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Manhattan Transfer

john dos passos josé robles pazos

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"Manhattan Transfer" narra fragmentos de la vida de una amplísima galería de personajes que tienen como denominador común el espacio y el tiempo en el que se mueven, el Nueva York de los años veinte, así como el principal objetivo de la mayoría de ellos: la obtención rápida y lo más fácil posible de obtener dinero. Lo que marca una clara línea de separción entre ello es la altura a la que sitúan su listo moral. El hecho de que los personajes representen las más diversas capas sociales (trabajadores portuarios, camareros de grandes hoteles, prostitutas, traficantes de alcohol, abogados, sindicalistas...) y las más alejadas procedencias (franceses, irlandeses, caribeños, etc.) confieren a esta obra el carácter monumental retrato de una ciudad. La técnica literaria de collage, que en su momento fue un auténtico hallazgo, sigue funcionando a la perfección y es una de las causas principales de que se considere ésta como la mejor de las novelas de Dos Passos.
Esta edición incorpora, a modo de apéndice, el prólogo que el traductor, José Robles Pazos, escribiera para la primera edición española, en la que hace una valoración de la obra precedente de Dos Passos.
José Robles Pazos y John Dos Passos han resurgido gracias a la obra de Ignacio Martínez de Pisón "Enterrar a los muertos".

0 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1925
Places
new york city new york, 

This edition

Format
0 pages, Paperback
Published
November 1, 2006 by Edhasa
ISBN
9789509009622
ASIN
9509009628
Language
Spanish; Castilian

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About the author

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john dos passos

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John Roderigo Dos Passos, son of John Randolph Dos Passos, was an American novelist and artist.

He received a first-class education at The Choate School, in Connecticut, in 1907, under the name John Roderigo Madison. Later, he traveled with his tutor on a tour through France, England, Italy, Greece and the Middle East to study classical art, architecture and literature.

In 1912 he attended Harvard University and, after graduating in 1916, he traveled to Spain to continue his studies. In 1917 he volunteered for the Sanitary Squad Unit 60 of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with Edward Estlin Cummings and Robert Hillyer.

By the late summer of 1918, he had completed a draft of his first novel and, at the same time, he had to report for duty in the United States Army Medical Corps, in Pennsylvania.
When the war was over, he stayed in Paris, where the United States Army Overseas Education Commission allowed him to study anthropology at the Sorbonne.

Considered one of the Lost Generation writers, Dos Passos published his first novel in 1920, titled One Man's Initiation: 1917, followed by an antiwar story, Three Soldiers, which brought him considerable recognition. His 1925 novel about life in New York City, titled Manhattan Transfer was a success.

In 1937 he returned to Spain with Hemingway, but the views he had on the Communist movement had already begun to change, which sentenced the end of his friendship with Hemingway and Herbert Matthews.

In 1930 he published the first book of the U.S.A. trilogy, considered one of the most important of his works.

Only thirty years later would John Dos Passos be recognized for his significant contribution in the literary field when, in 1967, he was invited to Rome to accept the prestigious Antonio Feltrinelli Prize.

Between 1942 and 1945, Dos Passos worked as a journalist covering World War II and, in 1947, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Tragedy struck when an automobile accident killed his wife, Katharine Smith, and cost him the sight in one eye. He remarried to Elizabeth Hamlyn Holdridge in 1949, with whom he had an only daughter, Lucy Dos Passos, born in 1950.

Over his long and successful carreer, Dos Passos wrote forty-two novels, as well as poems, essays and plays, and created more than four hundred pieces of art.

The John Dos Passos Prize is a literary award given annually by the Department of English and Modern Languages at Longwood University. The prize seeks to recognize "American creative writers who have produced a substantial body of significant publication that displays characteristics of John Dos Passos' writing: an intense and original exploration of specifically American themes, an experimental approach to form, and an interest in a wide range of human experiences."

As an artist, Dos Passos created his own cover art for his books, influenced by modernism in 1920s Paris. He died in Baltimore, Maryland. Spence's Point, his Virginia estate, was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1971.

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 99 votes)
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99 reviews All reviews
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marblegirl
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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This 1925 novel is a portrait of life in jazz-age New York, and really captures the energy of the city. Interesting to see what has changed since then, and what has stayed the same. Dos Passos attempts some Joycean modernist experimentation here, but never strays too far from his journalistic roots and clear narration.
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Faded_Star
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Although semi-impressive in scope and structure, this novel was, for me, mostly a lot of sound and fury without a whole lot of signification. The novel's attempt to somehow, as more than one character says, "get to the center of things," ("things" being New York City) by intertwining the tales of wealthy and poor, showgirls and bankers, barmen and day laborers, only really showed that there is no center of things, really, without perhaps at least isolating a sub-group such as politics or finance or the theater or art world, and even then subgroups and cliques abound. Even so, even if the oft repeated phrase is thus used ironically, and the novel's hundreds of scenes and characters are there to illustrate a lack of center; then, frankly, what's the point? It appears to me rather obvious and relatively banal that the USA's greatest metropolis is made up of the millions of lives that intertwine there daily and that expressing such complexity is well beyond the capabilities of a novel--even at 400+ pages I felt like these were the barest beginnings of the most meager sample of the lives of (perhaps exemplary?) New Yorkers over the course of the decade (the teens and not the twenties that the novel's cover claims) that the novel seeks to represent. Thus the scenes here fell around me like so many anecdotes rather than pieces of an interlocking narrative, or picture, or panorama, which is what, I suppose, they were perhaps intended to be. It just bit off so much, such a big city, so many characters, a whole decade, World War, and on to the Prohibition era, that it was bound to feel light and superficial on each of these many, many topics.
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hachiko_madoka
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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This is a book (my very first by this author) that I simply loved from page one to closing page. I wish it was longer as in my mind it’s worthy in all the aspects. And I smile even now upon finishing it because I am reminded myself that the decision to start reading this book – peacefully residing on my private bookshelves from last summer bookfair – was that the author is named “Dos Passos” alongside with John Roderigo–and well, in the last novel I read of Jose Saramago ‘The Stone Raft’ the main protagonists are travelling around Portugal and Spain in an old car named “two horses” and then in a cart by real “two horses”. And I started playing with the combination imaginatively –dos passos –two steps –two horses…Well, indeed, isn’t it a sign?!?
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JonGall
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Formal sicherlich ein Meisterwerk der Moderne, dem die Hörspielversion mit allerlei Effekten und Jazz- bzw. 20s AVantgarde gerecht werden wollte. Viele prominente Sprecher im Großstadtpanorama geben Charakteren Profil, die man samt und sonders nur nervig finden kann. Konnte keinen rechten Zugang zu niemand in diesem Kaleidodskop finden, etliche Lücken im Vergleich zum Roman tragen vielleicht auch dazu bei, dass vieles unmotiviert rüber kommt.
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YesImJunior
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Dos Passos' "modernism" sometimes feels like it consists of two main devices: first, all two word phrases that would ordinarily be printed as separate or hyphenated words are printed as one, creating a lot of Germanic constructions like "orangerinds", "handwinches", "manuresmelling", "leadentired" (those are all on the first page) - the other is, not delineating the start of a new section (and the change from one set of characters to another) by anything so obvious as a chapter division, instead relying entirely on personal pronouns (he and she) until eventually somewhere in the second or third paragraph dropping an actual name to identify who we are reading about.

Added to that is one chameleonic actress who subtly changes her name (Ellen, Elaine, Helena) over several decades and a few other ambiguous moves. The really precise Manhattan geography in here renders it particularly vivid for anyone quite familiar with the place as do the differences between then and now (West Village as an Irish slum with chickens running around in the streets, etc).

The story covers roughly the first quarter of the 20th century, and one striking thing is his decision to focus entirely on his characters' lives in New York - there's a big jump over WWI and the subsequent influenza epidemic and we rejoin our characters after a five-year hiatus, older but scarcely wiser, swilling Prohibition-era bootleg hooch, discussing or deploring the nascent Russian-inspired labor movement etc.

Did I say great?
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-was-
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Wow. I was not expecting this. The pace here is so frenetic; the narrative so kaleidoscopically disquieted; shifting here there and everywhere between characters, that on the one hand I admired it for its anarchic structure, but on the other I just found it just too messy and too busy to suck it all up - maybe just the wrong book at the wrong time for me at the moment, so I'm not going to be too hard. It felt like I was dancing out of tune to its rhythm. But hey, these things happen. I think of novels written in the 1920s depicting New New and the extravagance of Scottie Fitzgerald flashing through my mind, but this is more like a politically left-leaning 1920s Hubert Selby Jr in a chaotic state, infused with, say, the experimental modernism of Virginia Woolf. It could well be a masterpiece, and I'm willing to have another crack at it some day.
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JuneNephthys
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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This novel is very caleidoscopic and switches from one storyline to another very rapidly which makes it hard to follow sometimes. In the end all characters seem to flow in and out of each other. Maybe it was meant that way. It does give a very vivid sense of life in New York city in that era.
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cheetahs
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Καπνίζει ευτυχισμένος.
Δεν δείχνει να θυμάται τίποτα, δεν υπάρχει μέλλον, υπάρχει μόνο το τυλιγμένο στην ομίχλη ποτάμι και το πορθμείο, που προβάλλει τεράστιο με τα φώτα του στη σειρά, σαν νέγρικο χαμόγελο.

Πρόζα για το μεγάλο μήλο, και για τον 20ο αιώνα.
Υπέροχη πρόζα για την προσπάθεια της νέας ζωής, του ονείρου και της επερχόμενης εξαϋλωσης, από την τεράστια πυκνότητα της ιδίας προσδοκίας από τόσο πολύ κόσμο. Το αστικό αντίστοιχο ενός κόκκινου γίγαντα που το μέλλον του είναι ένας λευκός νάνος, αν όχι μια προσωπική μαύρη τρύπα.

Τρένα πυγολαμπίδες πηγαινοέρχονται στους αραχνοϊστους που σχηματίζουν οι γέφυρες τυλιγμένες στην ομίχλη
Τραπεζίτες και μετανάστες με μάτια θολωμενα , για τους δικούς τους λόγους, ακούνε τον ολολυγμο των ρυμουλκών, βολεύονται όπως όπως στα πολυτελή αυτοκίνητα ή στα πορθμεία τους, που τους μεταφέρουν ολοταχώς στους Σαράντα Δρόμους, δρόμους που αντηχούν από φώτα λευκά σαν τζιν, κίτρινα σαν ουίσκι, φώτα που αφριζουν σαν μηλίτης

Είναι 5 το πρωί στη Νέα Υόρκη!

Πιασμένοι αλά Μπρατσέτα διέσχισαν λοξά την Περλ Στριτ κάτω από τη δυνατή βροχή. Μπαρ εχασκαν ολόφωτα μπροστά τους στις γωνιές των βρεγμενων δρόμων. Κίτρινες αναλαμπές που αντανακλούσαν από καθρέφτες, μπρούτζινες μπάρες και χρυσές κορνίζες γύρω από πίνακες με ροδαλα κορμιά γυμνών γυναικών παγιδεύονταν και ξεχείλιζαν από ποτήρια ουίσκι που άδειαζαν μονορουφι με ανασηκωμένο το κεφάλι, κυλαγαν χαρούμενα στο αίμα, έβγαιναν αφρίζοντας από αυτιά και μάτια, στάλαζαν από ακροδαχτυλα.

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Το τραγούδι τελείωσε στο φωνόγραφο και η πλάκα γύριζε, γύριζε ατελείωτα...
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