4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I will begin with a confession that I have never read anything like 4 3 2 1. And, that is what made reading it partly fascinating and partly exhausting for me, not to mention a bit confusing too on several occasions. The story sort of outlines the butterfly effect, or the belief that small causes can have larger effects. It starts a little before March 3, 1947, in Newark, New Jersey, where Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson is born. And from here, the writer takes you along on the journey of 4 different Archi’s ( as our protagonist likes to be known ) lives and the way it takes varied twists and turns in response on the various triggers that lay in the path. The same boy with the same DNA and the same set of parents walks an entirely different path in his life as if the circumstances of his birth are fed into a random generator which produces out a new kind of life with every iteration.
I loved the idea of exploring how an individual’s life could vary so much by some seemingly meaningless triggers or events. The book, I am sure will force every reader to ponder over several what-ifs of his/her life during the course of the book. I sure did! As much as we desire to be control of our lives, it is not always so. I realised that there are countless determinants and influences in our lives over which we have no control whatsoever. Blinded by hubris, we don’t often realise that a lot happens in our lives and in the spheres that touch it that happenstance or a result of several things going right/wrong. For example, all the 4 “Archi”s in our stories become writers, but what they write about, how they write and why they write what they write is different. It makes you pause and marvel at the various influences we have around us, of both kinds, the good and the bad. And we don’t even realise that we have been influenced until much later in our lives. This intrigue was the biggest reason I plodded on with this book. And the way historical events such as the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and the assassination of President Kennedy influence our protagonist’s life is compelling enough to read ahead on several occasions.
As interesting as the premise sounds, it also comes with its own set of complications. It is this unpredictable nature that keeps thing interesting for the reader. At 800+ pages it is one the longest books I have read off late, a task made more difficult by the fact that the sentences are long, really long. That and plenty of American pop culture references made it a moderately difficult read for me. It got pretty annoying at a few places I will confess, I had a lot of difficulty in keeping a calm hand and not ditch the book on those instances. The task was made difficult by the fact that every time the story flips to a different Archi, it is completely different from the previous one. The author does leave some breadcrumbs at the beginning of each chapter, but they were not always adequate for me. At some point, the reader is bound to lose track of which Archi is doing what. Each of his 4 lives is divided into episodes, and they are presented to the reader together. For example, the first part of the book takes you through 4 childhoods that Archi grows out of, each varying quite a lot from another.
In a nutshell, it is not an easy book to read. It tested my patience, I read it over 6-7 weeks, taking breaks quite often. Having said that, it is most certainly a wonderfully unorthodox piece of fiction. Difficult but certainly not dull I would say!
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