Hi friends, I hope you’re all having a good Wednesday! Today I’m going to be posting my review of Paul Auster’s novel 4321.

4 3 2 1 by: Paul Auster: On March 3, 1947 Archie Ferguson is born in Newark, New Jersey and over the course of the novel, Ferguson’s life will take on four coinciding, yet separate paths as he navigates the world from boyhood to becoming a young man. This was definitely an intriguing coming of age story and a really long novel, yet all the details that took place had relevance to the main character’s story. This wasn’t so much a plot driven novel, but a character driven one where the course of events that centred around this one character changed and altered. The concept of the novel was really interesting, creating four versions of the main character and watching how each version tells a truth about them, but after a while reading about this character’s life got really tiresome. At first, it was really confusing to the reader why the timeline to the story was changing, it took a few chapters to realize that there were different versions of the same story happening. The plot didn’t really interest the reader, but the main character, Ferguson, did. Auster did a great job of creating this character who had many dimensions; the fact that there were four versions of Ferguson, all varying degrees of difference and similarities between them really helped shape this really rounded character. There was just something about Ferguson as a character that made him so likeable and really propelled the reader to want to read his story until the end. The ending wasn’t exactly what the reader had hoped for, it felt too meta, although the reader should have seen it coming as Ferguson was a writer, but it left the ending slightly disappointing. The underlying themes of racism and oppression were very clear in this novel and Auster handled them well; talking about history as it is point blank and creating characters who were willing to protest and to have the hard conversations. As much as this novel was really lengthy, it had its highs and lows; this novel isn’t for everyone, this is for fans of historical fiction with multiple timelines.