In the Country of Last Things

When I was reading "Station Eleven" (from 2014) recently, I was constantly reminded of Paul Auster's "In the Country of Last Things" (from 1987), my first encounter with Auster, exactly 30 years ago, when I came across the book in a small basket outside a shabby Finsbury Park thrift shop. Just for reference, Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" wasn't published until 2006. /// Auster is one of the most fascinating authors of our time. Utterly fascinating and also very often frustrating, as he keeps challenging his readers, shoving them out of their comfort zones. Many times I have found myself wanting to shake the characters out of their annoying inertia. Why would they just sit there, waiting, dazed, as they are slowly reduced to "nothing"? Why are they walking open-eyed into their demise? But it doesn't take much for the whole world to topple over, does it? It doesn't take much to lose everything; it can happen very quickly. /// There has been some kind of epidemic. "Life as we know it has ended, and yet no one is able to grasp what has taken its place. Those of us who who were brought up somewhere else, or who are old enough to remember a world different from this one, find it an enormous struggle just to keep up from one day to the next. I am not talking only of hardships. Faced with the most ordinary occurrence, you no longer know how to act, and because you cannot act, you find yourself unable to think. The brain is in a muddle." ... "For nothing is really itself anymore. There are pieces of this and pieces of that, but none of it fits together." ... "My mind is not quite what it used to be. It is slower now, sluggish and less nimble, and to follow even the simplest thought very far exhausts me." /// Everyday things that are taken for granted disappear, and as soon as they go, so does the memory of them: "What about an airplane? I said. What's an airplane? he asked, smiling at me in a puzzled sort of way, as though I had just told a joke he didn't understand. An airplane, I said. A machine that flies through the air and carries people from one place to another. That's ridiculous, he said. There's no such thing." /// There is no going back. People who believe "that however bad things were yesterday, they were better than things are today" are just speaking the language of ghosts. "Governments come and go quite rapidly here, and it is often difficult to keep up with the changes." One of them starts the project of building a gigantic wall to protect the homeland against foreign invasion. /// This novel, with all its allusions to Beckett and Kafka, is highly allegorical of course, of politics, society, city life. But at the same time, now more than ever, it seems to have been written with an eerie foresight.