Customer Reviews

Manhatten

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Unsung and unsullied, this mysterious word dervish sent me reeling with Manhatten, a gleefully unclassifiable collection of poetry and prose pieces centered around a bookish adventurer whose minor-key but major-league observations and experiences form a delightfully skewed New Yawk narrative of neurosis, nonchalance and nomenclature. Strunk and White might frightfully fret over the writer's playful disregard for the spelling of her title and the everywhichwayness of her grammar, but lovelorn language lads and peppy preposition princesses will savor every sentence. From first page to last it's clear we are in the presence of an original thinker, one who loves life even more than writing. Book of the year--this, or any other.

Sarah Rosenthal's book is a treat and a treasure. Manhatten subtly and exquisitely blends and blurs the distinction between self and place while never leaving you lost. In Manhatten you get a delightful experience of a slice of life both effected by and effecting its place in the world. A deceptive easy read, its blend of tense and style keeps you from falling and allows you to ride just above the obvious. Manhatten takes you into your own search of place. This is a book not be missed and one that you will read several times.

Sarah Rosenthal's long-awaited book Manhatten is a deeply introspective yet lyrical read about her time spent in New York City. The characters and humor popped off the page, and the setting was a vivid recollection of the city (which I especially appreciated because I grew up in New York). But the book is not just a portrait of Manhattan, it's Rosenthal's portrait of Manhattan. It's about her relationship with the city (and with being young and insecure and inspired and in search of one's identity IN the city). I think this is one reason why the title spells the city's name incorrectly - because this Manhattan is a private Manhatten, a skewed Manhatten. I loved this aspect of it, this searching for your footing in the big city that is only just a symbol or microcosm of the big world. I certainly had my own private relationship with Manhattan as a young adult, and this brought me back to that time of uncertainty, excitement, and the sense that everything simultaneously hangs in the balance and lies up ahead.

a friend of mine lent me "manhatten" by sarah rosenthal. it's a small book and looked like a quick read, so i thought i'd give it a go.

upon beginning it, i was immediately transfixed and devoured the book. the stream of conciousness writing style is a little distracting and hard to follow at first. however, once i gave myself over to it -- i felt like i was accompanying the author as she dreamily recalled her memories...flowing intuitively from one to the next. i didn't want it to end, but the length of the book is actually perfect.

i want to read more by this author!

Is there a literary tradition of making a city be one the characters in a novel? I would know, I suppose, if I were more literary myself. At any rate, there is definitely a movie tradition along these lines, and there's even a book about it (Silver and Ursini, L. A. Noir: The City as Character). Oft cited examples include Chinatown, Blade Runner, and Woody Allan's Manhattan. I don't know the extent to which Rosenthal had Woody Allen's movie in mind as she wrote her book, but there are a number of parallels beyond the obvious one of the role of Manhattan (the city, I mean): the neurotic Jewish outlook and the dodgy romantic involvements, to name two. Despite these similarities, however, Manhatten follows its own path, and in the end isn't much like the movie. I suppose it shouldn't come as a surprise that two different people would have two different stories to tell, even if they both happen to be nebishy Jews in the same borough.

The truth is, I didn't like Woody Allen's Manhattan that much, even though it's a landmark of 20th Century filmmaking and all. I like Manhatten quite a bit. The basic reason for this - which is pretty much always the reason that I like stories (or not) - is that the protagonist is real enough so that I care about what happens to her. In some narrative works this is due to the clever use of literary (or cinematic) devices. This isn't the case with Manhatten - in fact the book seems remarkably device-free. The protagonist and the people surrounding her are not characters in the sense that their stories are shaped by the need to fit into some grand arc of narrative. Their careers, romantic involvements, family life, and so on are not adjusted in order to make points or tie up loose ends. This is striking even given the book's (presumably) autobiographical foundation - even autobiographies and documentaries usually smooth out the rough edges and glue parts together to make them "work." Perhaps Rosenthal is doing this as well, but if so, she has me fooled. To me, her people just bumble around they way real people do.

This is not to say that this work is naïve, or that Rosenthal isn't a skilled writer - in fact, her skill is immediately evident if you are paying attention to that aspect. But Rosenthal uses her skill not to manipulate or impress the reader, but rather to stay out of the way. She gives you a direct line to the protagonist's head, and nothing (not even quotation marks) are permitted to interfere with the communication. The adjectives that come to mind when I try to describe Manhatten are not the adjectives that I would use to describe a book - profound, well-written, absorbing, 115 pages, etc. - but rather the adjectives that I would use to describe a person: chatty, engaging, witty, neurotic, and occasionally obesessed.

Then, there are the poems! Interspersed throughout the book are poems - how to describe them? I love these poems, but I'm almost afraid to say anything about them. I sense that the poems, like the text, are intended as unmediated communication between the author and the reader, and for me to talk about them is kind of a spoiler. That said, here's my take: The poems come from the a different place in the same mind that tells the story. It is a place that precedes narrative: first, there is raw experience, then the experience is organized into a story. Even if it's a Manhatten story, with the smoothing and processing kept to a minimum, it still loses something. The poems connect you to a place closer to where the experience began. It's the immediacy of Manhatten, straight up, when you're ready for the strong stuff.

A triumph of New Narrative, Sarah Rosenthal's Manhatten breaks up its mysterious and decorous story with the tweaks and flashes of tourism and desire. Beyond any individual romance, Sarah the narrator is suffused with longing for the city itself, New York, New York, here spelled Manhatten with an italicized e where the final a should be. (It's a puzzle which keeps on puzzling.) It's not the impossible crush of the suburban girl for the big city, for sarah's from Chicago; her relation to New York has more heft to it, more of the feeling of the jigsaw puzzle completed and yet there's a piece or two left over.

Obsessively she recalls all the different times she went to Manhatten and the traces it left on her. Like her sister, Manhatten is more obviously swanky and impressive, so naturally the sister feels at home there, where Sarah prowls from nightclub to museum to library searching not for culture, precisely, but for the romance of it. Sometimes the brisk and precise memories lose ground to another undercurrent, that of lyric poetry, and the chapters flare out into poems.

It's not only about longterm boyfriends who don't work out, it's also about the relationships Sarah has made with family and friends, over the years. It's sort of a Jewish version of Sex and the City, with its emphasis on female solidarity and kinship. I kept going to my Jewish dictionary to catch up on all the vocabulary I had missed out on growing up: huppa, kipa, what do I know. While it's not always easy to follow Sarah's chronology, it doesn't really matter; some things happened before 9/11, some in its wake; uncertainty, insecurity, attend the guest at all times. That's not to say that Manhatten isn't often screamingly funny! Take this one with you on a bus or plane trip and you will disconcert your fellow passengers with unforeseeable giggles and gasps.