Overview
O que define uma vida? Quais escolhas formam um indivíduo? O que constrói uma identidade? Em 4 3 2 1, o mais ambicioso romance de Paul Auster, essas questões são levadas às últimas consequências. Romance finalista do Man Booker Prize 2017.
Archie Ferguson é filho de Stanley e Rose, nascido no dia 3 março de 1947. Este é o único dado indiscutível de sua biografia. Pois, em 4 3 2 1, Paul Auster constrói não uma trajetória, mas quatro diferentes percursos de vida trilhados por Archie.
Desde o êxito de A trilogia de Nova York, de 1987, sua estreia na ficção, Auster tornou-se um dos principais nomes da literatura contemporânea, publicando grandes sucessos de crítica como Leviatã e Desvarios no Brooklyn. Após um hiato de sete anos, o escritor retorna à prosa com seu projeto mais ousado: pensar o que aconteceria com um mesmo personagem se as suas relações e condições — financeiras e familiares — fossem outras, como se a mesma pessoa habitasse universos paralelos.
Neste brilhante exercício literário, Auster instiga uma profunda meditação acerca de um dos temas mais recorrentes em sua obra: o poder do acaso. O resultado é um romance monumental, uma reflexão sobre o que nos torna humanos, o que podemos controlar e tudo o que há de mais imprevisível no destino de cada indivíduo.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9788554511746 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Companhia das Letras |
| Publication date: | 06/11/2018 |
| Sold by: | Bookwire |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 816 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Language: | Portuguese |
About the Author
Hometown:
Brooklyn, New YorkDate of Birth:
February 3, 1947Place of Birth:
Newark, New JerseyEducation:
B.A., M.A., Columbia University, 1970Read 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.