Caught in an electrical storm while hiking, the band of boys Auster was with tried to get to an open clearing away from the trees.
One key core element for one of the narrative strands is the death of a friend at summer camp, a death that has its origins in Auster’s past and that also serves as a fundamental theme for the novel and even a metaphor for the relationship of the writer with his or her characters. “The novel is my geography and chronology,” Auster explains, “but not my life at all.”Ĭonnections to actual figures (for example, the classics professor and translator Robert Fagles becomes Robert Nagle) and historical events (the Columbia student occupation of the campus buildings, the Attica prison uprising) play a prominent role in the novel. And these lives often share some skeletal elements with Auster’s own boyhood: post-World War II New Jersey, sports, Columbia University, writing, French language study. “The idea came to me to tell one life as four parallel lives,” Auster explains. Award-winning author Paul Auster’s latest-and longest-work of fiction, the künstlerroman 4 3 2 1, posits such thoughts as the basis of its plot: four parallel stories of Archibald Isaac Ferguson. We live our lives mostly in the moment, but also attendant to the question of what if?- what if we had lived in that town rather than the one I know? what if my father (or mother) had died? what if my parents had divorced? what if I had attended school X rather than school Y? what if I had accepted that offered job? Such speculative lines of thought are wisps of thinking in which we all indulge.
0 kommentar(er)
