Novel
Manhattan Transfer
John Dos Passos · 1925
Synopsis
New York, from 1896 to the twenties. Bud Korpenning, a farmhand from upstate, steps off a ferry and asks how to get to the centre of things. Ellen Thatcher, born at the beginning of the book, becomes an actress and changes her first name; Jimmy Herf, a well-off orphan, becomes a reporter; George Baldwin, a young lawyer with no clients, makes a start with the case of an injured milkman; Congo, a French sailor, leaves his ship to try his luck ashore; Joe Harland, a former Wall Street magician, is ruined. Their fates cross without a central character.
Context
The title is that of a New Jersey station where trains changed locomotives before passing under the Hudson, and where some of the passengers changed trains: the book is built on this model, of lines that meet and set off again. Begun in 1923 and published in November 1925, it tries out techniques that Dos Passos would take up again in his trilogy, newspaper clippings, advertisements and songs, and critics have compared it to Eisenstein's films. Sinclair Lewis hailed it as the first book to have caught Manhattan.
Who it is for
A long novel, with many characters and no central plot, made up of an assemblage of documentary materials.
Prizes and reception
Seventy-eighth of the hundred books of the century chosen in 1999 by the readers of Le Monde and Fnac.
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