Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things
Anna Blume is looking for her brother William in the city (New York? another city? we don’t know…) She arrived on a ship at nineteen, after William hadn’t been heard of for months. While the rest of the world seems to be going on normally, the city is decaying, on the verge of dying. Buildings flake and then crumble, a whole street can be there on day and gone the day after. Nothing new is produced, no baby is born anymore. In the city, people do not live, they merely survive. Some try to commit suicide, some try to adapt. They sell what they have, recycle what they can, use human waste and human bodies as fuel.
For Anna, the search for her brother is what allows her to go on. First on her own and homeless, one day she saves the life of an old woman, who offers to share her and her husband’s home. In the wasteland that is the city, Anna, who was used to wealth and comfort, will find friendship, she will even find love. She will live the happiest days of her life in the city… and the saddest.
In The Country of Last Things describes a post-apocalyptic kind of world, a world on the brink of collapse, and life there, with its absurd rules and unstable governments, is very similar to life in some totalitarian countries. In the Country of Last Thing, we meet some very strange characters, driven by absurd obsessions (as characters often are in Auster’s fiction) like Samuel Farr, a journalist who wants to write the story of the city, or Ferdinand, who builds boats in bottles.
In the Country of Last Things, it is not only the end of the city, but also the end of civilization, with the destruction of every reference and cultural landmark. Books are burnt to keep hot in the winter. It is the end of memory, and of language: "little by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whirling phonemes, and finally the whole thing just collapses into gibberish. The word "flowerpot" will make no more sense to you than the word "splandigo". Your mind will hear it, but it will register as something incomprehensible, a word from a language you cannot speak. As more and more of these foreign-sounding words crop up around you, conversations become rather strenuous. In effect, each person is speaking his own private language, and as the instances of shared understanding diminish, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate with anyone." It might also be the end of man…
In the Country of Last Things, Anna manages to survive however, recreating what used to be and has been lost: human connection and solidarity: maybe it is not the end of man after all, maybe humanity can find a way to survive, like Anna… Paul Auster uses the pretext of science fiction to show us how a world not so different from our own, a world where the homeless are legion, a world that could be ours if we don’t pay attention. In the Country of Last Things is a harrowing and powerful novel by a great writer…
Rating: 4/5
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