Joe Harland—Known as the "Wizard of Wall Street", he has won and lost several fortunes over the years. When I was fifteen, living in Rochester, NY I needed a book that could only be found at the University of Rochester library. The characterisations are brilliant and I wanted to read on to find out where their stories were taking me. OK, the manure-smelling wooden tunnel was gone by the time I arrived in the early 2000s, but everything else is remarkably familiar. Manhattan Transfer does involve some privileged characters living the high life in Jazz Age Manhattan, but it also shows a lot of the underside of the city, with a lot of characters scudding around at the margins, struggling to survive.

If you liked this review and would like to hear more from me, please sign up for my monthly newsletter. Combining alien invasion with apocalyptic survival dependent on engineering skills, with enough characterization to support the story line. The characters are a large group of people, from struggling immigrants to the well-established and secure, inhabitants of Manhattan at the turn of the 20th century.

En effet, dans ce récit largement inspiré par l’antique quatrième dimension, Manhattan se retrouve emporté de la surface de la Terre par d’étranges extraterrestres. The premise is interesting, the characters are dry toast, the aliens are run of the mill, the military guy is an arse I wanted to punch at least 15-20 times throughout the book even though he was supposed to be the hero we cheered for, the ending was anticlimactic.

It’s like sitting on a park bench at a playground and making up stories for each person there and then going back in two weeks and trying to remember each scenario and continue on… You may only follow them around for a page or two because they, you know, die or disappear (Where’d you go, Emile? There was one space battle (which turned out to be anticlimactic) but (YAWN) the second half of the book (except for some things being very inventive and clever) kind of fell on it's face. And even the rich people seem lost, alienated, perpetually dissatisfied despite everything they have. While Manhattan Tranfer is an earlier work - and lacks the polish of the Trilogy, it still makes for a great read. A colourful, multi-faceted chronicle of New York in the early 1920s, Manhattan Transfer ranks with James Joyce's Ulysses as a powerful and often lyrical meditation on the modern city.

Three gulls wheel above the broken orange-rinds, spoiled cabbage heads that heave between the splintered plank walls, the green waves spume under the round bow as the ferry, skidding on the tide, crashes, gulps the broken water, slides, settles slowly into the slip. La grande bolla immobiliare, il crack del '29, gli anni del proibizionismo, Roosevelt e la minaccia hitleriana nascente rimangono solo sullo sfondo, l'autore non ha trovato il modo di dare spessore a questi eventi. Manhattan Transfer κύλησε τόσο φυσικά και εύκολα που δεν το κατάλαβα πότε τελείωσε, παρότι μου πήρε αρκετό καιρό να το ολοκληρώσω λόγω έλλειψης χρόνου. Think of Virginia Woolf’s London, collecting thoughts and fates in the glimpse of a park, the rush of a street, the passing of a tram.