Writers work at their craft for years.
They do all sorts to survive; maintaining their finance and their mental well being on little. Word after word, sentence after sentence, writers walk their lonely path to an undisclosed destination. They can bring out book after book, and story after story, never to get attention, never to become something that may amount to something else. They are the hopeful. But by reaching a grand old age they may finally produce a fruit of such tender care that they are restored youthful again.
Dear readers I present to you 4321: Paul Auster's Great American Novel.
America has a knack of producing big novels about big themes taking hours and pages of time to both read and write. It has to in order to cope with the sheer scale of everything giving writers no end of fair copy.
Paul's offering is along the same direction and at the same time a total reversal of everything we know and expected of the Great Life of Ferguson, a man who lives so fully that he occupies no less then four lives, each one similar and yet wildly different.
To give an understanding of what this novel means to the Genre of Novels it is important to understand that Paul's account of Ferguson obeys a total understanding of the Art of the Novel and a total disregard to how a story is put together.
Let us begin with chronology. Stories work by Starting-Middling-Ending with focus on Highs and Lows and Development of Character. The conception of this novel envisions one character with four lives and consequentially has four startings, four endings and a hell of a lot of middling, with massive fluctuations of highs, lows and a forked development of character.
The tone is big in theme and scope yet the details are highly nuanced, carefully put together and a work of supreme art. Though easily readable this, be assured, is unusually complex craft that takes more than simple dedication but also an intricate understanding of not only how novels work but how films work and how politics work and how having sex works, which is not only an astounding level of detail but also of endurance.
In this sturdy American box he puts in metric tons of mainly French Continental Philosophy, Avant Garde twitches, touches and flourishes and his own chance encounters testing his abilities and stretching his talents until they seem to be unable to go any further, yet the ease and grace and suave skill he puts into all of this is not only admirable but it is a balm for the heart. Leaving the book one comes away with not merely feeling that Paul's intellectual capacity is at full flow but that his heart is on full strength and the two are beautifully combined in a book to live in.
Paul's back catalogue involves many seemingly strange and odd stories fashioned in the oldest of ways where he has consistently experimented and stayed true to the traditions of novel writing adding to the canon a truly great book, which, to this viewer's eyes suggests a full bloodied candidate to the Nobel Prize.
One hopes that the Committee finds such a book worthy enough to award it's author the highest award for literature, which is not to do disservice to his many other books that have led him to this almighty summit of a lifelong mountain Auster has valiantly climbed through all weathers and conditions, doing us the service of making his view deeply readable.
As an almost lifelong fan of your work I congratulate you and thank you for such generosity of imagination that you have willingly shared with us and wish you all the best for it's consequences and varied possibilities.
Fini
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