Manhattan Transfer: John Dos Passos (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Combining alien invasion with apocalyptic survival dependent on engineering skills, with enough characterization to support the story line. They arrive and immediately get caught up in the crushing and jostling, and some make it big while others fail spectacularly. The story mostly revolves around about eight major characters who at some point cross paths, two (arguably three) commit suicide, all are pretty much alcoholic and mostly out of control. I could have used a little more wind down at the end and a little less of the fanatic preacher but I'm only being nit picky.

Shuffle, droning saxophone tease, shuffle in time to the drum, trombone, clarinet”, “Strascicare di piedi al ritmo della batteria, del trombone, del clarino”.

Goldweiser's exact profession is unclear, but he seems to be a theatrical agent (although he does not represent Ellen). It’s also one of those opening paragraphs that, when you look back at the end of the novel, you realise contains within it the whole of what is to come.

This is sci-fi not romance, although there are attractions between Matt and Abby, the two protagonists in this book. The only problem I remember noticing was that the guy who lost one of his hands at the start of the book died resting his head in his hands. I often was reminded of film noir with its shadows, modernistic city settings, and portrayals of gritty city life. Manhattan Transfer fu pubblicato nel 1925, quando Dos Passos era ancora dalla parte di Sacco e Vanzetti.Oglethorpe finally snaps, and stands outside Stan's apartment building one night screaming in a drunken fury. After he has been in the city for months, he still has not been able to find steady work, and he lives in a homeless shelter.

Furthermore, it has a second role, no less important: to embody History, merciless History that feeds on people and events to show that only the masks change, the stage and the plot remain the same. Told in impressionistic vignettes the book moves quickly as stars on the Manhattan stage rise and fall. He takes a riverboat down the Hudson River to New York City, where he hopes to escape justice by becoming one of the anonymous millions in the city. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in 1925, before the cutoff of January 1, 1929. Third, there’s that wonderful image of the emerging ferry passengers “crushed and jostling like apples fed down a chute into a press”.of the vast loose gang of strivers and winners and losers which seems to be the very pep of New York. The lives of some characters figure through the course of the book; many others make only appearances. Now we are post credit-crunch this is probably a very good time to read this unusual American novel. Manhattan Transfer is Dos Passos's earlier novel in which he very successfully experimented with most of the techniques later used in the USA trilogy. The Joycean influence comes in the love of compound words but also in the general construction of the work: brief scenes, which are not given any context or background.

Which… I suppose… isn’t all that unlike living in a city… trying to remember who that person who is smiling at you in the corner market and do you really know them or is it someone that you might have seen at a friend’s apartment and it turns out that they’re actually your neighbor down the hall… Yeah, not unlike that.A colourful, multi-faceted chronicle of New York in the early 1920s, Manhattan Transfer ranks with James Joyce's Ulysses as a powerful and often lyrical meditation on the modern city. Un romanzo caleidoscopico, rumoroso, pieno di personaggi e spostamenti; pieno di battute fulminanti, di immagini che rimangono impresse davanti agli occhi.