4 3 2 1: This brick-thick novel brings you a different kind of life thinking.

Many people think that we live in parallel universes. For example, you live in this universe now: you can see the sun, moon, stars and galaxy when you look up, and the earth, grass and streams when you look down; But at the same time, there are many copies of our universe, and correspondingly, there are many copies of "you" living different lives there. It is said that this theory was supported by the late famous theoretical scientist Hawking, and many people are still looking for measured evidence for this statement.

However, I prefer to understand the "parallel universe" in this way: everyone has a fixed starting point of fate at the moment of birth, and every moment after that, there are countless possibilities in front of him. Just like a ray in geometry, it can radiate countless lines in different directions from a fixed point. If every direction is a kind of fate, you will have countless "parallel fate bodies"

Of course, so far, you have only chosen one direction, and today you have made this unique "you". But if ten or twenty years ago, you chose another road instead of the present one, what would your fate be?

We can't assume history, but novelists can. The book 4 3 2 1 in Utopia Series published by Kyushu Publishing House is a novel to explore the possibility of multiple destinies of human beings. Author Paul? Paul auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, USA. He is a novelist, poet, playwright, translator and film director. His works combine elements such as absurdity, existentialism and mystery novels, and are regarded as one of the most innovative novelists in contemporary America. His representative works include The New York Trilogy, The Phantom Book, The Absurdity of Brooklyn, The Beast and so on.

Archibald Ferguson, the hero of novel 4 3 2 1, is of Russian descent. His grandfather Reznikov arrived in the United States in 1900 and changed his name to "Ike? Ferguson ",so there was the Ferguson family. 1923 When he died, he had three sons: Louis, Arnold and Stanley. Ferguson, the hero of this book, is Stanley's only son, born in 1947 (the same year as the author of this book).

Therefore, Ferguson's parallel universe unfolded.

Ferguson's fate quartet

The second Ferguson is more troublesome to grow up and often encounters accidents. His story begins when he fell from a tree. Ferguson's grandmother came to take care of him and taught him to read and write. Therefore, Ferguson loved newspapers since he was a child. When he was in primary school, he produced and published the Stone Road Reform Newspaper, which was very popular in school. Timmerman, a friend he didn't want to offend, asked to join, but he didn't dare to refuse. He just took the initiative to close the newspaper. However, the attack on Nixon aroused Ferguson's interest, and he could not help but publish another issue of the newspaper. As a result, he not only offended Timmerman, suffered from school bullying for a long time, but was also called to investigate by the headmaster for allegedly supporting capitalism. He completely gave up running a newspaper. /kloc-At the age of 0/3, Ferguson attended a summer camp and ran under a tree in a thunderstorm. Lightning struck the branch and fell, killing him.

The third Ferguson has a rough fate. When I was a child, Ferguson's uncle Lu was deeply involved in gambling and owed usury. Lou planned to burn down Ferguson's father Stanley's shop to defraud insurance, but he burned down Stanley together. Ferguson's mother moved away with her family and married music critic Schneider. Third, Ferguson is bisexual, so in his story, he met a series of gay and bisexual people. Ferguson high school was arrested for stealing books, lost his reputation, was gay, and was refused military service. He began to solve ideological problems through writing and wrote his first novel in Paris at the age of 23. When I went to London to meet a publisher, I was killed by a car in a fog.

The fourth Ferguson's father had a successful career and became an upstart, but ignored Ferguson. Mother Ruth divorced Stanley after the death of her first lover's wife and reorganized her family. Ferguson refused his father since he was a child, and it was not until his father died as an adult that he reconciled with his father. The fourth Ferguson was determined to be a writer since he was a child, and by the time he was in his twenties, he had made his mark in the literary world. At the end of the story, Ferguson is writing a novel called "4 3 2 1" according to family legends.

The Echo of Existentialism: Absurdity and Death

Like Ferguson, the author Foster was born in 1947. The1960s, which occupied a large part of their adolescence, was a turbulent time for the United States and even the world. In the United States, there are Kennedy's inspiring administration, the civil rights movement initiated by Martin Luther King, and the feminist movement brought about by sexual liberation (or sexual liberation brought about by feminist movement); 1At the end of the 1960s, people couldn't stand the Vietnam War, which devoured life and property like a bottomless pit, and the anti-war movement and the student movement flourished.

Foster went through all this. The turbulent times give people a sense of absurdity. As the novel The Strange Face of Suicide City written by the writer Ferguson: "A series of suicides have lasted for three months, during which 2 1 children were buried in R city, which is an amazing number for a local town with a population of only 94,000."

Dr. Noyce and dozens of his colleagues made great efforts to investigate and try to stop suicide, but to no avail. Noyce talked with 250 boys and girls and finally found that R City was experiencing "not a medical crisis, but a mental crisis. The problem is not death or the desire for death, but the loss of hope for the future. " Noyce understood that "they all live in a desperate world." Finally, he himself became suicidal. After failing to persuade a girl to give up suicidal thoughts, "he will follow her to the garage, close the doors and windows, and then join her."

What is written here is the United States at that time. The futile Vietnam War made Americans feel absurd. In fact, after World War II, the whole world was experiencing this absurdity, and existentialism became the mainstream of the ideological trend of that era. The works of existentialist writers and philosophers such as Heidegger, Sartre and Camus show the anxiety, worry, addiction and absurdity of life. Paul auster wrote "4 3 2 1" in the present era, once again recalling the absurd era, as if it were the echo of existentialism in the new century.

Absurdity makes this book. The first thing Grandpa Ferguson did when he went to America was to change his name inexplicably, which was ridiculous in itself:

In Ferguson's eyes, this story has gone beyond the scope of jokes and turned into a fable about human destiny and countless forks and roads that one has to face in one's life, so "that young man was suddenly torn into three young people, each exactly like the other two, but with different names: Rockefeller, Ferguson and X, the long and difficult person who followed him from Russia to Alice Island."

Existence is absurd, only death is certain. Death is an important theme in 4 3 2 1: "God is nowhere to be found, … but life is everywhere, death is everywhere, and the living is connected with the dead." Paul. Oster carefully described Ferguson's imaginary death: 13-year-old boy Ferguson died of lightning, and 23-year-old Ferguson died of a car accident. At the end of the book, I revealed Ferguson's death: he died in a fire on September 8,197/kloc-0. The hardest paragraph to write is about the deaths of several boys he loved.

"Born to die" is a classic proposition of existentialism.

With Ferguson (Paul? Oster) Learn to write.

Paul. Oster wrote this book at the age of 70 and was included in the Booker Prize. Previously, he has been awarded an academician of the American Academy of Arts and Literature, and has won the Medici Prize for Literature in France, the Prince asturias Prize for Literature in Spain, and John F.? Corrington Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Literature, and has been shortlisted for Dublin Literature Award and Faulkner Novel Award for many times. His works have been translated into more than 40 languages.

The creative experience of such a great writer is naturally worth learning. Paul. In this book, Oster expresses his writing ideas through Ferguson's experience and sentiment.

Regarding the significance of this novel, Oster wrote about the great influence on Ferguson after reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment:

From that day on, Ferguson was determined to become a novelist. "In the following years, even in the most difficult years, when he seemed to fall off the edge of the earth, he never regretted his decision."

How did Ferguson become a novelist?

First of all, keep writing, writing, writing and practicing.

During his three years in high school in suburban New Jersey, Ferguson wrote 27 short stories and completed 19 from the age of 16 to 18. This is Ferguson's daily writing training:

Followed by a lot of reading.

Ferguson read many books, including Homer's epic, Shakespeare, Dickens, Swift, Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Babel, Salinger, Hemingway and so on. Classics are accompanied by Ferguson's growth.

The greatest influence on Ferguson was Crime and Punishment, which, as mentioned above, inspired Ferguson's enthusiasm for literature. Followed by Thoreau's Walden Lake and Civil Disobedience, Ferguson (that is, paul auster) commented:

Books that have an important influence on Ferguson include musician John? Cage's silence. If Dostoevsky's book is about the passion and contradiction of human soul, Thoreau's book is about how to live, and silence is about how to think. Read this book.

Thirdly, regarding the writing class, Ferguson decided not to attend the creative writing class:

This may be Oster's own view of the famous Princeton creative writing class. However, to communicate with peers who are better than themselves:

Oster also shared some skills in his writing:

The most important thing is to insist on:

Of course, it is a bit narrow to understand this philosophical work from the perspective of writing. But for those who study writing, Ferguson's experience is really enlightening.

This book is divided into seven chapters, and each chapter is divided into four sections: 1, 2, 3 and 4, which respectively correspond to the four fates of the protagonist. When reading this book, it is suggested that you should follow the order of 1.0, 1. 1 .2, 1.3, 1.4, 2. 1 Although it is more complicated to read, it is more in line with the author's original intention and can better understand the beauty of time convolution. According to the order of 1.0, 1.2, 2.2, 3.2 ..., although reading is more worry-free, thinking is less fun.

Before taking every step, there are infinite possibilities in life. But as long as you take one step, there is one less possibility in life. According to the novelist, a person can have four or more lives; But for everyone in reality, in the long life, there is only one trajectory of your life: this is the unique you.