Tot ongeveer pagina 850 kon ik geen genoeg krijgen van dit boek. Het is het verhaal van Ferguson’s leven, maar dan vier keer opgeschreven, met kleine variaties. Door toevalligheden worden de verschillen groter naarmate hij ouder wordt. In alle versies is hij verliefd op Amy. Hij scheelt maar drie maanden met Amy en zij zit daardoor een klas hoger. In het ene verhaal is het zijn stiefzus en in de andere versie een nichtje. Hij gaat naar verschillende universiteiten of hij gaat naar Parijs. Aan het eind wordt het verhaal erg gedetailleerd met lijsten van films over zelfmoord. Maar ook over de top 100 van boeken om te lezen, die zijn stiefvader Gil hem meegeeft naar Parijs. Of de redenen waarom Celia Federman hem zal verlaten...lees verder >

4 3 2 1 follows four Fergusons from their births to a Jewish family on March 3, 1947, in Newark, N.J. Each chapter is divided into four numbered sections, corresponding with each different version of Ferguson. They're the same person, in a way, but their lives follow dramatically different paths. One dies at 13, struck by a falling tree limb during a thunderstorm; his sections after that are left blank.... it's a stunningly ambitious novel, and a pleasure to read. Auster's writing is joyful, even in the book's darkest moments, and never ponderous or showy. "Time moved in two directions because every step into the future carried a memory of the past," one of the Fergusons muses, "... and while all people were bound together by the common space they shared, their journeys through time were all different, which meant that each person lived in a slightly different world from everyone else." Auster proves himself a master of navigating these worlds, and even though all might not happen for the best in any of them, it's an incredibly moving, true journey.

Auster gives us four parallel versions of Archie. Each pursues a passage all his own, although there are some striking continuities, beginning with a common ancestor: a grandfather who, when asked his name at Ellis Island, "blurted out in Yiddish, Ikh hob fargessen (I've forgotten)! And so it was that Isaac Reznikoff began his new life in America as Ichabod Ferguson." ...Archie is an aesthete, although this means different things to different variants. In one story line, he is a fiction writer and in another a journalist. It’s a game to a certain extent, in which the structure of the book reminds us of its own conditionality, the mutability of narrative, the notion that stories, like lives, are only fixed when they are done.... what’s most striking about the novel is the way its different narratives reflect, rather than diverge from, one another, what they share rather than what sets them apart.... "4321" is a long book, and it can meander through the details and detritus of a life — or quartet of lives. Still, what's compelling always is its sense that the most important time exists within us, the time of memory and imagination, out of which identity is forged.

He packs the books with minor characters of assorted races and ages, and attempts to conjure up a jaunty urban cacophony. That goal, however, is incompatible with Auster’s habitual style, which is a top-down, summarizing narration that closes like a fist around the proceedings. His novels are short on dramatic scenes and dialogue, and it’s not easy to celebrate a polyglot metropolis when you’re unaccustomed to letting characters speak for themselves. Whoever is telling the story—whoever is speaking, period—always sounds too much like Paul Auster ... Sprawling, repetitive, occasionally splendid, and just as often exasperating, 4 3 2 1 is never quite dull, but it comes too close to tedium too often; there is no good reason for this novel to be eight hundred and sixty-six pages long, or for every Archie’s love of baseball and movies and French poetry to be rhapsodized over, or for every major headline of the nineteen-fifties and sixties to come under review.