Nas suas páginas, com tamanha galeria de personagens que aparecem, desaparecem, reaparecem, é fácil perdermo-nos e, ao perdermo-nos, sentirmos o fervilhar de uma grande metrópole com um ancoradouro através do qual pessoas de todo o lado desembarcam olhando a Estátua da Liberdade.

Percam-se neste parágrafo: «Tem uma frase fabulosa sobre um imperador romano qualquer que apanhou Roma feita de tijolo e a deixou feita de mármore. So, I guess I’d have to say that the main character here IS the city… and how each character deals with it and how their ‘luck’ determines their ‘lot’ in life. Leaving aside Moby Dick, the USA trilogy was once considered the leading contender for the Great American Novel, and I think it still measures up.Almost in spite of itself, the overall tone of the book is one of poetry and possibility in a large ever-changing metropolis. She resents George, but in keeping with her tendency to plan ahead, she marries him because she is getting older and is running out of options if she wants to stay relevant in a materialistic New York. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (both 1922), and bears frequent comparison to the experiments with film collage by Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. Nevertheless, as a portrait of a city at a particular point in time, and as a literary experiment that still feels fresh today and must have been ground-breaking a hundred years ago, Manhattan Transfer is definitely worth reading.

He takes a riverboat down the Hudson River to New York City, where he hopes to escape justice by becoming one of the anonymous millions in the city. This novel will probably tax the patience of many readers, but though I found it difficult to read more than 10 or 20 pages in one sitting, I was determined to finish it.Time with characters is spent predominantly in bars and, as a consequence, conversations are shallow and empty. There's a lot of bleakness in Manahattan Transfer as relationships fail, people sink into poverty, and suicides take place.