هذا غامض جداً .. غامض بطريقة مريبة .. مخيفة ، أن تقرأ وصفاً دقيقاً مقلقاً لبلدٍ من هذا النوع ، وحين أقول من هذا النوع فأنا أعني نوعاً فريداً جديداً ابتكره بول أوستر - بالنسبة لي على الأقل - بلاد بول أوستر الغامضة هذه التي تطفو على بحر من جثثها وقاذوراتها ، على وعيها الجديد بالمحيط من حولها ، تمتلك قائمة جديدة بالمهام البشرية و الأعمال المطلوبة من العامة بأجور تبقي على الحياة لعدة سنوات ( مكسن و غذاء ساخن كل يوم ) ، قائمة غرائبية أطول بالجرائم المُعاقب عليها بصرامة شديدة كـ دفن الجثث دون تسليمها للدولة ، نعم ليست السرقة و القتل ضمن القائمة أبداً ، لأنها ولسبب ما جزء لا تجزأ من الوجود ، من الحضارة الإنسانية المُتهالكة ، من الحياة اليومية ، حيث تُبارك الحكومة مؤسسات تُساعد مجموعة من مواطنيها على الإنتحار بطرق مبتكرة جديدة ، كالموت منهكاً من الركض !

حين استمر أوستر طوال الصفحات الأربعين الأولى يصف بدقة متناهية كل ما ذكر أعلاه و يزيد كثيراً جداً ، جعلني أنتظر اللحظة الحاسمة التي ستتغير بها الأمور ويبدأ في سرد أحداث روايته ، ليس لشعورٍ بالملل ، إلا أن البلاغة العالية ( التي تمتع بها المترجم ) في وصف أفكار بول أوستر عن بلدته تلك ، جعلني أشعر بقرفٍ حقيقي من الوهم ، من اللاشيء الذي خلقه بول أوستر من العدم .. العدم ؟ قد لا يبدو هذا وصفاً دقيقاً إذا تحرينا ذلك ، بول أوستر لم يأتي بأي شيء من العدم إنه فقط كان يقول ببساطة : أن هذه هي الأشياء الأخيرة للعالم الكامل ، للإنسانية ، للحضارة !

الأشياء التي سنقف على أطلالها يوماً ، نصنعها بأيدينا كل يوم ، نبحث عنها بشكل محموم ، ونخرجها مباركين أنفسنا غير آبهين بالنهاية المحتومة ، باللحظة التي تتداعى فيها الأشياء ونعود إلى نقطة الصفر .

رسمياً, بول أوستر من كُتابي المفضلين, مبروك عليا :)

This was actually sweeter than I imagined; disturbing at times, but only a hint of it which was replaced by... sweeteness. It is something about the ease of the words which makes this story, despite the setting, quite easy and enjoyable to read. I don't know whether this is because it is really fast-paced or if the horrific details were rather more obvious than they seem at first. At the end of the story I didn't feel sad, I only exclaimed: "Huh... this was nice!". This doesn't mean that I enjoyed reading all about her eerie misfortunes or her descriptions of abominable characters, I guess it just means that the story flows nicely and that the main idea of the book is enticing. Sadly, it all lasted as much as a nightmare; your heart is pounding, but you are also interested and intrigued by what you dreamed, fascinated by everything you saw and the things that you could remember after you woke up. All in all, I really liked this book, but it was a bit too hurried and the story wasn't able to carve itself in my brain, but the feeling will last and that's why I recommend this book.

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 utter chaos. But this world building takes up almost all of every page at the expense of character development and the delivery of a moral.

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 know what caused civilization to end or how pervasive it is, and here the reader also gets focused on what essence of human nature can live on in the ruins as some kind of beacon against the darkness. Anna's progression from scavenger of discarded objects ("last things"), to a supporter of a journalist recording people's stories, and finally to a key contributor to a hopeless respite effort for the homeless seems some sort of allegory of cultural response to disasters. One piquant response of one character to the situation is to escape into building ever tinier ships in bottles, which possibly stands in for a satirical take of the poverty of art to make up for loss. As Anna begins to run out of space in the journal, she is reminded of this when she is forced to write in tinier letters in order to complete her story.

“No País das Últimas Coisas” - publicado originalmente em 1987 pelo escritor norte-americano Paul Auster (n. 1947) - é um obra de ficção científica ou uma distopia que o autor dedica a Siri Hustvedt (n. 1955), sua mulher e uma excepcional escritora.
A narrativa de “No País das Últimas Coisas” situa-se numa cidade norte-americana sem nome, estamos num futuro próximo, caótico e devastado, dominado pela miséria e pela violência, povoada por habitantes que tentam desesperadamente sobreviver, procurando a subsistência, recolhendo e vendendo objectos e outros materiais que encontram no meio do lixo e dos escombros de edifícios arruinados, como forma que assegurar alguma comida para “matar” a fome.
Paul Auster constrói este romance em forma de uma carta da jovem – Anna Blume – que nesse ambiente anárquico e obscuro, no meio do caos e da desordem, procura o seu irmão William Blume, um jornalista, que inexplicavelmente desapareceu, sem dar notícias ou deixar algum rasto de esperança.
Anna Blume refere: ”Quando vivemos na cidade, aprendemos a não contar com coisa nenhuma. Fechamos os olhos por um momento, viramo-nos para olhar para outra coisa qualquer, e, de súbito, aquilo que tínhamos à nossa frente desapareceu. Nada dura, compreendes, nada, nem mesmo os pensamentos dentro da nossa cabeça. E não vale a pena perdermos o nosso tempo à procura seja do que for. Quando uma coisa desaparece, é o seu fim.” (Pág. 9)
Depois há inúmeras seitas ou grupos, com objectivos de vida e de morte díspares; talvez o mais bizarro seja o Clube de Assassinato, para as pessoas que querem morrer, mas que têm demasiado medo de levar a cabo tal tarefa pelos seus próprios meios, inscrevendo-se na sua zona de recenseamento, tendo, para tal, que pagar uma quota relativamente módica.
Ao longo da narrativa acompanhamos as desventuras, as adversidades e os infortúnios de Anna Blume, entre o desespero e a descrença, entre a ansiedade e a amargura, entre a felicidade e a satisfação, ou entre as pequenas alegrias e o verdadeiro amor.
“No País das Últimas Coisas” é um romance de ficção científica ou uma distopia, com um título emblemático, que não se refere exclusivamente ao desaparecimento de um modo de vida e de objectos, mas ao desvanecimento das memórias e dos sentimentos mais comuns e mais triviais.
Como é habitual a escrita de Paul Auster é magistral, num registo invulgar – neste caso específico - conduz-nos por ambientes devastados, num mundo imaginário e futurista, mas, efectivamente, muito palpável e tangível, concreto nas questões das alterações climáticas; contudo, igualmente, primoroso na caracterização e enquadramento das personagens, na sua existência e nas suas vivências, englobando profundamente o desespero e a desesperança.
Altamente recomendável para os apreciadores de ficção científica e/ou das distopias, para os admiradores incondicionais de Paul Auster e para os leitores que valorizam a excelência da literatura.

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 an 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 her street by street, food is scarce, and punishments for transgressions are harsh, meted out by no nonsense enforcers. Anna writes that beatings are commonplace, and every now and then, you hear of a murder.

It’s clear that Anna has been in this place for some time now, probably for a number of years. We learn that babies aren’t born here anymore and conditions are so desperate that Euthanasia Clinics offer the opportunity to buy your own death – an assassin is assigned and you will be killed at a future point but in a way and at a time unknown to you. Groups of people run through the city screaming at the top of their voices until they drop from exhaustion. Anna explains that the point is to die as quickly as possible, to drive yourself so hard that your heart can not stand it.

Given the meagre amount of food available, for the majority (the non-rich) survival, for those that want it, it depends on earning sufficient to buy just about enough to stay alive. For most, this means scavenging: either garbage collecting or object hunting. Anna has become an object hunter and has also managed to find a place to stay, she’s keeping her head above water but barely so, and so far there’s no sign of her brother.

I thought I had already read all of Auster’s novels, but I’d somehow missed this one. First published in 1987 it’s a short dystopian tale with, in truth, little in terms of a discernible plot. But it is rich in atmosphere and, as you’d expect from Auster, it’s very well written. Though it’s a piece that left me with many more questions than answers, I do have a feeling it’s going to haunt me for some time. I wouldn’t consider it one of the author’s very best works, but such is the quality of this writer I still believe it’s worth seeking out.

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 separate stories I wanted to take a break between them in order to experience them as such. I have not gotten back to "Ghosts" or "The Locked Room" yet.
Recently, I was in Lithuania on business and came across Auster's book "4 3 2 1" in the Academy Bookshop. Recognizing the name from "The New York Trilogy," I picked it up and read the first page. When he explains how the grandfather became known as Ichabod Fergusson I experienced the rare moment of laughing out loud in a quiet bookshop.
Buying this book (12 Euro) would severely cut into my food budget and I wasn't sure if I had the space in my suitcase but I didn't care. I needed this book.
I had made a deal with my wife that we would both read Thomas Pynchon's "V" while away and so could not start on "4 3 2 1" straight away.
On my last day in Vilnius I was still very far from the end of "V" but I had inadvertently packed it deep into my luggage and wasn't going to look for it.
Over breakfast at my hostel I saw a few books in the window and among worn out copies of "Harry Potter" and "Neverwhere" was a pristine copy of "In the Country of Last Things." Again seeing Auster's name and that this book was short (188 pages) I swiped it from the hostel and began reading it at the airport.
At first the story did not grab me. It just felt so amateurish the way he laid out the city in pure exposition. It took 44 pages before any sort of story began and then it grabbed me. I wanted to know more. I wanted to explore this world and find out more about the inhabitants that lived there.
For all the setup Auster did, none of it - not one single piece of information- ever really came back to be useful. The story did not rely on any of it.
The story itself was great and made me care about the charatcers. Then Auster just abandons the whole thing and it is over. Mid-story it is finished.
Why did he waste so much space on the setup and then not continue the story to the end?
I am sure there is something deeper going on here. Some universal truth that I am missing. I know that if I studied it and reread it I could maybe walk away thinking that this book was worth my time.
Nothing in this book makes me want to do that though.
I will still read more Auster but this one is a lost cause for me.

Auster nos presenta un mundo que se acaba tal y como lo conocemos, un mundo que se destruye y desaparece, que podríamos interpretar como una pandemia ética: los valores en los que apoya nuestro mundo se resquebrajan y la madera está podrida.

Un libro completamente actual.

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 futile. 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 she arrived to. But you can pretty much guess (the city is on east coast, the country expands westwise, she crosses a sea, talk of her childhood life suggests UK to me - I feel this city is a form of New York).

Something has happened to the city and to the country. I guess the economy has fallen apart (the current is 'glot' here), politically the government falls apart very often, the houses and the streets are not cared for, the weather changes wildly (including having 5-6 month long winter at least once). There is a 'build a wall' project, that thankfully falls apart due to economical/political reasons, there's sudden tolls across the street that you have to avoid. The food is scarce, no children are born, the dead are left in the street to collect. No planes have been seen in the sky for years (some even don't remember/believe in them); the rich have left the country (mostly), no ships beyond aid ships have arrived for years.
Yet people arrive regularly from the west (seems like outside things are not much better). You can earn money from being a scavenger, or join groups for different forms of suicide/repentance (the description of the Runners is what made me try reading this first time around).

The description of the city comes first, in the book, some of the information of which is above. You have to piece things together to understand even a bit why this city (and the country) are in such a mess - mess that one could see being a 'near future' thing. Anna's story is simple yet an example of one arrival's life of surviving in the city (not all who arrive in the city from any direction are lucky, especially if they are not smart with it, or don't have enough money/connections).

The book ends with her notebook pages ending, her handwriting getting smaller (she says) as she comes to the end. There's no knowing if she even gets to send this letter-notebooks (she doubts it), nor if the plan to leave the city towards west succeeds, even with the permits, but the openness of the ending makes things seem hopeful.
This is a book (and a notebook) full of endings and vanishings, and how one accepts it or not; besides these themes, I loved the mood the story had - the end has come, but what an interesting way this world does it! All the characters, and the city, do it well.

قرأتها على فتراتٍ مُتباعدة , ليس أنَّها ثقيلة أو رديئة ؛ لُغتها النثريَّة فاخرة فحسب و تستحقُّ وقتاً تام وعقلاً خال لا يودُّ أن يُبصر إلا القراءة . رواية عميقة , تجسِّد التدهور الإنساني والصراع الأخلاقي بحرفيّة جميلة وتسلسلٍ متقن , هذا -بالتأكيد- بغض النظر عن الإباحيَّات التي قفزت في عدة مواضع كجانبٍ روائي مُكمِّل للقصة والرؤية التي يريد أوستر إيصالها .

"لا شيء يدوم، هل تفهمني، ولا حتى الأفكار في داخلك. وينبغي ألا تضيع وقتك بحثاً عنها. حين يتوارى شيء ما فهذا يعني نهاية الأمر."

رواية "في بلاد الأشياء الأخيرة" لـ"بول أوستر" هي رواية من نوع الديستوبيا، حيث الأشياء تنتهي، والعالم يفنى إلى زوال، فلقمة العيش غير مضمونة، المسكن والمأوى يُعد ترفاً، حيث تصبح أهمية جسدك وهو ميت أكثر مما وهو حي، حيث البرودة والصقيع في كل مكان، حتى أفئدة البشر.
تبدأ الرواية بسفر "آنا بلوم" إلى بلداً ما، لتبحث عن أخيها الذي ذهب ولم يعد، لتكتشف أنها وقعت في مأزق، ويجب عليها أن تُكافح يوماً بيوم من أجل النجاة في هذه البلاد العجيبة، ولكن النجاة يوماً بيوم لم يمنعها من التفكير والتشبث دائماً بقضيتها وهدفها، العثور على أخيها حتى لو خبر يقول أنه مات!

"إن الذاكرة هي الفخ الأعظم، أتفهم، وقد بذلت قُصارى جهدي لأمسك نفسي، لأبعدها، لأتأكد من عدم عدم تسلسل أفكاري إلى الأيام الغابرة."

ومن خلال قصة "آنا" نرى كيف توحش البشر، وكيف يندثر العالم، كيف أصبح العالم فارغاً من كل معانيه، وكل الأفكار لم يُصبح لها فائدة، فقط ما يُنجيك هو ما له قيمة.
وهنا تكمن براعة "بول أوستر" فمن خلال عرض القصة يُناقش ويسخر القضايا الإنسانية، ما تفعله المدينة بالإنسان، التحول لآلة أو حيوان، أما أن تكون مُصمتاً فارغاً أو أن تكون وحشاً ضارياً، الطريقة التي بُنيت بها الحياة في المدينة تجعلك عبداً لها، وتقل رويداً رويداً الإنسانية والمشاعر، ليحل محلها العملية والقسوة، والوحشية، فلاحظ أننا نتكلم عن النجاة من الموت، إلى أي مدى يُمكن أن ينحدر البشر؟

تأتي هذه الرواية التي نُشرت لأول مرة في نهاية التسعينيات وبالتحديد عام 1987، لتكون مثالاً وتخيلاً قاسياً لو ساءت الأمور أكثر مما كانت عليه وقت وباء كورونا الذي عاصرناه، والذي يُحلق في الفراغات حولنا كشبحاً خفي، فلا تعلم أتُعد ما مررنا بها هو ميزة لأننا لم ننحدر إلى هذا السوء، أم نتخوف من مستقبل قد يجعلنا نصل إلى أسوأ ما فينا؟ أظن لهذا السبب ترك "أوستر" نهاية روايته مفتوحة، فالنهاية سنُدركها عندما تحدث، وسنراها بأعيننا.

بكل تأكيد يُنصح بها.