Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1

The news of Paul Auster’s death caught me somewhere in the middle of 4 3 2 1, one of the novels that I enjoyed most from this writer. I don’t know about others, but I do dream from time to time about how my life would have looked like if I took another road, if some events from my life never happened. What would I have become if I hadn’t had a sister, if I chose another profile, another road, other people, if I said what bothered me from the beginning, and so on. There are the small things, when we look back in time, that make all the difference.

I don’t want to write a review here, because the world is probably full of reviews about this book, as it should be. Because I was already familiarised with Auster’s work and his plays with literary techniques (especially Travels in the Scriptorium), I already knew what to expect here, and how the book would end. What is, after all, the difference between us as fictionalised characters and us in the real world? Which ones would we prefer? Is there any way we can make the difference?

I guess that what Paul Auster does here is to write about all the aspects of Life, and that maybe he teaches us here that "Memory is identity" (Julien Barnes), and it’s not only those pieces of our puzzle that make our lives, but it’s also what we chose to remember as part of our identity and conscience, those people who were there for us in times of need and moulded our personality, from the presence (or absence) of parents, aunts, uncles or cousins that pathed our way to the importance of friends who later on in life became part of the family. No matter how many lives we have, no matter what roads we take, for all the Fergursons all those little things matter, because in the end, these are the things that make us humane, and this is in the center of this masterpiece.

Thus, Fergurson’s lives gravitate around these topics: motherhood (Rose who is always described as an ”extraordinary” mother, a devotion to her that almost resembles Cartarescu’s depiction of motherhood in his novels) and the lack of a father from his life (and people who successfully managed to substitute this role) the importance of sport, of good friends and how they have impacted his life, of sex and love, of the history of America (especially the way Afro-American people have been perceived or the influence of the Vietnam war inside America’s university campus), and the glue that keeps everything together: his passion for writing.  4 3 2 1 is among other things an encyclopedia of books that influenced Paul Auster’s career, and from time to time, there are hints and references to other ideas/books written by the author himself.

To put it in a nutshell, Paul Auster reminded me - perhaps when I needed the most - that I believe in the humanity of the human being, and if there is only one book that you should read in a year, I think this would be on the top list. 

Some of the lines that I mostly enjoyed: 

"The word psyche means two things in Greek, his aunt said. Two very different but interesting things. Butterfly and soul. But when you stop and think about it carefully, butterfly and soul aren't different, after all, are they? A butterfly starts out as a caterpillar, an ugly sort of earthbound, wormy nothing, and then one day the caterpillar builds a cocoon, and after a certain amount of time the cocoon opens and out comes the butterfly, the most beautiful creature in the world. That's what happens to souls as well, Archie. They struggle in the depths of darkness and ignorance, they suffer through trials and misfortunes, and bit by bit they become purified by those sufferings, strengthened by the hard things that happen to them, and one day, if the soul in question is a worthy soul, it will break out of its cocoon and soar through the air like a magnificent butterfly." (140)

"[...] remembering how his mother had ultimately replaced God in his mind as the supreme being, the human incarnation of the divine spirit, a flawed and mortal deity prone to the sulks and restless confusions that afflict all human beings, but he had worshipped his mother because she was the one person who never let him down, and no matter how many times he had disappointed her or proved himself to be less than he should have been, she had never not loved him and would never not love him to the end of her life.” (518) 

"No impulse to reinvent the world from the bottom up, no acts of revolutionary defiance, but a commitment to doing good in the broken world she belonged to, a plan to spend her life helping others, which was not a political act so much as a religious act, a religion without religion or dogma, a faith in the value of the one and the one and the one, a journey that would begin with medical school and then continue for however long it took to complete her psychoanalytic training, and while Amy and a host of others would have argued that people were sick because society was sick and helping them adjust to a sick society would only make them worse, Hallie would have answered, Please, go ahead and improve society if you can, but meanwhile people are suffering, and I have a job to do." (996-997)