In the Country of Last Things

Paul Auster

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2010
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571266739
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Social Sciences

Paul Auster's dystopian future from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: 'a literary voice for the ages' ( Guardian)

'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 happened.

Paul Auster takes us to an unspecified and devastated world in which the self disappears amidst the horrors that surround us. But this is not just an imaginary, futuristic world: like the settings of Kafka stories, it is one that echoes our own, and in doing so addresses some of our darker legacies.

In the Country of Last Things is a tense, psychological take on the dystopian novel. It continues Auster's deep exploration of his central themes: the modern city, the mysteries of storytelling, and the elusive and unstable nature of truth.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• These are the last things, she wrote
• There are people so thin, she wrote
• When you walk through the streets
• You would think that sooner or later
• Other deaths are more dramatic
• It tends to blur in my mind now
• For those at the bottom
• There is so much I want to tell you
• Bear with me
• I never found William, she continued
• In the end, that photograph made all the difference
• Their house was on Circus Lane
• We lived in one medium-sized room
• In the beginning
• I wandered aimlessly for two or three hours
• Isabel spent the rest of the morning
• I stayed with Isabel until the end
• Later that same day
• In spite of what you would suppose
• It was the hardest winter in memory
• That was how I survived the Terrible Winter
• In the end, Sam and I never suffered from these laws
• Little by little, I am trying to tell you what happened
• The routine was endless and exhausting
• The Woburn House supplier was a man named Boris
• Boris was right
• That was more than a year ago
• The irony was that Sam was a success
• Our necks were saved for a little while
• That was six or seven weeks ago
• I don’t go out much anymore
• About the Author
• Copyright