Rubbish City and the Utopia of the Residual: in the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster

Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things is a powerful and disquieting allegory of a world that is no longer there; and if it still exists, it possesses a merely fantastical reality, like “a huge, dissolving crystal” through which filter the last nostalgic rays of what is no longer there, of what remains of the real. Objects are still for a moment but soon transform into mounds of rubbish: “Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it”. Human life too is already a walking ghost: one roams the city with a dreamy air, and hollow, bloodless eyes like those of ghosts, staggering, terrified of stumbling and falling on the ground – which would already be a premature submission to death.