Kaynakların ve üretimin, nesnelerin, binaların, yolların, insanların kısacası her şeyin kaybolduğu, sonunun geldiği bir distopya üllesi ve hikayesi Son Şeyler Ülkesinde.

Anna Blume gazeteci olan ve görev için geldiği bu ülkede kaybolan abisini bulmak için gelir bu adsız ülkeye ve şehre. Ne zaman ve nasıl bu hale geldiğinin net olarak belirtilmediği, New York olduğunu düşündüğümüz şehirde öncelikli olarak hayatta kalmaya çalışan bir yandan da abisi ile ilgili iz bulmaya çalışan Anna’nın bir arkadaşına yazdığı mektuptan öğreniyoruz hikayeyi. Açlığın, korkunun, yokluğun ve belirsizliğin egemen olduğu, terk edilemeyen, insanların ölümü kurtuluş olarak gördüğü totaliter bir ülke söz konusu olsa da başlangıç ve son konusunda net bilgilerin olmadığı, yaşanılan anın anlatıldığı bir hikaye.

Auster romanı 1987’de yazmış; kaynakların tükendiği, totaliterleşen bir geleceğe göndermeler yapmış. Auster’in gelecek varsayımları çok da uzak ve imkansız görünmüyor 2024’ten bakıldığında.

مدينة الاشياء الاخيرة تبدو خيالية ، تحمل مستقبل البشرية ، لكنها في الحقيقة وفي العمق تبدو اقرب مما تبدو ، استطيع ان اقول اننا نحيا او نموت - فلا فرق - داخلها ، فقط انظر حولك لن تجد سوى العزلة والوحدة والانانية ، الحالمون مننا يتحدثون لغة الاشباح والواقعيون لا يتحدثون مجانا ،ستجد العدائين و الواثبين وحاملي الدلاء و جامعي الخردة ، فعربة التسوق هي شعار وجوهر عصرنا ، تلك هي حياتنا وتلك هي مدينتنا

إنها رواية الشخصيات التي لا مستقبل لها، تعيش في قاع مدينة ليس لها سطح ولا سلطة إلا سلطة العصابات، لا مدارس فيها ولا سينمات ولا أحد يعرف كم سيبقى على قيد الحياة، عالم معزول غير العالم، بلا حاضر ولا غد، كل ما عليك حين تكون في تلك المدينة، ومثلها مدن البلاد، أن تبحث عن طعام لكي تعيش، حتى إن كان الحصول على الطعام يتم بالسرقة أو بالإذلال أو بالقتل، أن تعيش يجب أن تقاوم بكل شراسة، أن تمتهن القتل من دون أن يرف لك جفن

Have you ever reread an old favourite book and been unsettled by what it told you about your past self? I can't remember when precisely I first read In the Country of Last Things, I'd estimate fifteen years ago, but do recall that it spoke to me profoundly. This is probably because the main character is called Anna and she is trapped in an anxiety nightmare very similar to those I experience. As I read again with the benefit of hindsight, I wondered why the fuck did it took me so many years to realise that I have anxiety. From page six:

You can never know which streets to take and which to avoid. Bit by bit, the city robs you of certainty. There can never be any fixed path, and you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you. Without warning, you must be able to change, to drop what you are doing, to reverse. In the end, there is nothing that is not the case. As a consequence, you must learn to read the signs. When the eyes falter, the nose will sometimes serve. My sense of smell has become unnaturally keen. In spite of the side effects - the sudden nausea, the dizziness, the fear that comes with the rank air invading my body - it protects me when turning corners, and these can be the most dangerous of all.

Surely not everyone would read this literary evocation of a society in terminal decline, narrated by a lost woman constantly afraid of violence and death, and think "Wow, this is just like the inside of my head!" Apparently I considered that normal; I now realise it isn't.

Personal revelations aside, this remains my favourite to date of Paul Auster's excellent fiction. It can be read primarily as a fable or more literally with historical echoes (perhaps of the Holocaust and Siege of Leningrad). The novel is structured as a long letter that the protagonist Anna Blume writes to her brother, who she is searching for in the unnamed collapsing city. The first line states 'she wrote', with the implication that someone reads her words. This opening and the ending give the book a slightly more hopeful cast than I remembered, but it is still a fundamentally bleak narrative. The atmosphere is of a nightmare, as Anna describes her attempts to survive in an utterly hostile and arbitrary urban environment.

In a sense the setting could be considered dystopian, but I have strong and capricious views about what is and isn't a dystopia. In my opinion, In the Country of Last Things is apocalyptic rather than dystopian as it's a setting collapsing chaotically rather than being terrible yet stable. I consider dystopias to be characterised by a stable yet terrible regime of power that appears impossible to overturn, cf the classics 1984 & Brave New World, rather than something worse than reality per se. Dystopian and apocalyptic fiction deal with different fears, at least according to my theories. Auster certainly has acute insight into social collapse:

People will talk about anything here, especially things they know nothing about. What strikes me as odd is not that everything is falling apart, but that so much continues to be there. It takes a long time for a world to vanish, much longer than you would think. Lives continue to be lived, and each one of us remains the witness of his own little drama. It's true that there are no schools anymore; it's true that the last movie was shown over five years ago; it's true that wine is so scarce that only the rich can afford it. But is that what we mean by life? Let everything fall away, and then let's see what there is. Perhaps that's the most interesting question of all: to see what happens when there is nothing, and whether or not we will survive that too.

That question has always haunted me and will certainly continue to do so as climate change accelerates. Another particularly striking passage concerns a charity hospital:

The quandary is immense, however. The moment you accept the idea that there might be some good in a place like Woburn House, you sink into a swamp of contradictions. It is not enough simply to argue that residents should be allowed to stay longer - particularly if you mean to be fair. What about all the others who are standing outside, waiting for a chance to get in? For every person who occupied a bed in Woburn House, there were dozens more begging to be admitted. What is better - to help large numbers of people a little bit or small numbers of people a lot? I don't really think there is an answer to this question. Dr. Woburn had started the enterprise in a certain way, and Victoria was determined to stick with it to the end. That did not necessarily make it right. But it did not make it wrong either. The problem did not lie in the method so much as the nature of the problem itself. There were too many people to be helped and not enough people to help them. The arithmetic was overpowering, inexorable in the havoc it produced. No matter how hard you worked, there was no chance you were not going to fail. That was the long and short of it. Unless you were willing to accept the utter futility of the job, there was no point in going on with it.

In the Country of Last Things was first published in 1987, yet reads presciently like post-Cold War fiction. It is characterised by a terrifying absence of socio-political systems, rather than their oppressiveness. Despite the pervasive deprivation, alienation, and threat, however, there is also kindness, love, care, and solidarity in hellish circumstances. I'd forgotten a lot of details such as Anna losing a baby, her bisexuality, and the scene in which she nearly murders a man who tries to rape her but stops because she's enjoying choking him too much. I also didn't recall that the ending is open, as Anna and those she loves attempt to escape the ever-deteriorating city. They do not know whether they have any chance of managing it, but the reader is offered the possibility they succeed.

I'm glad that I reread In the Country of Last Things, as it's an extraordinarily vivid, intense, and distinctive narrative that still haunts me. Now that it has given me an unsettling window into my lack of self-awareness when I was younger, though, I think I can pass my copy on.

في بلاد الأشياء الأخيرة

لا تضيف هذه الرواية للقارئ شيئاً، وخاصة إذا كان قد قرأ رواية كويتزي (حياة وزمن مايكل ك)، تدور الرواية في زمن مستقبلي، حيث تحل كارثة ما، وتحاول البطلة البحث عن أخيها في مدينة تبدو وكأنها معزولة عن بقية العالم، مدينة مدمرة وشخصيات غريبة، ولكنك لا تتآلف مع الرواية ولا مع شخوصها.

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.

في برنامج لطالما أثار عجبي على قناة
National Geographic Abu Dhabi
يُظهر مجموعة من الأشخاص يستعدون لمواجهة نهاية العالم
بطريقتهم الخاصة


المجهزون لليوم الأسود

المراجعة
******
تشيع في الغرب روايات من نوع
Post-Apocalyptic Apocrypha
وهي الروايات التي تكشف الحجاب عن نهاية العالم

لم أكن أعتقد يوما أن مثل هذه الروايات قد تجذبني
لقراءتها .. لكن انغماسي في الرواية أولا ثم القراءة عنها ثانيا هو
ما جعلني أعرف هذا النوع من الروايات

الرواية
*****

بغض النظر عن النوع التي تنتمي إليه هذه الرواية فإنها ليست أبدا كأي من الروايات التي قرأتها سابقا
هذه رواية ذات حالة فريدة ومتفردة ذات وصف وأسلوب روائي ممتع يصطحبك إلى عالم غير متخيل ابدا بثوان معدودة .. يجعلك تعيش هاهناك لحظات ثم ينتقل هذا العالم معك لأيام بعد انتهاؤك من الرواية

يوجد في مخيلتي صورة لمدينتين متخيلتين وهما مدينة العمى لساراماجو ومدينة بيروت في كوابيس غادة السمان
الآن انضمت مدينة آنا بلوم إليهما

لا سوداوية مثل سوداوية هذه المدينة

مايو 30، 2015

نجمتان ونصف.

.

في بلاد الأشياء صغيرة ، بلد بدون اسم ،بلد خارج حدود الانسانية ، يقع البلد خلف كل البلدان الحالية ،
خلف اقنعة الدين والقانون والعرف والتقاليد ، عندما ينهار ثالوث الانسانية ، تصبح مواطن في بلاد الأشياء الأخيرة .
بول اوستر نجح في تجسيد السوداوية بطريقة مرعبة ، استخدم نفس طريقة رواية العمي "لفضح سقوط قناع الإنسانية من البشر " ،واحدة من الروايات الي ممكن تقعد في رأسك ، نتفكر بعد ماكملتها من فترة ، ماقدرتش نكتب ولاحاجة ، واحدة من تلك الروايات التي تكتفي "بلاتعليق" وتغلق الكتاب مع تنهيدة ، وابتسامة أنه عالم بول اوستر خيالي .
طريقة السرد ممتازة ، عندما تسرد حياة انسان يعيش من أجل هدف واحد هو أن يبقي حياً ، يستحق الموضوع وقفة احترام .

‎أعرف أن الناس ما عادوا يتحدثون إلى الرب، لكنني لا أستطيع أن أتمالك" نفسي
‎عن أن أفكر فيه كل يوم، أصلي لأجله ليلًا حين يغفو فرديناند، أتحدث إليه في قلبي طوال الوقت
‎و لما لم يعد فرديناند يتحدث إلي الآن إطلاقًا، فإن الرب هو صديقي الوحيد،
‎الشخص الوحيد الذي يستمع إلي، أعرف أنه مشغول جدًا، و لا وقت لديه لامرأة عجوز مثلي
‎غير أن الله رجل نبيل، و لقد سجلني على لائحته، اليوم و بعد مدى طويل
‎قام بزيارتي، أرسلك إلي كعلامة على حبه"

‎مقطع من الشخصية ‫"‬ايزابيل لبلوم

‎آنا بلوم‫...‬

‎‫حزين من أجلك أعتذر نيابة عن بول اوستر ، لوضعه لك كشخصية البطلة في الرواية ، وضع فتاة جميلة مثلك في جحيم دانتي ، وجدتي نفسك في جحيم يرحب بك " ‬يا من تدخلون هذا المكان ، اتركوا وراءكم أي أمل في الخروج !

‎الأشياء تختفي ، في صفحة الأولي يوجد بعض الناس ، في الصفحة الاخري يعلن عن اختفائهم ، متاهة الموت ، البقاء للآقوي ، تشغيل خاصية الغريزة الحياة ، أصدقاد يموتون ، بشر يأكلون الجرذان ، تفاصيل مقززة ، لكن للأسف هذه حقيقة الإنسان ‫.‬

‎" إنه من ضروب الحكمة توقع أي شيء ٍ سوى الأسوأ ".

I close the covers of this book with a sense of foreboding and uncertainty. The narrative is a kissing cousin to n  Dhalgrenn, 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 n  The Handmaid's Talen, but less linear. It's harder to guess where this goes next.

It's lyrical, and beautifully written. I'll need to re-read it, I think.

---

See also:

• The Best (or Worst) of Apocalyptic Books (via HuffPo, via LA Review of Books)

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. Death is seen in every doorway and on the streets with bodies stripped of clothing and all other possessions. It is as if they never belonged to them in the first place. Family members take their loved one’s gold teeth to sell in the markets, to buy rotten or fake food for themselves. Eggs filled with sawdust. Then the garbage pickers take those naked bodies away along with the buckets of sewage that has been placed on the streets. Then they are into energy to light the houses. Like those who have died, I wish to escape, but I am getting somewhat drawn in, much like a moth to a flame.

What are these last things that caused the author to place these words in the title of his book? Last of Civilization? Last of your sanity? Last of your Family? Last of everything you own as it can be stolen, everything you buy to eat can be rotten.

A woman is looking for her brother. Where he is, even he does not know. When she finds him, will she even know it? She comes to this town and is subjected to a haircut to make her bald, unattractive to men. The fear is that they will rape her for her very beauty. Do men in this world really care that much as to whether a woman is beautiful or not? After this, she begins to pleasure herself. There is a reason why these acts are done in private. Some don’t wish to see or hear about it, much less read it. I decide then that this is the LAST of the book for me, and I didn’t even have to do a death run in order to leave this horrid world. I only had to close the book.

4.5/5

De Paul Auster hacía ya bastante tiempo que no leía nada y mira tú por dónde, he ido a toparme en nuestro emotivo reencuentro con una de sus -hasta hoy- mejores novelas. La premisa de la que parte el libro (una mujer llamada Anna Blume que narra la búsqueda de su hermano desaparecido en una ciudad completamente desolada por un desastre que apenas se intuye) me sonaba un tanto extraña en manos de Auster, pero no hace falta más que leer unas cuantas páginas de El país de las últimas cosas para reconocer el inconfundible e inimitable estilo del escritor neoyorquino. Una visión conmovedora, audaz, intrépida y sofisticada sobre el fin de la civilización que gana enteros gracias a su fascinante carácter metaficticio. Sublime, brillante, desgarrador... simple y sencillamente alucinante.