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Loading... In the Country of Last Things (1987)by Paul Auster
  
  ) b.b.michael | Jan 29, 2024 |  Characters: 6 Setting: 9 Prose: 9 An interesting read, but without any semblance of a story. In fact, it is as if Auster has only bothered to write down his idea for a compelling setting. Not recommended. ( ) MXMLLN | Jan 12, 2024 | The narration, done in first person, as Anna is writing a diary to an unknown reader, is full of energy, and this made a change from the other stories I have read so far, in my opinion. Anna, a young woman who left her country to look for his brother, who left the family some time before, seems to me to always have the strength to live, to fight against the injustice and corruption, even when she seems to have lost all she has gained. She seems to me so different from some of the male protagonists of the New York Trilogy, or Moon Palace, mainly because I do not know what really happens to her afterwards...it's a diary interrupted just before the last chapter, and although there is always the hope that she has succeeded in escaping her destiny, I cannot help but think that, just like the others, even Mr Bones of Timbuktu, she didn't make it... (  ) MissYowlYY | Jun 12, 2020 |  ) eclecticheart | Dec 10, 2018 | ) amuskopf | Jun 7, 2018 |
In a book-length letter home, Anna Blume reports that her search for a long-lost brother has brought her to a vast, unnamed city that is undergoing a catastrophic economic decline. Buildings collapse daily, driving huge numbers of citizens into the streets, where they starve or die of exposureif they aren't murdered by other vagrants first. Government forces haul away the bodies, and licensed scavengers collect trash and precious human waste. Weird cults form around the most popular methods of suicide. Anna tries to help, but the charity group she joins quickly runs out of supplies and has to close its doors. A number of post-apocalyptic novels have been published recently; Auster's, one of the best, is distinguished by an uncanny grasp of the day-to-day realities of homelessness. This is a scary but highly relevant book. Imagine an American city in the near future, populated almost wholly by street dwellers, squatters in ruined buildings, scavengers for subsistence. Suicide clubs offer interesting ways to die, for a fee, but the rich have fled with their jewels, and those who are left survive on what little cash trade-in centers will give them for the day's pickings. This enthralling, dreamlike fable about a peculiarly recognizable society, now in the throes of entropy, focuses on the plight of a young woman, Anna Blume. Anna has memories of a gentler life, but comes to the city in a "charity ship" to hunt for her missing brother. She first finds shelter with a madman and his wife and later experiences a brief idyll with a writer, Samuel Farr.Together they live in the deteriorating splendor of the marbled public library. Promise is ultimately rekindled when the survivors consider taking to the road as magiciansan action implying that art and illusion can save. Auster, an accomplished stylist, creates a tone that deftly combines matter-of-factness and estrangement. The eerie quality is heightened by the device of a narrator who learns everything from Anna's journal.
From the author of the forthcoming 4 3 2 1: A Novel - a spare, powerful, intensely visionary novel about the bare-bones conditions of survival In a distant and unsettling future, Anna Blume is on a mission in an unnamed city of chaos and disaster. Its destitute inhabitants scavenge garbage for food and shelter, no industry exists, and an elusive government provides nothing but corruption. Anna wades through the filth to find her long-lost brother, a one-time journalist who may or may not be alive. New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) shows us a disturbing Hobbesian society in this dystopian, post-apocalyptic novel. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsFound: YA? Dystopian Fantasy, Running forever until they died? in Name that Book Popular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.74)
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