![]() ![]() People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. While conventional wisdom is that writers must avoid coincidences, Auster has always put them centre stage: "Our lifelong certainties about the world," he has said, "can be demolished in a single second. Yet it's upstaged by an even greater achievement - an affecting kind of nakedness, drawing on formative incidents from Auster's own life, matched only by an elaborate consideration of his lifelong fascination with chance. However, its length delivers the kind of absorbing, emotionally transformative book that the luckiest versions of Ferguson - and, you imagine, Auster, who gave up baseball for Paris and poetry - experiences reading, which include Voltaire's Candide and The Making Of The President, 1960 by Theodore H White. In contrast to the spare narratives of his best-known novels, 4 3 2 1 weighs in at almost 900 pages. Still, you may come to wonder how a sports-obsessed, suburban childhood fuelled by hamburgers and chocolate malts in baby-booming Montclair, New Jersey - where Auster himself grew up with a talent for baseball - can fruitfully be retold over and over again. ![]()
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