Strange to have read this so soon after True Crime Addict –– both books are about vanishings, only Paul Auster's story is about the disappearance of everything, about a city's descent into the kind of staggered chaos that leads to increasing degrees of meaninglessness, until eventually entire ideas just disappear. It is a city devouring itself. The narrator goes to the city to search for a missing brother, only to be swallowed into the disaster herself. She never finds him. Instead she survives. This is a book of description, the narrator a defeated witness to history. Not everything is explained; not everything has to be. It's just that so much happens in the struggle for survival, and for meaning, that she's left with nothing but a dark compulsion to write it down. #thecityoflostthings #paulauster #cottagereading #murraycorner