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- ISBN13: 9780618381869
- Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
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Product Description
Considered by many to be John Dos Passos's greatest work, Manhattan Transfer is an "expressionistic picture of New York" (New York Times) in the 1920s that reveals the lives of wealthy power brokers and struggling immigrants alike. From Fourteenth Street to the Bowery, Delmonico's to the underbelly of the city waterfront, Dos Passos chronicles the lives of characters struggling to become a part of modernity before they are destroyed by it. More than seventy-five years after its first publication, Manhattan Transfer still stands as "a novel of the very first importance" (Sinclair Lewis). It is a masterpeice of modern fiction and a lasting tribute to the dual-edged nature of the American dream.
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Summary: A once-famed novel . . .
. . . that's very dated today. Dos Passos was admired for his impressionistic writing in the 1930s, but he's weak on character development and that's at the center of contemporary fiction.
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Summary: Good but not great
Manhattan Transfer is a book that is designed to work by cumulative, metonymic impact. As such, its episodes linger but confusedly. It leaves us with a picture of a city both glittering and ragged, rife with abysmal failures and dubious successes, but ultimately fails to make us care much about it or them. Jimmy Herf and Ellen Oglethorpe, its main protagonists, are too weakly developed and, as such, are not by themselves sufficiently interesting to bring this book to the level of Dos Passos' own USA, or of its model, Joyce's Ulysses. The latter in particular not only displays a formal virtuosity that Manhattan Transfer never or very rarely attains but also provides us with a strong narrative anchor via Leopold Bloom. This is just what's lacking here and is powerfully present in a much, much sharply drawn (if arguably less totalizing) New York novel : Henry Roth's brilliant, under-appreciated Call it Sleep. To paraphrase Stendhal (and I think he'd agree), if your novel is a mirror, it is wise to have someone holding it to the world instead of just bouncing about in the carriage reflecting whatever. What you lose in supposed objectivity and newness, you gain in focus and power.
Still, the influence of Dos Passos' method on Sartre, not to mention Gaddis, Pynchon, et al is enormous and obvious (it's also what makes some of their books such a drag to read). I for one tend to feel it even more in the films of the American New Wave: I'm thinking Altman's Nashville or his later Carver inspired Shorts (which incidentally are NOT my favorite Altman movies for just the reasons mentioned above).
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Summary: Too many voices, but they were the real deal
Let me first say that Dos Passos is a great author and his ability to write so many different characters is an incredible talent that I'm sure many authors wish they could emulate. That being said, with this novel being as brief as it is, some of the voices get lost in the shuffle. I think that the city vs. humanity motif is a great one and relevant in our bustling and merciless world of today, but I wonder if the story would have been more poignant through a single set of eyes, or at least a central character in the third person narrative.
I'll give Dos Passos credit for being prophetic. I lived in NYC for the last couple of years while I was seeing someone who lived there. It is a world unto itself and many of the chapters concerning the vampire-like quality of Manhattan are spot on. But again, there were many occasions where I began to enjoy a single narrative, like George the attorney, only to have it vanish for twenty pages. I guess it is an acquired taste. From a technical standpoint it is definitely executed well. I am always wowed by authors who can mimic so many different voices and have it feel authentic. But I have to stick to my guns and say that there were just too many.
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Summary: A dizzying mosaic of a city
Manhattan Transfer is a book peopled by a crowd of characters, rich or poor, sad or happy, hopeful or hopeless, beautiful or ugly, bold or coward, each and everyone of them seemingly an archetype of the New Yorker, but none of them standing out from the gray, trampling, anonymous mass of New Yorkers. None stands out because all are engulfed, crushed and swallowed by the voracious monster who is the main, if not the only real, character in the novel: the City itself, with its glaring lights, its stifling smells, its deafening sounds, its never-ending pulsating pace.
In a style that revolutionized the art of writing by basing itself on the techniques of the movies, (short and brisk dialogues, no transitions, descriptions bursting in violent flashes), the writer managed to paint a dizzying mosaic of a city that, after ninety years, has not changed that much: the buildings may be taller, the cabs may be faster, but the people are the same, human, so human...
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Summary: the rhythm of a city...
John Dos Passos (1896-1970) has tried to compose an artwork built of the stuff: NEW YORK, - and it works like a movie script - but written in a time (1925), in which the film industry did not yet have the tremendous technical and financially possibilities available as they owe today.
Dos Passos portrayed the movement, the speed, the unstoppable energy of this city. The title "MANHATTAN TRANSFER" deciphered in the scene as ELLEN sits in a subway and the rhythmic strides seem to sound like "MAN-Hattan TRANS__FER. MAN-Hattan TRANS__FER. MAN-Hattan TRANS__FER".
ELLEN is on the way in an unhappy partnership, it does not succeed in time to redirect, like a leaf in the wind seems to be the tempo of the city. They are simply unstoppable followers of that tempo. This is also what Dos Passos as the most impressive overall wants to feature.
The fates of many are developing a high tempo - and apparently randomly, BUD, (at the beginning of the novel incoming in the New York harbor) jumps to the end of his life (and the novel) at the same place from the bridge into the water -- no into a wedding party, just because a ship below him was passing in the same moment. Fortune and misfortune, random-like are mixed in this scene: happy wedding couple and a man, trying to commit suicide.
The milk man Gus McNiel is covered by an insurance payment to him as a victim of a rich man and self-conscious politicians, Congo Jack loses at first one leg during the war, but by extensive smuggling operations and continues he at least drives jovially in a Rolls-Royce.
Jimmy Herfst, butler of Congo Jack, is leaving at the end of the novel disillusioned with the city - others have adapted it. Dos Passos has characterized NEW YORK as normally painters do - of course using other techniques: Piet Mondrian painted at the end of his life against that colorful Big Apple chaos with stripes looking like a city-map of New York. The contemporary artist James Rizzi paints skyscrapers with human faces (Dos Passos compares in his novel the multi-ballet dancer ELLEN with multi-window skyscraper).
Television series like "SEX IN THE CITY" or musical events, like Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel performed in the Central Park, singing "NEW YORK, to that tall skyline I come, flyin in ... " - All those artworks try to explain NEW YORK as a focal point of modern life - and they do not focus the images of September eleven. I hope I will experience in my lifetime, that MANHATTAN TRANSFER once is a movie.
John Dos Passos himself (sometimes compared with James Joyce or Marcel Proust or compared with Hemingway and Gertrude Stein who were friends) - he has after the completion of his novel managed to organize a movie: 1935, "Devil Is a Woman" (The Spanish Dancer ) - With Marlene Dietrich ...
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