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In the Country of Last Things
by
'That is how it works in the City. Every time you think you know the answer to a question, you discover that the question makes no sense . . .'
This is the story of Anna Blume and her journey to find her lost brother, William, in the unnamed City. Like the City itself, however, it is a journey that is doomed, and so all that is left is Anna's unwritten account of what happe ...more
This is the story of Anna Blume and her journey to find her lost brother, William, in the unnamed City. Like the City itself, however, it is a journey that is doomed, and so all that is left is Anna's unwritten account of what happe ...more
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Paperback, 2005, 188 pages
Published
1987
by Faber and Faber Limited
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I have friends who, when entering my library for the first time, see my collection of Auster novels and say, "Oh my God! You read Auster!" I have other friends who, when entering my library for the first time, see my collection of Auster novels and say, "Oh my God! You read Auster!?" One way spoken in surprise and delight, the other in surprise and derision. Yes, Auster polarizes.
And I get why people don't like him. Many of his novels have a self-referential shtick that I can see as being off-pu ...more
And I get why people don't like him. Many of his novels have a self-referential shtick that I can see as being off-pu ...more

"The weather is in constant flux. A day of sun followed by a day of rain, a day of snow followed by a day of fog, warm then cool, wind then stillness, a stretch of bitter cold, and then today, in the middle of winter, an afternoon of fragrant light, warm to the point of merely sweaters."
In the Country of Last Things was published in 1987 and set sometime in the future. That future could be close at hand, going by those couple of sentences. They perfectly describe the winters we've been havin ...more
In the Country of Last Things was published in 1987 and set sometime in the future. That future could be close at hand, going by those couple of sentences. They perfectly describe the winters we've been havin ...more

Post-Apocalyptic Apocrypha
I don’t normally seek out post-apocalyptic novels, but Paul Auster’s novel is one to treasure.
Even though it is an early work, I felt I was in the hands of a master.
It is both beautifully written and wise.
It’s easy to read, but it’s not so easily “readable” that I could read it without turning the telly off.
Although its style is sparse and economical, there’s a lot happening beneath the surface.
Still, Auster carefully manages exactly how much he wants us to know and wha ...more
I don’t normally seek out post-apocalyptic novels, but Paul Auster’s novel is one to treasure.
Even though it is an early work, I felt I was in the hands of a master.
It is both beautifully written and wise.
It’s easy to read, but it’s not so easily “readable” that I could read it without turning the telly off.
Although its style is sparse and economical, there’s a lot happening beneath the surface.
Still, Auster carefully manages exactly how much he wants us to know and wha ...more

The description of Paul Auster of a post-apocalyptic world in this novel seems for me the most plausible I have ever encountered in a dystopian novel.
Young Anne Blume arrives in a devastated city on an aid ship from somewhere obviously much safer and enters an imploded city. She arrives in this desastrous world to look for her brother whom she did not hear from for a year. The name of the city is nowhere mentioned nor in what country it is situated, but it must be New York. It is soon clear tha ...more
Young Anne Blume arrives in a devastated city on an aid ship from somewhere obviously much safer and enters an imploded city. She arrives in this desastrous world to look for her brother whom she did not hear from for a year. The name of the city is nowhere mentioned nor in what country it is situated, but it must be New York. It is soon clear tha ...more

Dec 27, 2015
Violet wells
rated it
really liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
contemporary-american-fiction,
dystopia
The account in the form of a letter of a girl who has gone to look for her missing brother in a dystopian city where everything that provides a sense of self is vanishing.
There’s a constant sense of an author discovering and enjoying his talent in this short novel. He doesn’t waste energy on making his world logically plausible or itemising how the apocalyptic disaster happened. We’re very much in an existential twilight zone world. The tone essentially is one of macabre playfulness. There’s lo ...more
There’s a constant sense of an author discovering and enjoying his talent in this short novel. He doesn’t waste energy on making his world logically plausible or itemising how the apocalyptic disaster happened. We’re very much in an existential twilight zone world. The tone essentially is one of macabre playfulness. There’s lo ...more

This post-apocolyptic novel about a young woman who enters a ruined city to search for her brother is infused with pending doom. There may be no escape. Yet a sense of deep humanity is always present - even in the midst of horror, Anna finds connection and love. Not as complex or layered as Auster's later works, but still compelling.
...more

Anna Blume writes in a notebook her account of her time in an unnamed city where she arrived by a foreign aid ship, 19 and a know-it-all, looking for her brother, William. It is addressed to an unnamed friend-from-childhood, and we know pretty early her search is (view spoiler) . The story becomes not just her story, but a story of things ending, things decaying, like vanishing into thin air or something.
The city is not named, nor the country she came from, nor the country ...more
The city is not named, nor the country she came from, nor the country ...more

When you live in the city, you learn to take nothing for granted. Close your eyes for a moment, turn around to look at something else, and the thing that was before you is suddenly gone. Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you.
Paul Auster's last novel, Sunset Park, opens with the main protagonist working for a south Florida realty company which deals with cleaning out reposessed homes; his name is Miles Heller, he's 28 and he takes photographs of abandoned things, the innumerabl ...more
Paul Auster's last novel, Sunset Park, opens with the main protagonist working for a south Florida realty company which deals with cleaning out reposessed homes; his name is Miles Heller, he's 28 and he takes photographs of abandoned things, the innumerabl ...more

Existential tale of a woman, Anna, who moves to an unnamed country to find her brother and ends up in a quest for survival in an economically-collapsed urban dystopia. As with a fairy tale, everything is boiled down to bare essentials, rendered in the compelling voice that evolves in Anna's journal. But there is richness in the spareness, and I couldn't help but be drawn into rooting for her as some kind of advocate for humanity. As with McCarthy's The Road, written over 20 years later, we don't
...more

Jan 15, 2020
Andrew Smith
rated it
liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
apocalyptic,
science-fiction
Anna Blume has travelled to an unnamed place. She’s looking for her brother who came here too, on a journalistic assignment some time ago. She’d arrived on an aid ship, which gives us some clue as to what she’d have been likely to find here, it’s a desperate place and it’s far from safe. We learn of Anna’s plight through a letter she’s written to a old friend – in fact ‘letter’ might be understating it, it’s more a series of journal entries. The city Anna finds herself in is disappearing around
...more

I am ridiculously impressed with this book thus far - post-apocalyptic fiction is absolutely my favorite genre, and this is such a different take on it that I haven't been able to stop reading. Typically, nearly the entire population is already dead or dying, whereas Auster has entire cities still squabbling and struggling to survive. Far more plausible. Of course, more and more people would die as fresh water becomes scarce, food unavailable in markets, sewage systems cease to function, etc. An
...more

Oct 30, 2011
Shovelmonkey1
rated it
liked it
Recommends it for:
hardcore Auster fans - this is his old skool repertoire
Recommended to Shovelmonkey1 by:
burning need to complete the entire Auster back catalogue
Shelves:
dystopian-lit,
read-in-2012
Ok people, the world is going to shit. Falling apart at the seams. Imploding into a fiery ball of people fuelled insanity. So what are you going to do about it?
Do you...
a. PANIC! Scream and run around in circles waving your arms above your head.
b. Start hoarding toilet roll. You have it on good authority that it might become the currency of the realm.
c. Emulate Michael Douglas in popular 80s yuppie-fest, "Falling Down" and shoot everyone before they get you first. After all it is only a matter o ...more
Do you...
a. PANIC! Scream and run around in circles waving your arms above your head.
b. Start hoarding toilet roll. You have it on good authority that it might become the currency of the realm.
c. Emulate Michael Douglas in popular 80s yuppie-fest, "Falling Down" and shoot everyone before they get you first. After all it is only a matter o ...more

There is a river that howls through a darkened forest. First it flows one way and then another. And when it untangles itself it disappears, to where, I do not know.
The above introduction came to me while reading this book, a book that speaks of a very strange world, more strange than my very words. It is a world that I do not understand, nor do I wish to understand it. Pages upon pages describe this world even before the story begins. People commit suicide just to escape it. Death by running. De ...more
The above introduction came to me while reading this book, a book that speaks of a very strange world, more strange than my very words. It is a world that I do not understand, nor do I wish to understand it. Pages upon pages describe this world even before the story begins. People commit suicide just to escape it. Death by running. De ...more

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.

In the small but powerful book In The Country of Last Things Paul Auster evokes a distressingly plausible dystopia. Nothing catastrophic seems to have occurred -- just a general collapse of public services, utilities, education, government, military, industry, the environment . . . basically all that represents "civilization" as we know it has ground to a Dark Ages crawl.
Our narrator Anna came to the city (which could be Manhattan, or D.C., really any major metropolis) from somewhere better. She ...more
Our narrator Anna came to the city (which could be Manhattan, or D.C., really any major metropolis) from somewhere better. She ...more

translater and expat Paul Auster suddenly at age 35 releases his father-son memoir 'Invention of Solitude' and then at age 40 releases the acclaimed New York Trilogy as well as this slim, dystopian volume. drawing comparisons most closely with '1984,' "The Country of Last Things" is faintly allegorical (poverty?), post-disaster, Roadesque (but the Road is 2006 and this is 1987), a city novel, a poverty novel, a hunger novel, an examination of societal breakdown as well as incident, idealism, and
...more

In this novel, Paul Auster has painted a brutally beautiful portrait of a society in collapse, and the ways humanity finds ways not only to go on in the face of horrific desolation, but to retain its soul. There's a "dark fairy tale meets Dickensian social realism" vibe to this novel. I could easily picture this adapted into a film by Terry Gilliam -- he and Auster seem to share a particular post-apocalyptic aesthetic of the bizarre and the grotesque.
(view spoiler) ...more
(view spoiler) ...more

I love Paul Auster's books. I've read mostly all of his fiction and now finally this one that's been eluding me for quite some time and was finally acquired through an interlibrary loan. Well worth the wait, well worth a read...all of these platitudes are terribly inadequate when it comes to describing In the Country of Last Things. But I do think it might be a masterpiece, a classic of dystopian fiction that be shelved right next to Brave New World, 1984 and the like. Presented as one long lett
...more

Imagine an unknown city in the near future, populated almost wholly by street dwellers. 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 exposure if they aren't murdered by other vagrants first.
Auster (my beloved author) uses his usual tremendous power with words to convey the depth of all the darkest of the dark.
“Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you must ...more

If Sartre's No Exit is the epitome of an existentialist hell, this book is the epitome of what hell would be like if it were every day life in a city. Auster's story focuses on a country that has deteriorated into almost complete anarchy. Starvation and theft are so rampant no one really cares about them anymore. Everyone is suffering until they eventually die. In some ways this was my favorite Auster book, and in some ways it was my least favorite. I loved the setting he establishes--a city in
...more

Auster plunges us into a dystopian nightmare in which love, dignity and compassion are still possible. His simple, clear prose unerringly trace his characters' inner logic—despite the seemingly fortuitous unfolding of events. (I'm assuming it is an early work.) Afterwards, I found myself sitting very quietly, the way you do when something momentous has passed.
...more

gripping and terrifying, auster creates a compelling dystopian cityscape and then somehow pulls the subtlety of the human spirit from it.

I love a good dystopian novel and this is a good dsytopian novel. It's fascinating and sad.
...more

Aug 30, 2018
Harry Collier IV
added it
Paul Auster is known as one of the masters of metafiction, or bringing one's own experience into a story and thus adding a level of meaning, and so I have decided to bring my own experience of Auster into this review in order to try and figure out what it is all about.
This book was the second thing by Auster I have read. Last Christmas, I received a lovely Folio Society edition of The New York Triology and read the first story "City of Glass." Since the books were originally written as three se ...more
This book was the second thing by Auster I have read. Last Christmas, I received a lovely Folio Society edition of The New York Triology and read the first story "City of Glass." Since the books were originally written as three se ...more

I close the covers of this book with a sense of foreboding and uncertainty. The narrative is a kissing cousin to
Dhalgren
, and is a city only a little less shifty than Bellona. It isn't per se dystopian (too anarchic?), nor is it really "apocalyptic" (there's been no obvious end of the world) but it's disturbed and disturbing and turned upside down. It's an epistolary novel, and as such conjures up comparisons with
The Handmaid's Tale
, but less linear. It's harder to guess where this goe
...more

http://haydenwritesthings.wordpress.c...
I finished this book on the train yesterday and, like all of Auster’s books, I wanted to immediately turn the book over and start again.
But I didn’t, and maybe that says something about this particular book. Moon Palace I must have read over five times now, and The New York Trilogy has been read at least four times - I’ve turned these books over in my hands on the same day, reaching the end only to start at the beginning again. This didn’t happen with In T ...more
I finished this book on the train yesterday and, like all of Auster’s books, I wanted to immediately turn the book over and start again.
But I didn’t, and maybe that says something about this particular book. Moon Palace I must have read over five times now, and The New York Trilogy has been read at least four times - I’ve turned these books over in my hands on the same day, reaching the end only to start at the beginning again. This didn’t happen with In T ...more

Written in first person; depicts a world filled with hollow men, only occasionally brightened by definite and sympathetic personalities; overflowing with some really amazing and meaningful sentences: I might be talking of Hearts of Darkness, but I must admit that Auster really did catch my attention with this short (albeit longer than Conrad's ) novel. From the very first page we found ourselves thrown in a postapocalyptic world, with no clear contest. The world, the country, is utterly doomed,
...more
topics | posts | views | last activity | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Goodreads Librari...: Add ACE reference | 1 | 7 | Dec 09, 2018 12:02PM | |
مناقشة رواية في بلاد الأشياء الأخيرة | 8 | 21 | May 25, 2015 12:46PM | |
What's the Name o...: SOLVED. A person walking around a dying or empty city writing home to someone because they are looking for a family member [s] | 6 | 32 | Feb 06, 2015 01:33AM | |
What's the Name o...: SOLVED. young girl (abandoned?) in a post-apocalyptic world man was at home most of the time building little buttled models. the girl is wondering the streets by day [s] | 3 | 66 | Oct 01, 2011 02:06AM |
Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Report from the Interior, Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Invisible, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. He has been awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature, the Prix Médicis Étranger, the Independent Spirit Award, and the Premio Napoli. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Ac
...more
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“إنَّ الذاكرة , كما تعلم , هي الفخُّ الأكبر .”
—
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“Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't
waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.”
—
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waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.”