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.

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.

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?!?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Ρομαντισμός
Ρεαλισμός
Λυρισμός


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

Hopeless Migration

New York City was, perhaps still is, defined not so much geographically as spiritually by the unfulfilled aspirations of the people who migrate to it. And those migrants historically have come as much from the American hinterland as they have from across the ocean.

Manhattan Tranfer was a stop on the Pennsylvania Railroad in Newark, New Jersey before the tunnel under the Hudson connecting the mainline to Manhattan was completed. Once you arrived there, you had nowhere else to go but New York City. Dos Passos begins and ends his novel in this forlorn non-place. It is the entrance, for those already in America, into a world that was unique even within the uniqueness of America.

No one in this world is a native. All come because they are dissatisfied and become more dissatisfied as they acclimate to its brutality. It is a place of power not beauty, of deceit rather than wit, of crowded isolation.

These migrants want what others already have in New York City. They think that means money and opportunity. But more often they find that it’s disappointment and squalid, bare survival.

Immigrants from abroad come with nothing but hope. Migrants coming through Manhattan Transfer come with illusions rather than hope, and leave with less of both.

It is amazing how so many different voices are followed, threaded together through the narrative, to tell a story about what it was to be a person alive at that time and at that place as opposed to just the story of a single person or even any of the particular characters. There are so many hops and jumps it can be a bit difficult to remember who is who and when, especially since characters can change sometimes fairly drastically between their portions, but overall the effect is well handled. I do have to say that some of the dialects seem a bit hokey, but maybe that was just the best way to represent how they sound.

I've just reread it and liked the way the character of the city is built through the multi phasing of characters. Sure the dummies may find it hard to keep track of. But I don't think you're meant to hold them all like the city it depicts.

Now we are post credit-crunch this is probably a very good time to read this unusual American novel. At times it was hard to believe that Manhattan Transfer is describing the New York of 80+ years ago, so contemporary did it sometimes feel to me. The blurb on the back implies it is a novel about early 20's N.Y., but this is rather inaccurate. My grasp of history is not good enough to be precise, but the story certainly spans a period of over twenty years, and only reaches the 20s in the third of the three sections into which it is divided.



The prose style is idiosyncratic to say the least: the author loves creating German-style compound words, and frequently employs very individual spelling and punctuation. Some people might want to employ the dread phrase "prose poem" to describe it. The novel flits from character to character every few pages, sometimes even more often, with many appearing only once (so that very often I found it necessary to rifle through the earlier pages to try to confirm whether a character had appeared previously, and to see what had happened to him or her before)



This novel will probably tax the patience of many readers, but though I found it difficult to read more than 10 or 20 pages in one sitting, I was determined to finish it. I enjoy meeting people in pubs, even if I never see them again, and so I felt very comfortable with this book, because much of it is set in bars or restaurants, and characters are presented very vividly whether or not they will reappear later, and with something of the same intensity that one drink too many sometimes brings about. Although the city of New York always dominates over the humans I found the characterisation very satisfying.



Dos Passos was more or less contemporary with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Manhattan Transfer is, like the Great Gatsby, a book about New York and the American Dream. I far preferred Manhattan Transfer - I don't "get" Gatsby, and it is a mystery to me why it is so highly thought of. Though Manhattan Transfer occasionally drags, and though I sometimes wished for the kind of notes present in "real" Penguin Classics, I am very glad to have been introduced to this book. If you know nothing more about it try the Amazon "Look Inside" facility, as this gives a good impression of what you are in for if you decide to read this fascinating novel.