His parents likewise have fourfold lives, while retaining their names and professions (he’s a businessman, she a photographer). His four selves go their separate ways, each with his own experience of childhood, adolescence, friendship, love, sport and school. From his one beginning, as the only child of Stanley and Rose Ferguson, born (as Auster was) in 1947, the hero quadruples. What’s this reference to Aunt Mildred never having married when we’ve just been told the name of her husband? How could Uncle Lew have both made a fortune from and been bankrupted by a bet on the 1954 baseball World Series? Which to believe: that the warehouse on which the family business depends was burgled or that it burned down?Įven those who are taken in at the start will quickly clock the narrative logic. With 800 pages still to go, any illusion of a single narrative begins to crack. Ferguson, it emerges, isn’t the hero of his own life but of his own lives, plural. Surely it can’t be that simple? And no, it isn’t. More to the point, the opening of the novel – Auster’s first in seven years – is engagingly old-fashioned in spirit, as the genealogy and childhood of one Archibald Isaac Ferguson are set out. But there’s a telling tribute to David Copperfield halfway through this book, along with a rebuke to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield for badmouthing Dickens in the first sentence of The Catcher in the Rye. He’s known for his concision, his affiliations with European modernism, his conjuring tricks and sleight of hand. T he last thing you’d expect Paul Auster to write is a social-realist novel of panoramic, Dickensian scope.
0 kommentar(er)
