Astonishing, a masterpiece, Paul Auster’s greatest, most satisfying, most vivid and heartbreaking novel - a sweeping and surprising story of inheritance, family, love and 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.
Paul Auster was born to Jewish middle class parents by the name of Samuel and Queenie. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to France where he lived translating for French writers. Sincе he returned to America in 1974, he has published his own poems, essays, novels and translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.
He married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, in 1981. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer Lydia Davis. He is a father of two children - Daniel and Sophie.
Paul Auster is known as the most unorthodox and philosophical writer of crime fiction. His work can be best described as a fusion of existential theories, absurdism and criminal plots – his characters are usually people on the verge of society, complete outsiders, who try to start life from zero and reinvent the conditions under which the human situation revolves. The collection of detective stories “The New York Trilogy” brought him to international success, mesmerizing the audience with its fathomless quest for identity and meaning beyond the surface of our well-ordered and sterile modern lives. Paul Auster has been awarded the France Culture Prize for Foreign Literature in 1989 and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991. His postmodern twist of genres and themes has made it possible for the crime fiction to enter the reserved realm of serious literature. Paul Auster is also the Vice-President of PEN American Center.
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