Paul Auster on Existential Doubt, Inspiration and 4 3 2 1

Granta's online editor Luke Neima interviews the novelist Paul Auster about his most recent book, 4 3 2 1. They touch on the inspiration for his latest novel – the longest of his career – the differences between fate and chance, and embedding historical events into fiction.

Video by Gaétan Nivon.

[luzvinosorio]

I finished yesterday this book. Beautiful and has pacing similar to A 100 years of solitude. It was a good journey

[froze-kl]

So happy to see Auster here.... one of the greatest literary minds.

[pauldockree]

History says, Don't hope On this side of the grave But then, once in a lifetime
The longed- for for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

Seamus Heaney.

[lidiawolanskyj]

This is what I wrote about it in APril 2020:
Paul Auster’s 4321
What immediately struck me was the pedestrian quality of the writing in the first chapter (1.1). It felt like he was in a hurry to just get down lots of very mundane historical information and he presented most of it in clichéd and hackneyed turns of phrase without developing characters or dialog beyond the predictable. It seems as though he had a whole novel but he couldn’t be bothered writing it all out. It was very disappointing because I was enchanted by the Book of Illusions, which I read years ago.
Then the conceit of four different boys being the same boy living different life paths. One reviewer wrote, “At the heart of this novel is a provocative question: What would have happened if your life had taken a different turn at a critical moment?” Well, no, that’s not what happens in this book. The different Archies don’t really have a critical moment when something else happened, and very often the critical moments that are there are not related to the boy at all. They are simply different developments of the same character with no real “turning point.” The story line is not like “Pretty Little Mistakes, ” the do-it-yourself novel where the heroine has a choice of doing A or B, the reader decides which and we see the outcome of her choices. It’s more as though Auster had FOUR novels that he could have written but he knew that the story lines weren’t dramatic or different enough to stand alone as great novels, so he decided to recycle the same characters (which he’s done many times in the past apparently) into one big fat novel with variegated story lines.
I wondered about maybe reading one of the story lines linearly to the end, rather than interlarded to see what the effect is. It’s clear that #2 dies young. He was very accident prone in 1.2, so when the story line disappears at 3 it’s obvious he was killed off...
In terms of character develoment, some of the passages of Ferguson inner workings when he’s little are not especially persuasive. At times he seems to be thinking in ways and of things that a kid of 5 or 7, even an extremely bright one, is unlikely to think.
One thing that really got me going was Auster’s apparent complete ignorance of what music is. “For some reason, [Ferguson] had trouble reading music, couldn’t fully absorb the symbols on the page...” blah blah into a detailed description of musical transcription—not music, not melody, not a well-tuned ear—and concludes “It was a sad defeat.” What? Dozens of great musicians had zero formal training and couldn’t read sheet music if their lives depended on it. It has nothing to do with making music. Even a composer doesn’t need to read music. There are always those who can transcribe the music that the composer hums or plays. Auster’s conclusions made as much sense as saying someone couldn’t be a storyteller because he couldn’t read words on a page... I suppose he hated learning music at some point and so the diatribe. I hated reading music as well as a kid, and played almost entirely by ear until I was 12 and was taken away from music lessons. I forced myself to finally read it seriously because I wanted to learn Moonlight Sonata. And I did.
After Auster killed off one of his four selves, I gave up trying to keep the threads of the four stories—or rather the three remaining stories—clear in my head, as the hero, supporting characters and past events are quite different, often dramatically so, and started reading all the bits that belonged to Ferguson 1, 2, 3 or 4 in sequence, rather than interlarded. Much more enjoyable.
In deciding to read the chronology of a single version of the hero sequentially, I could begin to appreciate that Ferguson 1 and 3 were interesting, rich, quite different, and likeable characters rather than spending mental energy trying to plug back into a story line with different characters after reading two or three unrelated ones in-between. But when I got into #4, it felt like Auster was running out of ideas or had become bored with his hero and this version becomes less and less interesting with each passing section. Another indication of Auster’s impatience with the exercise (this book) is his inclination at least twice to tell us something terrible will happen and then blithely whip through the period until that something comes to pass at the end of the chapter. It’s like because he’s bored himself, knowing where it’s all going (he planned it, after all), he wants to make sure the reader doesn’t get to enjoy any surprises in the unfolding plot, either.

[jackcarroll]

1:03 "He could care less." It's "he couldn't care less" if you could care less that means you do care somewhat... I love how someone who trys to come off so intelligent and knowing about language and literature just isn't.