“The terrible thing is that when you get fed up with New York there is nowhere to go. It is the vertex of the world. The only recourse is to go round and round like a caged squirrel.”
Some lost worker, more aware of the pan than the confusion, must have left the bucket forgotten on the edge of the cornice, at the very end of the building that famous one with the shape of an iron peak. Year 1902, the majestic Flatiron, the proud first skyscraper in New York, contemplates its first sunset and, who knows how (perhaps a breeze, that timid first breeze when the sun says goodbye? perhaps the rain?), the bucket precipitates in a vacuum.
From the bucket sprout, in impossible and miraculous proportions, all kinds of ropes, ropes and cables. Hundreds of thousands of giant worms that during their fall compete in speed with the drops of the clouds. Window to window, the ropes, ropes and cables fall for years: hard pulleys that are thrown decisively towards the center of the earth, sometimes to the very center of Wall Street; also strings that get tangled, sometimes in marriages, others in business, others in legal proceedings (others, all at once, in the form of divorce); thin threads gliding toward the sidewalk, fighting the wind, parasites, and poverty; and, of course, anemic strands that the rains fray and that the passage of time, starvation, or simple chance finally kill.
The content of the bucket is understood as the human beings that inhabit Manhattan Transfer. Understand the clumsiness of the worker, the rain and the force of gravity, the circumstances of this ordered chaos called life. Understand yourself by this review start of Manhattan Transfer, the humble appeal to the metaphor of someone who did not know how to start an article.
Manhattan Transfer Review
Characters characters. The most celebrated novel of the most famous contemporary of Ernest Hemingway (excuse me of Francis Scott Fitzgerald and his Great Gatsby) has 38 secondary characters. Along the three decades beginning at the very end of the XNUMXth century, we read the dreams, joys and miseries of the staff in order to dissect the anatomy of the only proper name with a leading role: the great New York of money, ambition and the cliché that we all know today.
Although it can be found in pocket format for just over eleven euros, the historical value of Manhattan Transfer it is priceless (this poor metaphor, too).
Manhattan Transfer It shows us better than any other novel of the time (or so they say) what poverty tasted like, how the cash registers roared and what the aromas of the flourishing America post Great War and pre Crack of 29. And also what future she awaited him. Read, read, what a book published at the beginning of the XNUMXth century says:
[Conversation between two architects in Manhattan Transfer]»“Man, you should see their plans for steel buildings alone. He has the idea that the skyscraper of the future will be built exclusively of steel and glass. We've been experimenting with tiles lately… Christ, some of their projects would blow your mind. He has a great phrase about I don't know what Roman emperor who found Rome made of brick and left it made of marble. Well, he says that he has found New York made of brick and that he is going to leave it made of steel…, of steel and glass. I have to show you his city rebuilding project. It's a stupid dream!"
New York, main character of the hive of Manhattan Transfer
Mosaic, catalog, showcase... critics have used many words to praise this compendium of human dramas that advances at lightning speed that is Manhattan Transfer. With a party room and melopeas of dollars in one paragraph, and an abortion in a cubbyhole in the next. The fragmentary narration is very cinematographic, very to the point, very in average res, without specifying where the narrative takes place now or how long it has been since the last allusion to the character. What matters here is the herd. Beehive.
Beehive? After a few pages, I have remembered the illustrious Nobel Camilo José Cela. what without Manhattan Transfer could not have existed its better? novel is something very evident that is revealed very early and that, however, does not harm the reading and the enjoyment of it. Manhattan Transfer and his story. His stories. Although Dos Passos fills everything with action and dialogue, the reader has to do a lot of their part (pen and paper perhaps) and pay attention if you really want to stay with the enormous tangle of twists and turns and secondary roads.
Dos Passos and the anti-capitalist critique
The plot of the journalist Jimmy Herf and the lawyer George Baldwin stand out. As it should be, they are not entirely good and bad characters, but they do each approach one of the two borders. Erratic, wobbly and good-natured, Herf can't quite find his place in the world while Baldwin, ambitious, becomes Mr. Money, Power and Women. Dos Passos would enhance his counter-capitalist trench literature in later works, but already in this one the residue of denunciation and discomfort with a society where "the only one who takes advantage of capitalism is the swindler, and becomes a millionaire right away."
very much Crematorium by Rafael Chirbes.
La date It's not taken from the novel, it's taken from John Dos Passos. In the book the denunciation is never shown so explicit. You have to dig into the cast. There are those who do well on the Stock Exchange and there are those who die stamped against the sea after jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge.
Dig and check how everyone, even the primed, breathes that discontent that circulates in the pressure, the vertigo, the rush and the frenzy typical of the Big Apple; a multivitamin city where the explosion of small collateral fatalities (fires, traffic accidents, personal bankruptcies, murders) seems the inevitable price to pay in order to continue pushing the pistons of human progress.
Each chapter begins with beautiful descriptions of crowds and metropolitan anonymity. If we ignore the residue of uncomfortable reality that the book leaves, these introductory paragraphs are the small license that Dos Passos allows himself to shout at us without half measures his opinion on how things are done in the capital of the world. According Luis Goytisolo in his essay nature of the novel, these descriptions have been the ones that have established the image (the common place) of the unfathomable New York of Little Ant Automata Edward Hopper obedient:
"The twilight gently rounds the hard corners of the streets. Darkness weighs down on the smoky asphalt city, melting window frames, billboards, chimneys, water tanks, fans, fire escapes, moldings, ornaments, festoons, eyes, hands. , the ties, in huge black blocks. Under the ever-increasing pressure of the night, the windows pour out streams of light, the electric arcs spill bright milk. The night compresses the gloomy blocks of houses until they drip red, yellow, green lights on the streets where millions of footsteps echo. Light pours off rooftop signs, spins around wheels, colors tons of sky."
Just like Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Dos Passos belongs to the so-called Lost Generation. What The Great Gatsby, Manhattan Transfer was published in 1925. While the first was limited to describing the roundness of the bubbles of champagne spilled on the syrup of vice and passion, the book that concerns us today is a complete encyclopedia of the fauna and social classes that they swarmed the island in the prelude to the Jazz Age.
The title of Passos' book alludes to that of a busy train station. A place where, as in the novel, faces come and go, some remain on the retina and others are forgotten in the blink of an eye. Given the virtual absence of digressions regarding the psychology of the characters in favor of a succession of daily scenes with abundant dialogue, the book could have been 200 pages shorter or a thousand pages longer. It didn't matter: what matters is the hive. Headlines and classifieds are cited, further evidence that Manhattan Transfer is, above all else, a testament to what New York was and a manual for how it got to where it is.
John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
Debolsillo, Barcelona 2009 (originally published in 1925)
448 pages | 11 euros
