The narrator here, Anna Blume, has journeyed from her comfortable home to a distant, unnamed city to find her brother, William, who has disappeared. In the city, much of the social order one relies on to live one's life has broken down. Governments come and go--quickly--with no appearance of participatory democracy. Goverment is limited to things like the collection of nightsoil and corpses from the streets, and enforcing local laws forbidding human interment, since the city depends on the energy derived from burning bodies. Newspapers are published with regularity but we are left to wonder about their contents. Unlike, for instance, Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD, a bleaker dystopia, in which all law and order, all government has disappeared after some global cataclysm, Auster seeks to keep a semblance of civilization intact by way of the city-run markets, the local currency, the government, etc. He doesn't want his characters reduced to a mere subsistence existence, otherwise how can they strive for higher things? Like the book Anna helps Sam write, or the book Anna herself ends up writing. If one is constantly running from starvation and cannibalism, as in THE ROAD, one doesn't have much time for higher pursuits. The work Anna eventually undertakes in a local halfway house can be included under that heading as well. And yet the government, the currency, the city-run markets, the police, all this organization is incapable to stopping the populace from indulging in its death-saturated ways. There are The Leapers, who jump from buildings, and The Runners, who train to end their lives in one deadly sprint. The streets are despair and there seems no cure for it. The Euthanasia Centers provide death in any number of entertaining and pleasurable ways. Yet among all this death lust there are those like Anna who seek to sustain a daily life in the city. Like Zimbabwe and other third-world toilets, one is stuck here unless one has the money, connections and planning it takes to flee. This reader often has a problem with Auster. He is a purveyor of considerable narrative pleasure, but his novels, some of them, often suffer from near fatal lapses. In IN THE COUNTRY OF LAST THINGS one of the lapses has to do with the Anna's lover, Sam. There is word that Sam has burned to death in the great library fire. Anna is clearly shaken by this loss. She wails a bit. But she never looks for Sam. She just seems to move on. Granted, she has gotten into some Big Trouble along the way that can legitimately be said to have distracted her, yet always in the reader's mind is the sense that she has never properly looked for Sam. So naturally one feels he will eventually reappear. Auster wants this reappearance to be a surprise. It isn't. We expect it, and the trick strikes one as amateurish. I continue to read Auster despite his flaws. But one must always brace oneself for these glitches. (Who is the man's editor?) Every time I start an Auster book I wonder how the glitch will manifest itself, and I prepare myself for the pang of disappointment amid the pleasure. That's Auster for you. Like so many writers he must be taken warts and all.

Anna Blume arrives in an unnamed city to search for her brother - a journalist who has vanished without a trace. The city is one of unspeakable destruction and horror, where dead people lie in the street (either by their own hand, or from hired assassins, or from starvation or violence). Things disappear daily along with memories. To survive, Anna becomes an object scavenger, gathering up things from the past to sell for food and shelter. Who and what can survive in this bleak and desolate city?

Paul Auster's novel is written from Anna's point of view - and presented in a letter she writes to someone in her past. For Anna, there is no going back "home."

Unable to go back, and uncertain about going forward, the reader learns how Anna survives and what she finds in a place where everything seems to be lost.

The novel is not particularly hopeful - the characters not only lose the past, but also their faith.

The novel is well written and I found myself turning the pages seeking the same answers that Anna seeks. Auster offers a glimmer of promise - but, ultimately I finished the book with a feeling of disappointment. ( )

recommendable, the review by "RV" at
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/cust...
I'd like to suggest that Auster should ALSO be read by those who care that he's one of the U.S.' "most-exported" writers -- witness the reviews by readers from other countries, on the Amazon site. Here in Mexico, his works are among the best-known and most-discussed, of those by U.S. authors. ( )