I bought this book in 1998, at the tail end of my Auster obsession. In the 90s, I read everything he published — the novels, of course, but also the essay collections, the plays, the juvenalia… and watched all movies he’d been involved with. But I grew increasingly… er… overly familiar with his storytelling ticks? There wasn’t ever any of the works that I disliked, but I just fell out of love with his work?
So this one was probably the last one I bought, and I never got around to reading it. Until now!
It’s odd that I never got around to reading this, because it was the first thing he wrote after the New York Trilogy, which is (of course) everybody’s favourite (me too! although I haven’t read it again since I was nineteen; I should fix that).
Anyway, I wonder whether this was written earlier? It’s a dystopian thing set in a large city, which at the start seems like a metaphor for New York in the 70s. As the book progresses, it grows less metaphorical, I think, and the New York semblance fades — but it’s a kinda formless book. The first quarter is all a description of this society without any “action”, and then the rest is one-thing-that-happens-after-another-to-the-protagonist. It’s not altogether successful?
Which is another reason why I’m wondering whether this was written earlier, because it reminds me of what Auster was writing about in Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure, which has as an “appendix” an entire early novel that he couldn’t get anybody to publish.
Googling the book doesn’t tell me anything… this is not one of the more celebrated books in Auster’s oeuvre.
In the Country of Last Things (1987) by Paul Auster (Buy used, 3.91 on Goodreads)