In the country of last things door Paul Auster

Summary

Anna Blume arrives in a city in the country of last things to look for her brother William. Nobody has heard about him for months. It is not very probable that he is still alive. And who goes voluntarily to a city which doesn't really exist? All she has is William's last address, the name and a photo of his successor, Samuel Farr. She only realizes the dimension of chaos and destruction when she arrives in the city. The street, the building she looks for don't exist anymore. The conditions are unimaginable - the city falls into ruin; in order to survive you have to plunder, to steal, to be inventive; food is meagre, apartments are luxury. There are many new jobs in the city: corpses collectors, assassins, who are employed by the victim himself, garbage collectors, etc.
But Anna is lucky. One day she saves the live of an older woman, Isabel. Isabel takes Anna home. She also shows her tricks to survive. Anna is able to life there and they become friends. However Isabel is very ill. After her death housebreakers immediately come to take over her apartment.
After that Anna lives on the streets again - until she happens to enter the national library, being on the run. There she meets Samuel Farr, who is working on a book about the city. Anna and Sam share Sam's room and soon become lovers. One day Anna is lured into a human slaughterhouse, while she is looking for new shoes. But she manages to escape. In the meantime the library has burnt down.
The people of Woburn House find Anna and take her with them. Woburn House gives a roof to homeless persons for a few days. Anna stays there, recovers from her accident and begins work there. She doesn't know what happened to Sam, her relationship with Victoria, the owner of Woburn House, gives her new strength.
A few weeks later Sam turns up at Woburn House. Anna, who has given up searching for him, is very happy. Sam works at Woburn House, too. Finally the people of Woburn House run out of money and have to close shelter. Anna and her friends decide to leave the city although this is a dangerous enterprise. Anna also wants to continue the search for her brother.

Anna Blume, a Jew but no longer believing in God since her childhood, is a nineteen-year-old woman searching her brother.
She lives her own ideas of living in a destruct land. She doesn't want to live in a sect like lots of other people. She wants only to survive. For surviving she becomes an object hunter. She doesn't believe everything people tell her because she has learned nothing has to be like someone else had told her time before.
Isabel gives her lots of advice.
One day, she becomes aware that she'll get a baby, she has lots of doubts - not that she wouldn't be happy about this, but the thoughts of giving birth to a child under those conditions she lives struck her as madness. She loses her baby when she jumps out of a window for not being killed by a man in a human slaughterhouse.
Anna and Victoria become a sort of couple - but not really one in the usual sense. Being with Victoria gives Anna pleasure, but it also gives her the courage to live in the present again. Anna doesn't hate her life anymore, and now she's able to look forward and to love the other woman.
She's very happy when she meets Sam who was in the time in the Library her lover, again.
The only thing Anna thinks about the last night before she'll leave is to ask for the chance to live one more day.
One day she found Isabel's notebook in her bag and she begins writing this letter before it'll be too late. By this moment, it is the one thing that counts for Anna, to get it all down on these pages before it is too late.
Isabel is a tall, middle-aged woman; her thoughts aren't obviously not on her job as object hunter. She is a thin and trembling woman with a long face and hollow eyes. She says about her, that she's bad luck. Everyone would know it, but no one would tell her - and even this, she would know it. She knows everything, even if no one tells her. She is married with Ferdinand and she had had three or four children, all of whom were dead or had run away from home.
She becomes a scavenger, an object hunter. She is ill and she wouldn't survive if Anna doesn't help her. She is worn out, too tired to stay on her feet for a long time, and her mind now wanders constantly from her work.
She thinks that she'll take care for Anna and will do everything she can do for her.
She is a very strong woman - she did all to keep the household on going by herself and when she gets weaker, she does it together with Anna until the day she couldn't get up anymore.
She is married with Ferdinand, but she feels happy the morning after the night he had died.
Then she becomes really ill. It's a kind of sclerosis and there is no cure for it.
At the end of her life, she's only able to write something down for Anna in the notebook.

Characters

Ferdinand

He is Isabel's husband and he had once been a commercial sign painter, but with so many business closing up or unable to pay, Ferdinand had been out of work for several years. For a while, he drinks too much - stealing money from Isabel's purse at night to support his sprees, hanging around the distillery in the fourth census zone, begging glots from the workers by dancing for them and telling them funny stories. After a group of men beat him, he never goes out again.
The only thing he cares about is his hobby: making miniature ships and putting them into bottles.
He has lost his authority long time ago because he has relinquished all practical decisions to his wife and it would be difficult for him to assert his authority in only one area.
He is an uncooperative man. Ferdinand is an ugly man, and nothing about him makes you forget this ugliness: no charm, no generosity, nothing else in this way. He is bone-thin and hunched, with a large hooknose and a half-bald head. The little hair he has left is frizzy and unkempt. It sticks out furiously on all sides, and his skin has a sick man's pallor. It's an unearthly white, and it seems even whiter because he has black hair growing all over him. Perpetually unshaven, dressed in rags, and never once with a pair of shoes on his feet, he looked like someone's cartoon version of a beachcomber.
He wants to create the smallest ships and to become famous and perhaps rich.
Another hobby of him is to catch the mice living in the house. When he catches one, he burns it over the flames of the stove and after that he eats it.

Samuel

In the year living in the city, Samuel Farr has become a gaunt, bearded man with dark circles under his eyes, and a nervous, unpredictable energy seems to go out from his body. This gives him the look of an old man who hasn't slept anymore for over a month. But at the same time, he's an arrogant man. He doesn't believe everything you tell him, he always wants a proof. He speaks in a nervous, self-mocking voice, and he skips from one subject to another in ways, which are difficult to follow. You get the impression of a man who is nearly at a collapse. He's writing a book about the story of the city. His money is running low and he is now eating only every other day. The strength has been sapped out of him, and there are times when he becomes so dizzy that he sees no longer the words he's writing. Sometimes he would fall asleep at his desk without even knowing it.
When he gets to know Anna, he falls in love with her. When Anna tells him that he'll become a father, he gets very enthusiastic. He thinks there is perhaps a chance of a new world's beginning. After the fire-down of the library, he's no longer so arrogant - he has made his experiences and this changed him into a softer, more calm and peaceful man. He has to live in the Diogenes Terminal. He comes also to Woburn House, begins to work there and he's so happy meeting Anna again.

Victoria

Victoria Woburn is about thirty-eight or forty years old, and she had dark wavy hair and large green eyes.
After a while, Victoria come more often to Anna - she needs someone to talk to and a person to share her thoughts with. Anna and Victoria have lots in common, only the kind of childhood is different. They become friends.
Money itself doesn't interest her, and she has turned her back on the things it represented long ago.
She has been married twice - once with a man who was good for her being accepted in the society, and the next time with a man called Tommy. They had together two children. She sends her children away to England.
She invites Anna to rest in Woburn House with the words: "There's a lot of work to be done here, Anna, more work than we can ever hope to do. I have no idea what will happen in your case, but broken hearts are sometimes mended by work."
Anna and Victoria become a sort of couple - not really one in the usual sense. But they both become a refuge for the other, the place where each of them could go to find comfort in her solitude.
When Sam appears in the Woburn House, Victoria doesn't react with jealousy or something like this, she only understands the situation. Her first response to the news is happiness - for Anna's sake, for the fact that Sam was alive - and afterward she worked as hard as Anna did to see that he recovered.
She had suffered a private loss, but she also knows that Sam's being there represented a gain for Woburn House.
Nothing is more important to Victoria than Woburn House. She is going through her life with straightforwardness. But suddenly there seems to be a realm of darkness in her recognizing that Woburn House is on the verge of going under.
At the end, Victoria begins to get aware that she has to leave the city and all things that were once important for her.

Boris

Boris Stepanovich is the supplier of Woburn House.
Boris has a dubious character, but he was an old friend of the death Dr. Woburn. Boris is a plump, middle-aged man who seemed really fat by the standards of the city. He has a taste for flamboyant clothes like fur hats (he collects hats), walking sticks and boutonnières. In his round, leathery face there is something, which reminds you of an Indian chief or Oriental ruler. Everything he does has a certain flair of it.
It is often difficult to follow him in conversation, and when you know him better, you learn to expect a good deal of confusion whenever he opens his mouth. He invents many different versions of his life.
He has been a dishwasher, a juggler, a car salesman, a literature professor, a pickpocket, a real estate broker, a newspaper editor, and the manager of a large department store that specialized in women's fashions. He never expects you to believe what he tells you.
Under his bluff and heartiness there is a hint of a sharp mind, perhaps a sense of some deeper understanding. Inside him, there is a strong pessimism. He has the ability of telling stories so good, you are really fascinated by that.
He is able to take the roles of clown or something like that to make his friends happy.
After the closing of Woburn House, he loses a lot of his liveliness and his energy. The only thing he cares for is how to get out of the city with Anna, Sam and Victoria.

Homeless

There are loads of homeless all around the city, who sleep in subway-stations or on the street. Most of them were forced to leave their homes for various reasons and there aren't any accommodations available.

Scavengers

People who walk through the city and look for things others have thrown away. They are divided into two groups: object hunters and garbage collectors. You need a permisson to work as either one, but you can earn quite a lot of money, especially as an object hunter. An object hunter looks for things you can still use, whereas a garbage collector collects everything he can find.

Resurrection Agents

If you are an object hunter you have to sell your things to a Resurrection Agent. They are private entrepreneurs, who convert these odds and ends into new goods and sell them on the open market. The agents are the richest and most powerful people in the city.

Criminals

Almost all the people you meet in the streets belong to this group. If you manage to stay alive for more than three days, you'll soon join them. (e.g.Vultures or housebreakers)

Fecalists

People who go through the streets and collect human waste, which is burned in huge power plants. Originally, they were prisoners, but now they have the status of civil servants.

Suicides

Runners
A sect of people who run through the streets as fast as they can, screaming at the top of their lungs until they collapse and die. This method is over 90% failure proof.

Leapers
People climbing to the highest places for no other reason than to jump down. A really impressive picture- don't forget your camera!

Euthanasia Clinics
For the wealthiest people this is the best method of committing suicide. There are several varieties, depending on how much you are willing to pay. The simplest and cheapest form takes no more than an hour or two and is advertised as the Return Voyage. Next on the price ladder are the Journey of Marvels (1-3 days) and the Pleasure Cruise ( ~ 2 weeks ). There are elaborate meals, wines, entertainment and even a brothel.

Assassinations Clubs
A person who wants to die, but who is too scared to go through with it himself, joins an Assassination Club. An assassin is then assigned to him. Members of the Assassination Club can look forward to a quiet and violent death in the not too distant future. Once you join an Assassination Club, you are not allowed to quit. On the other hand, if you manage to kill your assassin, you can be released from your contract.

Weather Theorists

Smilers
A small minority that believes that bad weather comes from bad thoughts. Their solution is to maintain a steadfast cheerfulness, no matter how dismal the conditions around them.

Crawlers
These people believe that conditions will deteriorate until we demonstrate how ashamed we are of how we lived in the past. Their solution is to throw themselves on the ground and refuse to stand up again until some sign is given to them that their penance has been deemed sufficient.

Other Weather Theorists
"Drummers", the "End-of-the Worlders", the "Free Associationists"...

Form

Characteristics of a letter:
- written for a certain person
- personal, intimate, subjective
- decribes opinions, emotions, impressions
- open structure

Why did P. Auster choose this form?
- open, chaotic structure corresponds to the chaotic world in the book
- personal address to the reader
good way to focus on emotions, opinions (e.g.:Anna's despair)

Point of View

author (Paul Auster) (wrote the novel) outside reader (reads a 3rd person narration)
in the book

Anna in the City. She writes a to old friend(s) in the "old world".
The reader reads what the old fried(s) read(s) what Anna wrote.
It's a kind of hope in this hopeless world, because the letter arrived.