The human being is a masterpiece. Whose? Its own. 

Paul Auster's 4321 is a masterpiece. It encompasses everything. Nothing is left out: life, death, God, books, parenthood, love, "dear, dirty, devouring New York, the capital of human faces, the horizontal Babel of human tongues", roller coaster, racism, identity, feminism, stories, friendship, sexual discovery and experimentation, freedom, war, politics et al. It is so comprehensive and all-encompassing that one feels petty and exposed. 

At first glance, 4321 is a Bildungsroman, i.e. the boyhood of Archie Ferguson (the son of Stanley Ferguson, a self-made man, and of Rose Adler, a determined woman who both transgresses the confinements of being a woman in the 1960s America and takes pleasure and comfort in them) and his transformation into a man. 

The novel starts with the (his)story of Ferguson's grandfather, a Belarusian migrant who travelled on foot from his native city of Mink "...