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Manhattan Transfer (Penguin Modern Classics)
by: John Dos Passos

Used Price: $10.00
Third Party New Price: $8.94

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780141184487
ISBN: 0141184485
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: August 31, 2000
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Sales Rank: 2272862
Studio: Penguin Classics

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
This is a portrait of New York City, drawn by describing the interconnected lives of dozens of people - bankers, chefs, bums, cabdrivers and others. Written in an impressionistic style, with vivid descriptions and bursts of overheard conversation, it has more in common with films than traditional novels.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- New York City like it was: unrecognizable, yet still larger than life
'Manhattan Transfer' is certainly a curious read. It contains dozens of interwoven threads of people living in New York during World War I. Many of these threads are utterly forgettable, some are quite interesting. What makes 'Manhattan Transfer' so interesting is the narrative (..Dos Passos really captures the vernacular of locals) and the historical perspective; New York of 1918 is much different than it is today. So while certainly not for everyone, 'Manhattan Transfer' is a worthy diversion for those tired of fiction found on supermarket shelves.

Bottom line: less ambitious than his more famous 'USA Trilogy', Dos Passos is in fine form with his earlier work 'Manhattan Transfer'. Recommended.

Rating:

- Jump-cuts: riffs & shots edited & experimented
Yes, a five-star book compared to most of them, but compared to "USA," this novel's a warm-up, between 3 & 4 stars, rounded up for innovation if not poise. In the start of each chapter you get marvelous, miniature modernist riffs, reminding me of saxophones, Carl Sandburg, Whitman, and Joyce (he loves those runoncompounds too); these anticipate the "Camera Eye" vignettes that would enrich "USA"'s own prose concoctions. Jimmy Derf (some surname) and Ellen Oglethorpe emerge at the end as the two main characters; others come and go much like life itself--the central figure is not one human but a cast of millions. As an urban reporter here, Dos Passos excels at capturing the snatches of dialogue, smells of the bums, grit of the air (it's rare that nature itself is shown as less than threatening, when it's evident at all), and shouts and noise that, then as now, relentlessly hums and pounds along Manhattan's streets. ... Read More

Rating:

- Poetic Prose
Manhattan Transfer's plot is a series of interwoven stories that span several generations of interconnected lives in early twentieth-century New York City. The most appealing element of the book is Dos Passos's beatifully poetic descriptive prose. The mini-plots are a bit over-contrived and difficult to follow; he assigns them less attention and care than his descriptions of the city itself, but this is his intention. As a reader, I felt no emotional connection to any of the (many) characters I met; I did, however, feel a deep attachment to the city. It is an organic being in Dos Passos's cosmology--it is in fact the book's protagonist, almost as though it's the city's growth we're meant to be charting through the decades and its relationships with its inhabitants, rather than vice versa. His use of verbs is brilliant and rather unique: the city "breathes," it "sweats," it "sighs"; it is alive. As a book lover, ... Read More

Rating:

- Manhattan Transfer?
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, none of the featured reviewers on Amazon's page for this novel mention the seemingly most obvious point about Dos Passos' style, which is that it's heavily influenced by Jazz rhythms and structures in its cutting between different characters and different points in time to flesh out and vary basic themes. The occasional interruptions by random characters echo the way a soloist seizes on elements or variations of a musical phrase to lend depth and context to an entire piece.

I realize this is all pretty pedestrian: after all, it's New York in the mid-20s, duh. However, some of the reviewers make the novel sound almost like proto nouveau-roman, which seems to me to be both little unfair, and also to make the novel sound a lot more confusing and difficult than it actually is.

In fact, I think an ordinary modern reader consciously or subconsciously ... Read More

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