IV III II I

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster

This is the blurb:

Nearly two weeks early, on March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning, Ferguson’s life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four identical Fergusons made of the same DNA, four boys who are the same boy, go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives.

As inventive and dexterously constructed as anything Paul Auster has ever written, yet with a passion for realism and a great tenderness and fierce attachment to history and to life itself that readers have never seen from Auster before. 4 3 2 1 is a marvellous and unforgettably affecting tour de force.

Review from The Guardian

One of several things Paul Auster shares with the protagonist of his new novel is an admiration for the 18th-century German writer Heinrich von Kleist, whose work (we know from Auster’s letters to JM Coetzee, published in 2013) “overwhelmed” Auster when he reread it seven years ago. “He tells and tells but doesn’t show much, which everyone says is the wrong way to go about it,” observes the hero of 4321, which might have been written to defy that boring old advice yet ends up confirming its wisdom.

A Bildungsroman, it lays out four parallel lives of Archibald Isaac Ferguson, born of Russian-Jewish descent in New Jersey in 1947. An early chapter ends after an uncle burgles his father’s white goods store; the next chapter rewinds the narrative, with the store burned down, not robbed. Auster replays it a third time – the store burns down with Ferguson’s father inside – before a final alternative shows the business thriving.

We’re lured in by Auster’s fine-grained scene-setting and intrigue at his intentions. The perspective is puzzling: we’re inside the protagonist’s mind but also told of what he was “still too young at that point to understand”. We’re curious, too, as to what Auster means when he says Ferguson’s parents appear “in the all-inclusive, authorised edition of The Book of Terrestrial Life”, a strange-sounding work that remains mysterious when it appears for the fifth and final time some 700 pages later.

By that time, 4321 has long settled into a largely unsurprising coming-of-age tale of sexual longing and literary ambition. Auster gives us heft without density: there are few stakes in this Borgesian garden of forking paths. The hero might sleep with Amy Schneiderman or Brian Mischevski; go to Columbia or Princeton; become a basketball reporter or a movie critic; get killed in a road accident or only maimed, but the story lines cancel each other out instead of adding substance.  

Paul Auster: ‘I'm going to speak out as often as I can, otherwise I can't live with myself'

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The sentences, plausibly inspired by what Auster has called Kleist’s “great hatchet-blows of thought”, usually run about half the length of this review and often a good deal longer. But Kleist’s model sits ill with Auster’s preoccupations. Where Kleist’s 1810 novella Michael Kohlhaas “tells and tells” us about its hero’s bloody rampage, 4321 tells and tells us about Ferguson’s first taste of couscous or about how good he is at “parallel parking, the tight-squeeze operation that was the downfall of so many would-be motorists”. You can fill 864 pages pretty quickly writing like this.

While there’s an everyman tint to Ferguson, Auster is keen to show how special he is, whatever the incarnation. A girl from Brussels with “breasts fuller than might have been expected” tells him he knows “10 times more than any 10 of these idiot Americans put together” when he brings up Leopold II’s atrocities in the Congo (guess what the girl does next?). The “finest literary mind in Princeton” says it’s “a privilege” to meet him after reading his student short stories. When a prostitute says he’s “a good-looking boy with a pretty pecker”, there’s no question she doesn’t mean it.

As the last Ferguson standing makes it into the Nixon era, the novel’s girth guarantees suspense: how will Auster play the hand he’s spent so long assembling? That the novel should hymn the power of imagination is hardly a shock – he’s been here before – but in a book that is longer than his last three novels put together, the finale has the air of a bad joke. I can’t tell if it’s better or worse that he seems utterly sincere.

What I thought:  The critics seem to have been very harsh on Paul Auster.  I chose to listen to this novel on Audible.  All 35 hours of it.  There was good and bad in this decision.  Paul Auster's reading was easy to listen to and for the most part held my concentration.  However it took a while for the penny to drop when a particular section would be announced as "blank" because that incarnation of the young man Archie had died in a previous section.  For this a hard copy of the book was necessary, which I had in fact bought.  It is a fat tome and took, I believe, over 5 years to write.  Would I recommend it to my fellow readers.  Probably not unless you have loads of time to read, leg in plaster and up in traction (?!) and want something sustained to get your teeth into!

Daily Telegraph: "Paul Auster's new novel, 4321, is as big as his ego – review
Los Angeles Times: " For a doorstopper, Paul Auster's '4 3 2 1' is surprisingly light"   

History of Wolves

History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

A good and fair Review from NPR, National Public Radio, US:

There's a reason that some readers view contemporary coming-of-age novels with suspicion. Too many play out the same way: An odd but winsome young person goes on some kind of journey of discovery, either literal or figurative, and learns something about himself or herself in the process. Often, there's an awkward romance. And the ending, whether happy or otherwise, can usually be described as bittersweet.

There are exceptions, of course, and Emily Fridlund's electrifying debut novel History of Wolves is one of them. The book doesn't follow the now-familiar narrative arc that other novels in the genre do. There's no moment of revelation at the end; if anything, the protagonist ends up more confused than she was at the beginning. Fridlund refuses to obey the conventions that her sometimes hidebound colleagues do, and her novel is so much the better for it.

History of Wolves follows a 14-year-old girl named Madeline, though nobody calls her that: "At school, I was called Linda, or Commie, or Freak." The unkind nicknames are the result of her upbringing on a northern Minnesota commune, long since abandoned by all of its idealistic residents, with the exception of her parents. To them, Linda is something of an enigma, overly serious, lacking the heedless playfulness of other children. "[My mother] wanted very badly for me to cavort and pretend, to prove I was unharmed, happy," Linda muses, but she finds herself unable to participate in the ruse.

Linda's year is changed by the arrival of a new history teacher, Mr. Grierson, the kind of adult desperate to be seen as cool by his adolescent charges. Linda makes a passing attempt to seduce him; later, he's arrested and accused of possessing child pornography and having sex with one of his students.

'History of Wolves' isn't a typical thriller any more than it's a typical coming-of-age novel

Michael Schaub

When a new family moves across the lake from the mostly abandoned commune, Linda sees a chance to distract herself from her unhappy home and school life. She develops a quick affection for Patra, a young woman who works editing her astronomer husband's manuscripts, and their four-year-old boy, Paul. The couple hires Linda to babysit Paul during the summer days.

Linda doesn't know quite what to make of Paul, or of children in general. "By their nature, it came to me, children were freaks," she thinks. "They believed impossible things to suit themselves, thought their fantasies were the center of the world. They were the best kinds of quacks, if that's what you wanted — pretenders who didn't know they were pretending at all."

Patra, Paul and Linda grow close, although Linda harbors misgivings about Leo, the quiet and mysterious father of the boy. It doesn't take long for Linda's doubts to be confirmed, when something terrible happens — it's out of the blue, and it leaves both Linda and the reader in shock.

History of Wolves isn't a typical thriller any more than it's a typical coming-of-age novel; Fridlund does a remarkable job transcending genres without sacrificing the suspense that builds steadily in the book. She's particularly effective using descriptions of nature to provide eerie foreshadowing: "You know how summer goes. You yearn for it and yearn for it, but there's always something wrong. ... The afternoons are so fat and long. You want to see if anything you do matters."

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment in the novel is Fridlund's portrayal of Linda, who the reader encounters not just as a teenager, but, in brief flash-forward scenes, as an adult still psychically wounded from the events of the summer. Sometimes people overcome the traumas they were subjected to as children; sometimes they don't. For most people, and for Linda, it's somewhere in between.

"Maybe there is a way to climb above everything, some special ladder or insight, some optical vantage point that allows a clear, unobstructed view of things," an adult Linda reflects. "But isn't that the crux of the problem? Wouldn't we all act differently if we were someone else?"

Looking in hindsight isn't any more accurate than trying to predict the future, of course; and neither really works out for Linda. But she's such an incredible character — both typical and special, sometimes capable of great love and sometimes spectacularly not — that it's hard to turn away from her sometimes horrifying story. History of Wolves is as beautiful and as icy as the Minnesota woods where it's set, and with her first book, Fridlund has already proven herself to be a singular talent.

Fish have no Feet

Fish Have No Feet

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017.
Keflavik: a town that has been called the darkest place in Iceland, surrounded by black lava fields, hemmed in by a sea that may not be fished. Its livelihood depends entirely on a U.S. military base, a conduit for American influences that shaped Icelandic culture and ethics from the 1950s to the dawn of the new millennium.

It is to Keflavik that Ari – a writer and publisher – returns from Copenhagen at the behest of his dying father, two years after walking out on his wife and children. He is beset by memories of his youth, spent or misspent listening to Pink Floyd and the Beatles, fraternising with American servicemen – who are regarded by the locals with a mixture of admiration and contempt – and discovering girls. There is one girl in particular he could never forget - her fate has stayed with him all his life.

Layered through Ari's story is that of his grandparents in a village on the eastern coast, a world away from modern Keflavik. For his grandfather Oddur, life at sea was a destiny; for Margrét its elemental power brings only loneliness and fear.

Both the story of a singular family and an epic that sparkles with love, pain and lifelong desire with all of human life.   Fish have no Feet is a novel of profound beauty and wisdom by a major international writer.

By the author of the acclaimed trilogy, Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels and The Heart of Man; you can read a review of Fish have no Feet from the Irish Times:

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/fish-have-no-feet-by-j%C3%B3n-kalman-stef%C3%A1nsson-translated-by-philip-roughton-1.2813844

Patres nostres

Our Fathers by Andrew O'Hagan

Jamie returns to Scotland with his grandfather, the legendary social reformer Hugh Bawn, now living out his last days on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise.  The young man is faced with the unquiet story of a country he thought he had left behind and now he listens to the voices of ghosts, and what they say about his own life.  It is a story of love and landscape, of nationality and strong drink, of Catholic faith and the end of the old left.  It is a tale of dark hearts and modern houses - of three men in search of Utopia.  Jamie Bawn's journey home will leave him changed beyond words - beyond the words that darkened his childhood.

The story, set in post WWII Scotland, is also about the “coming of age” of Jamie, a young boy growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father and a weak, ineffectual mother. One day, after a brutal beating of his mother by his drunken father, thirteen year old Jamie realizes he can no longer tolerate his home environment and moves in with his father’s parents, who have provided the only source of stability throughout his young life.

Jamie remains with his grandparents until he finishes school and then moves to England to strike out on his own. He returns to Scotland ten years later for an extended visit when he learns that Hugh, his grandfather, is dying. As he and his grandfather reminisce about the past, Jamie thinks to himself: “Once upon a time it was Hugh that had shown me, a young, saddened boy, how to grow up, how to make use of the past, and live with change. And now I was here: I would try to show him.”
Ultimately, this is a story about forgiveness because, in going through this process with his beloved grandfather, Jamie comes to the realization that his parents too were victims of their own personal torments and did the best they could with what they had to work with at the time – which is all any of us can do.

Such is the quality of the writing, the verisimilitude of the narrative, that the novel reads like an autobiographical memoir.

This was O'Hagan's debut novel, shortlisted for the 1999 Booker prize.  He went on to write four more novels and all five have either been nominated for Awards, or received literary prizes, or both.  The fifth novel, The Illuminations, published in 2015, was longlisted for the Man Booker.

Maya's Notebook

Maya's Notebook by Isabel Allende

In a nutshell this novel, encompasses a crime story, an addiction-recovery narrative, and a family drama..

Abandoned by her parents as a baby, Maya has been brought up by her tough grandmother Nini and her gentle grandfather Popo. But at school, the teenage Maya finds herself drawn towards the wrong crowd. Before she knows what’s happened, Maya’s life has turned into one of drug addiction and crime.  Things go from bad to worse as Maya disappears into the criminal underworld. To save her from her old associates, Nini sends Maya to a remote island off the coast of Chile.  Safe amongst her new neighbours, Maya feels compelled to write her story and slowly she begins to heal. But can she learn to live with her scars, and will her past ever catch up with her?

Character portraits and sketches of other lives abound, although Maya is the main focus "with hair dyed four primary colours and a nose ring".  In the opening pages we find Maya on a remote island in the Chiloe region of Chile, on the run from "the FBI, Interpol and a Las Vegas criminal gang."  .

                          

Fortunately, she has a loving grandmother who has arranged this sanctuary, and despite recent ordeals, her confident, upbeat nature soon charms the locals. She is smart and curious, and the novel brims with her discoveries about the archipelago and its people: tourist fantasies and harsher realities are described with great feeling. On the island Maya begins to write down her story, from her grandmother's flight from Chile in the early days of the Pinochet regime to her own childhood in Berkeley, teenage loss and three years of plummeting crisis. At the same time, the Chilotan narrative moves forward, and Maya gets involved in village life, forms close bonds, and begins to uncover horrors from the past.

Maya is the lightest of narrative guises: wise beyond her 19 years but convincingly coltish, she gives us an outsider's observations ("happiness seems kitsch to Chileans") and has a chirpy, wry sense of humour; when she falls in love, she writes her adoration and despair with hyperbole, exclamation marks and teenage wholeheartedness. The sections describing her own past are dominated by the energetic narrative impetus and lose track of any feelings of abandonment, terror and hurt at the story's centre. This may be due to the pressure applied by the crime plot, or the need to drive this book in the direction it is headed – towards a story of survival.

Maya used to read the dictionary with her beloved grandfather, something we're reminded of when she drops words such as "lapidary" and "telluric". Harder to reconcile are the almost anthropological observations, such as this, of her teenage gang: "We walked along dragging our feet, with our cells, headphones, backpacks, chewing gum, ripped jeans, and coded language." Little of that coded language finds its way into the book, even during intense scenarios with her best friends and sometime boyfriend, a hapless fellow in low-slung baggy jeans. The slang is mild: "dumbass", "man". The crime boss she works with in Vegas explains, "Heroin doesn't kill: it's the addicts' lifestyles that do…" The effect is a bit like taking a bus tour through the desperate parts of Las Vegas, a guide delivering facts about life on the streets. You see a mugging through the window, but the bus has moved on.

The prioritising of story over voice suggests that it's not the aim of Maya's Notebook to plunge the reader into the grim existence of a real-life Maya; this is a tale of revelations and resolutions, and the plot is more answerable to its own turns than to the brutal possibilities of reality. Despite the observations about the number of young people lost to street violence, crime and slavery, or because of them, the driving force of this novel is ultimately resilience – the power of love and acceptance to face down terrible things.

In this worldview, perhaps, the wise perspective of the narrative voice can elide with the young narrator: "I'm not going to be weighed down [by past mistakes] till the day I die," Maya insists. Her argument is compelling. She hits some nasty snags on the way to her rock bottom, but emerges (after a rather idyllic sounding rehab) with her joy in life intact, able to heal others. Whether a consequence of characterisation, magical thinking or authorial determination, this girl and her community are going to be all right. "The whole world is magical," says Manuel, the man who has survived much and becomes Maya's protector, and the book is best read in that spirit.

Growing up in the Shadow of 'The Troubles'

Two Booker Prize Shortlist nominees, both Irish authors writing about the Troubles, their stories focused on the City of Derry, Northern Ireland.

Shadows on our Skin by Jennifer Johnston.

Recognised as a small masterpiece when first published in 1977, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A poignant novel about a boy in Derry jolted into early adulthood by harsh circumstances.

Derry in the 1970s: teenager Joe Logan is growing up in the teeth of the Troubles, having to cope with embittered parents, a brother who's been away and come back with money and a gun in his pocket, harsh school teachers, and the constant awareness of the military presence in the background. Central to the story is the friendship that tentatively grows up between Joe and Kathleen, a young school-teacher who brings a fresh perspective to his familiar world.


Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane, shortlisted in 1996

"What we misleadingly call ordinary life is destroyed by politics in our part of the world, generation after generation. I had to show how that happens." Seamus Deane

A haunted childhood, lived out in two dimensions. One is legendary: the Sun-fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly; the house in Donegal where children are stolen away by demonic forces. The other is actual: the city of Derry in the Northern Ireland of the 40s and 50s; a place that is also haunted by political enmities, family secrets, lethal intrigue. The boy narrator of Reading in the Dark grows up enclosed in these two worlds, sensing that they are intertwined in some mysterious ways that he both wants and does not want to discover. Through the silence that surrounds him, he feels the truth spreading like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. Claustrophobic but lyrically charged, breathtakingly sad but vibrant and unforgettable, Reading in the Dark is one of the finest books about growing up - in Ireland or anywhere - that has ever been written.