4321
I have 13 Paul Auster novels on my bookshelves (14 if you include The Red Notebook ) and each one of them has been duly read and loved – with degrees of love, admittedly, but always love. I bought 4321 when it was released but baulked at it until December 2018. When you read the first of its 866 pages, you can understand that a commitment of time is needed. Not only that, but because the story is really 3 alternatives to 1 story (or 4 closely related, alternate stories) there is no use reading a few pages each day because you will just get lost. In the end, with other duties to attend to, I started in the holiday period and set myself the goal of getting through 50-60 pages a day, and that is an approach I can recommend for this weighty tome. Before starting the novel, I had understood the narrative strategy of providing the reader with different pathways for the main character, Archie Ferguson. However, it took me a few chapters to work out what was going on. Chapter “1.0” acts as