A City that Devours Everything
Review of Paul Auster’s "In the Country of Last Things" (1987)
Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things (1987) is a novel of disappearance—of people, of civilisation, of hope itself. The book so immerses you in a dystopia that you feel trapped alongside its characters.
“When you live in the city, you learn to take nothing for granted. Close your eyes for a moment, turn around to look at something else, and the thing that was before you is suddenly gone. Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you mustn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.”
Auster draws from a rich tradition of dystopian literature but crafts a chimera of his own. The novel's DNA contains traces of Kafka's bureaucratic nightmares, Borges's labyrinthine mysteries, and the raw survival instincts of post-apocalyptic fiction.
Enter at your own risk
The novel is framed as a letter from Anna Blume, a woman searching for her missing brother in a nameless, decaying city. But the city is a black hole—once you enter, you don’t leave.
“Entrances do not become exits, and there is nothing to guarantee that the door you walked through a moment ago will still be there when you turn around to look for it again.”
Society has collapsed into a brutal scavenger economy, where people survive by collecting garbage, selling their own bodies, or joining suicide cults. Death is everywhere, and hope is an extinct species.
Auster doesn’t waste time explaining how things got this way. That’s not the point. The city exists in a perpetual now, a place where the past doesn’t matter because survival consumes everything.
"This is the story of what happened to me, but even if I tell it to you, even if I write it down, there is no guarantee that it will still be true tomorrow."
You don’t question the logic of this world. You just try to endure it, page by page.
“You must get used to doing with as little as you can. By wanting less, you are content with less, and the less you need, the better off you are.”
Where Auster shines
You’ll catch yourself holding your breath, moving through a city where “nothing is permanent.” Auster doesn’t rely on grand shocks—he builds an eerie, slow-burning horror through the smallest, most ordinary details.
“It's not just that things vanish – but once they vanish, the memory of them vanishes as well. Dark areas form in the brain, and unless you make a constant effort to summon up the things that are gone, they will quickly be lost to you forever...try to remember it, try to memorise all the beautiful things you are seeing, and in that way they will always be with you, even when you can't see them anymore... I wanted everything to belong to me, for all that beauty to be a part of what I was.”
Auster wrote this in 1987, but it feels disturbingly relevant today. The novel doesn’t name its city, but you can’t shake the feeling that it’s an extreme version of what happens when late-stage capitalism, environmental collapse, and social decay reach their inevitable conclusion.
The city is full of refugees, the rich have sealed themselves off in private enclaves, and the poor tear each other apart for scraps. This isn’t a novel about the future. It’s a warning about the present.
Auster's prose is lean and precise, every word carrying the weight of inevitability.
“Whatever you see has the potential to wound you, to make you less than you are, as if merely by seeing a thing some part of yourself were taken away from you.”
If there’s one thing keeping In the Country of Last Things from being outright nihilistic, it’s Anna herself.
"You do what you have to do, and then you do a little more."
She keeps moving, keeps surviving, keeps writing. Even in a world where almost nothing is left, she refuses to disappear.
“There can never be any fixed path, and you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you. Without warning, you must be able to change, to drop what you are doing, to reverse. In the end, there is nothing that is not the case. As a consequence, you must learn how to read the signs.”
But Auster isn’t interested in easy optimism. Whatever Anna finds by the end, it’s not salvation. It’s just a different kind of endurance.
“I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.”
What might disappoint you
The book occasionally gets tangled in its own philosophical musings. Some passages read like a freshman philosophy major's late-night revelations. These moments, while poetic, can interrupt the narrative's otherwise relentless momentum.
“Our lives are no more than the sum of manifold contingencies, and no matter how diverse they might be in their details, they all share an essential randomness in their design: this then that, and because of that, this.”
If you want a clear backstory of how things got so bad here, Auster doesn’t tell you. Occasionally, you get a tantalising glimpse, but the narrative veers away just before you can put a finger on it.
And, similarly, there is no closure at the end. What happens to Anna, to the city, to the rest of the world? No neat answers, and not enough clues for an educated speculation.
The Verdict: A Necessary Haunting
Despite its occasional philosophical navel-gazing, In the Country of Last Things is a hauntingly necessary work of dystopian fiction, particularly since reality has begun to mirror its fictional world in unsettling ways.
“Is that what we mean by life? Let everything fall away, and then let’s see what there is. Perhaps that is the most interesting question of all: to see what happens when there is nothing, and whether or not we will survive that too.”
It's not an enjoyable book. It’s not meant to be. It’s a bleak, relentless meditation on loss—loss of people, loss of memory, loss of meaning itself. And yet, you can’t look away.
“In the end, the problem is not so much that people forget, but that they do not always forget the same thing. What still exists as a memory for one person can be irretrievably lost for another, and this creates difficulties, insuperable barriers against understanding.”
If you’re in the mood for something that will haunt you long after you close it, read this book. You'll emerge from its pages shaken but oddly hopeful, armed with a new appreciation for the small acts of kindness that keep us human.
"Even in the most extreme circumstances, people are capable of surprising you."
Read Next:
In fiction, try Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in which a father and son journey through a similarly devastated America.
Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven is another masterful take on finding beauty in a post-apocalyptic world.
If you want a book that inspired Auster to write this one, go for Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground with its philosophical examination of isolation and society.
And, if you want to stay in Auster’s world but need something less harrowing, The New York Trilogy offers mystery and existential dread without total collapse.