4 3 2 1 (German Edition)

by Paul Auster, Thomas Gunkel (Translator), Werner Schmitz (Translator), Karsten Singelmann (Translator), Nikolaus Stingl (Translator)

Overview

Paul Auster, der bekannte amerikanische Bestsellerautor, legt in Gestalt eines Rätselspiels sein bisher umfangreichstes Werk und Opus magnum vor: die vierfach unterschiedlich erzählte Geschichte eines jungen Amerikaners in den fünfziger und sechziger Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts – ein Epos voll mit Politik, Zeitgeschichte, Liebe, Leidenschaft und dem wechselvollen Spiel des Zufalls.
«4 3 2 1» – das sind vier Variationen eines Lebens: Archibald Ferguson, von allen nur Archie genannt, wächst im Newark der fünfziger Jahre auf. «Was für ein interessanter Gedanke», sagt er sich als kleiner Junge, «sich vorzustellen, wie für ihn alles anders sein könnte, auch wenn er selbst immer derselbe bliebe. Ja, alles war möglich, und nur weil etwas auf eine bestimmte Weise geschah, hieß das noch lange nicht, dass es nicht auch auf eine andere Weise geschehen konnte.»
Im Verein mit der höheren Macht einer von Paul Auster raffiniert dirigierten literarischen Vorsehung entspinnen sich nun vier unterschiedliche Versionen von Archies Leben: provinziell und bescheiden; kämpferisch, aber vom Unglück verfolgt; betroffen und besessen von den Ereignissen der Zeit; künstlerisch genial begabt und nach den Sternen greifend. Und alle vier sind vollgepackt mit Abenteuern, Liebe, Lebenskämpfen und den Schlägen eines unberechenbaren Schicksals …
«4 3 2 1» ist ein faszinierendes Gedankenspiel und ein Höhepunkt in Austers Schaffen. Seine großen Themen, das Streben nach Glück, die Rolle des Zufalls, Politik und Zeitgeschichte von Hiroshima bis Vietnam – alle sind hier versammelt und verdichtet in den hoffnungsvollen Lebenswegen eines jungen Mannes, der sein Glück in der Welt zu finden sucht.
(Einige Kapitel mit Nummerierung, aber ohne Text in diesem Buch sind künstlerische Absicht des Autors, keine technischen Fehler.)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783644050112
Publisher:	Rowohlt E-Book
Publication date:	01/31/2017
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1264
File size:	8 MB
Language:	German

About the Author

Paul Auster wurde 1947 in Newark, New Jersey, geboren. Er studierte Anglistik und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft an der Columbia University und verbrachte nach dem Studium einige Jahre in Frankreich. International bekannt wurde er mit seinen Romanen Im Land der letzten Dinge und der New-York-Trilogie. Sein umfangreiches, vielfach preisgekröntes Werk umfasst neben zahlreichen Romanen auch Essays und Gedichte sowie Übersetzungen zeitgenössischer Lyrik. Am 30. April 2024 ist Paul Auster im Alter von 77 Jahren gestorben.

Thomas Gunkel, 1956 in Treysa geboren, arbeitete mehrere Jahre als Erzieher. Nach seinem Studium der Germanistik und Geografie in Marburg begann er, englischsprachige literarische Werke ins Deutsche zu übertragen. Zu den von ihm übersetzten Autoren gehören u.a. Larry Brown, John Cheever, Stewart O'Nan, William Trevor und Richard Yates. Thomas Gunkel lebt und arbeitet in Schwalmstadt (Hessen).

Werner Schmitz ist seit 1981 als Übersetzer tätig, u. a. von Malcolm Lowry, John le Carré, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth und Paul Auster. 2011 erhielt er den Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt-Preis. Er lebt in der Lüneburger Heide.

Nikolaus Stingl, geb. 1952 in Baden-Baden, übersetzte unter anderem William Gaddis, William Gass, Graham Greene, Cormac McCarthy und Thomas Pynchon. Er wurde mit dem Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt-Übersetzerpreis, dem Literaturpreis der Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart, dem Paul- Celan-Preis und dem Straelener Übersetzerpreis der Kunststiftung NRW ausgezeichnet.

Paul Auster wurde 1947 in Newark, New Jersey, geboren. Er studierte Anglistik und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft an der Columbia University und verbrachte nach dem Studium einige Jahre in Frankreich. International bekannt wurde er mit seinen Romanen Im Land der letzten Dinge und der New-York-Trilogie. Sein umfangreiches, vielfach preisgekröntes Werk umfasst neben zahlreichen Romanen auch Essays und Gedichte sowie Übersetzungen zeitgenössischer Lyrik. Am 30. April 2024 ist Paul Auster im Alter von 77 Jahren gestorben.

Thomas Gunkel, 1956 in Treysa geboren, arbeitete mehrere Jahre als Erzieher. Nach seinem Studium der Germanistik und Geografie in Marburg begann er, englischsprachige literarische Werke ins Deutsche zu übertragen. Zu den von ihm übersetzten Autoren gehören u.a. Larry Brown, John Cheever, Stewart O’Nan, William Trevor und Richard Yates. Thomas Gunkel lebt und arbeitet in Schwalmstadt (Hessen).

Werner Schmitz ist seit 1981 als Übersetzer tätig, u. a. von Malcolm Lowry, John le Carré, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth und Paul Auster. 2011 erhielt er den Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt-Preis. Er lebt in der Lüneburger Heide.

Nikolaus Stingl, geb. 1952 in Baden-Baden, übersetzte unter anderem William Gaddis, William Gass, Graham Greene, Cormac McCarthy und Thomas Pynchon. Er wurde mit dem Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt-Übersetzerpreis, dem Literaturpreis der Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart, dem Paul- Celan-Preis und dem Straelener Übersetzerpreis der Kunststiftung NRW ausgezeichnet.

Hometown:

Brooklyn, New York

Date of Birth:

February 3, 1947

Place of Birth:

Newark, New Jersey

Education:

B.A., M.A., Columbia University, 1970

Read an Excerpt

According to family legend, Ferguson’s grandfather departed on foot from his native city of Minsk with one hundred rubles sewn into the lining of his jacket, traveled west to Hamburg through Warsaw and Berlin, and then booked passage on a ship called the Empress of China, which crossed the Atlantic in rough winter storms and sailed into New York Harbor on the first day of the twentieth century. While waiting to be interviewed by an immigration official at Ellis Island, he struck up a conversation with a fellow Russian Jew. The man said to him: Forget the name Reznikoff. It won’t do you any good here. You need an American name for your new life in America, something with a good American ring to it. Since English was still an alien tongue to Isaac Reznikoff in 1900 he asked his older more experienced compatriot for a suggestion. Tell them you’re Rockefeller, the man said. You can’t go wrong with that. An hour passed, then another hour, and by the time the nineteen-year-old Reznikoff sat down to be questioned by the immigration official, he had forgotten the name the man had told him to give. Your name? the official asked. Slapping his head in frustration, the weary immigrant blurted out in Yiddish, Ikh hob fargessen (I’ve forgotten)! And so it was that Isaac Reznikoff began his new life in America as Ichabod Ferguson.

He had a hard time of it, especially in the beginning, but even after it was no longer the beginning, nothing ever went as he had imagined it would in his adopted country. It was true that he managed to find a wife for himself just after his twenty-sixth birthday, and it was also true that this wife, Fanny, née Grossman, bore him three robust and healthy sons, but life in America remained a struggle for Ferguson’s grandfather from the day he walked off the boat until the night of March 7, 1923, when he met an early, unexpected death at the age of forty-two – gunned down in a holdup at the leather-goods warehouse in Chicago where he had been employed as a night watchman.

No photographs survive him, but by all accounts he was a large man with a strong back and enormous hands, uneducated, unskilled, the quintessential greenhorn know-nothing. On his first afternoon in New York, he chanced upon a street peddler hawking the reddest, roundest, most perfect apples he had ever seen. Unable to resist, he bought one and eagerly bit into it. Instead of the sweetness he had been anticipating, the taste was bitter and strange. Even worse, the apple was sickeningly soft, and once his teeth had pierced the skin, the inside of the fruit came pouring down the front of his coat in a shower of pale red liquid dotted with scores of pellet-like seeds. Such was his first encounter with a Jersey tomato.

Not a Rockefeller, then, but a broad-shouldered roustabout, a Hebrew giant with an absurd name and a pair of restless feet who tried his luck in Manhattan and Brooklyn, in Baltimore and Charleston, in Duluth and Chicago, employed variously as a dockhand, an ordinary seaman on a Great Lakes tanker, an animal handler for a traveling circus, an assembly-line worker in a tin-can factory, a truck driver, a ditchdigger, a night watchman. For all his efforts, he never earned more than nickels and dimes, and therefore the only things poor Ike Ferguson bequeathed to his wife and three boys were the stories he had told them about the vagabond adventures of his youth. In the long run, stories are probably no less valuable than money, but in the short run they have their decided limitations.

Editorial Reviews

"[Paul] Auster's deep understanding of his characters, soothing baritone, and skillful pacing...deliver an immensely satisfying experience overall for listeners"
-AudioFile Magazine

“An epic bildungsroman . . . . Original and complex . . . . It’s impossible not to be impressed – and even a little awed – by what Auster has accomplished. . . . A work of outsize ambition and remarkable craft,a monumental assemblage of competing and complementary fictions, a novel that contains multitudes.”—Tom Perrotta, The New York Times Book Review

“A stunningly ambitious novel, and a pleasure to read. Auster’s writing is joyful even in the book’sdarkest moments, and never ponderous or showy. . . . An incredibly moving, true journey.”—NPR

“Ingenious . . . . Structurally inventive and surprisingly moving. . . . 4 3 2 1 reads like [a] big social drama . . . while also offering the philosophical exploration of oneman’s fate.”—Esquire

“Mesmerizing . . . Continues to push the narrative envelope. . . . Four distinct characters whose lives diverge and intersect in devious, rollicking ways, reminiscent of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. . . . Prismatic and rich in period detail, 4 3 2 1 reflects the high spirits of postwar America as well as the despair coiled, asplike, in its shadows.”—O, the Oprah Magazine

“Sharply observed . . . . Reads like a sprawling, 19th-century novel.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Ambitious and sprawling . . . . Immersive . . . . Auster has a startling ability to report the world in novel ways.”—USA Today

“The power of [Auster’s] best work is . . . his faithful pursuit of the mission proposed in The Invention of Solitude, to explore the ‘infinite possibilities of a limited space’ . . . . The effect [of 4 3 2 1] is almost cubist in its multidimensionality—that of a single, exceptionally variegated life displayed in the round. . . . [An] impressively ambitious novel.”—Harper’s Magazine

“Auster’s magnificent new novel is reminiscent ofInvisible in that it deals with the impossibility of containing a lifein a single story . . . . Undeniably intriguing . . . . A mesmerizing chronicle of one character’s four lives . . . The finest—though one hopes, farfrom final—act in one of the mightiest writing careers of the last half century.”—Paste Magazine

“Wonderfully clever . . . . 4 3 2 1 is much more than a pieceof literary gamesmanship . . . . It is a heartfeltand engaging piece of storytelling that unflinchingly explores the 20thcentury American experience in all its honor and ignominy. This is, withoutdoubt, Auster’s magnum opus. . . . A true revelation . . . One can’t help but admit they are in the presence of a genius.”—Toronto Star

“A multitiered examination of the implications of fate . . . in which the structure of the book reminds us of its own conditionality. . . . A signifier of both possibility and its limitations.”—The Washington Post

“At the heart of this novel is a provocative question: What would have happened if your life hadtaken a different turn at a critical moment? . . . Ingenious.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Auster presents four lovingly detailed portrayals ofthe intensity of youth – of awkwardness and frustration, but also of passion forbooks, films, sport, politics and sex. . . . [Trying] to think of comparisons [to the novel] . . . [nothing] is exactly right . . . . What he is driving at is not only the role of contingency and the unexpected, but the ‘what-ifs’ that haunt us, the imaginary lives we hold in our minds that run parallel to our actual existence.”—The Guardian

“Draws the reader in fromthe very first sentence and does not let go until the very end. . . . An absorbing, detailed account – four accounts! – of growing up in the decades following World War II. . . . Auster’sprose is never less than arresting .. . . In addition to being a bildungsroman, “4321” is a “künstlerroman,” aportrait of the artist as a young man whose literary ambition is evident evenin childhood. . . . I emerged from . . . this prodigious book eager for more.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Leaves readers feeling they know every minute detail of [Ferguson’s] inner life, as if they were lifelong companions and daily confidants. . . . It’s like an epic game of MASH: Will Ferguson grow up in Montclair or Manhattan? Excel in baseball or basketball? Date girls or love boys too? Live or die? . . . A detailed landscape . . . for readers who like taking the scenic route.”—TIME Magazine

“Auster pays tribute to what Rose Ferguson thinks of as a ‘dear, dirty, devouring New York, the capital of human faces, the horizontal Babel of human tongues.’. . . Sprawling . . . occasionally splendid.”—The New Yorker

“A bona fide epic . . . both accessible and formally daring.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Inventive, engrossing.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Arresting .. . . A hugely accomplished work, a novel unlike any other.”—The National (UAE)

“Brilliantly rendered,intricately plotted . . . a magnum opus.”—Columbia Magazine

“Auster’s first novel inseven years is . . . . an ingenious move . . . . Auster’s sense of possibility, his understanding of what all his Fergusons have in common, with us and one another, is a kind of quiet intensity, a striving to discover who they are. . . . [He] reminds us that not just life, but also narrative is always conditional, that it only appears inevitable after the fact.”—Kirkus (starred review)

“Auster has been turning readers’ heads for three decades, bending the conventions of storytelling . . . . He now presents his most capacious, demanding, eventful, suspenseful, erotic, structurally audacious, funny, and soulful novel to date . . . [a] ravishing opus.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Rich and detailed. It’s about accidents of fate, and the people and works of art and experiences that shape our lives even before our birth—what reader doesn't vibrate at that frequency?”—Lydia Kiesling, Slate

“Auster illuminates how the discrete moments in one’s life form the plot points of a sprawling narrative, rife with possibility.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“Mesmerizing . . . . A wonderful work of realist fiction and well worth the time.”—Read it Forward

“Frisky and sinuous . . . energetic. . . . A portrait of a cultural era coming into being . . . the era that is our own.”—Tablet magazine

“Almost everything about Auster's new novel is big. . . Satisfyingly rich in detail . . . . A significant and immersive entry to a genre that stretches back centuriesand includes Augie March and Tristram Shandy.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher