifting ground (sexuality, broad strokes of human relations, lifelong careers all provide to be results of banal contingencies) and anything arbitrary can have staying power (liking films lol). There are two endings. One is weak - to be vague, he briefly suggests that the 1,000 pages you've just read are a matter of ‘epistemology' rather than ‘ontology', and that spoils the meal. Auster has always been too cool (read: undisciplined) to care about the coherence of the random narrative devices he lobs over to his readers - they often do not fit in the novel, they are just novel. That is the sense in which he is a post modernist (the rest of his work reads very modernist). The other is strong - after 1,000 pages on the absurd twists and turns that violently stich together one already above average life, he shows us there are true men of agency and destiny who fuck shit up for the rest of us because they are simply too powerful.

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.

This book is 100% not a novel I'd normally pick up - but my “read the lit prize shortlist” challenge brought it to my attention, and this type of novel is absolutely why I'm expanding my reading horizons with that challenge.

A 800+ page novel, written by a dude, about another dude? Pass. Not my wheelhouse, not my interest list, not for me. And yet. Somehow, I am completely and utterly in love with this behemoth of a story about the four lives of Archie Ferguson.

I think tackling this on audiobook was the way to go - I'm sure I would have bailed trying to get through the print version. But somehow, against the odds, I found myself sucked in to Archie's world - Archie's FOUR worlds, to be exact, and the tiny decisions that completely altered the trajectory of his lives.

AND - let's be honest - Rose Ferguson and Amy Schneiderman are a couple of FAN-freaking-TASTIC female characters. Good job, Auster, for giving readers these two complex and important women to impact Archie's life.

I am 100% sure this book is not for everyone - but good gracious, am I glad I gave it a chance.

The first Auster I've read, and it didn't disappoint. This one's a huge book, 1141 pages in the Finnish edition, and it kept me captivated until the end. Ok, some parts of the university life I ended up a bit glossing over, but the beginning and the end were particularly good.

My knowledge of the 1950s and 1960s in the US has been a bit weak; Forrest Gump comes to mind, but not much else, thus it was quite interesting to read about the social movements in the 1960s.

All in all a fascinating approach.