In the City: Random Acts of Awareness

By Colette Brooks

Book Overview

What kind of person is a city person?

This is a question of increasing importance, Colette Brooks suggests, as the city begins to spread, inexorably, into the furthest reaches of the modern mind. One possibility: a city person is someone who doesn't feel the need to finish a jigsaw puzzle, who relishes jagged edges and orphaned curves, stray bits of data, stories parsed from sentences half overheard on the streets.

Someone who is willing, sometimes eager, to immerse herself in mystery.

Winner of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award, In the City is an idiosyncratic, lyrical, edgy exploration of the urban experience. This daring, unpredictable work breathes new life into the nonfiction form. Chronicling the often haphazard lives of city dwellers and cities themselves, In the City is a window into the urban psyche.

An unnamed narrator roams the streets of an unnamed city, practicing random acts of awareness as she gathers disjointed pieces of the puzzle. She is sometimes in a city that seems to be New York, and sometimes in cities halfway around the world. In her wanderings she collects bits of stories, some taken from the headlines, some from the streets, some from the distant past.

She studies criminals, innocent bystanders, commuters; a renowned painter who fled to the country; a bomber who sends unsuspecting city dwellers lethal packages marked personal; a blind, deaf woman who loves to ride the subway; a young cabdriver who keeps an open dictionary at his side as he drives, struggling to learn a strange language; a perplexed explorer who finds himself, against all expectation, stranded at the very edge of the earth.

All of these people, she discovers, are city people, whether they know it yet or not.

Some will flourish, others will be lost, victims of chance and mischance: the woman who drinks by herself in a brownstone apartment; the ancient city dwellers who couldn't outrun fire or flood; the children whose faces end up on posters on a wall. Those who survive learn, sooner or later, that everyone keeps company with ghosts who walk alongside.

In the City shows us that the city is a place where past and present are commingled, where questions rarely have answers, where danger, difficulty, and exhilaration are interwoven in ways we can hardly begin to explain.

Welcome to the city, the place where all contrary indications hold true.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393324419
• ISBN13: 9780393324419
• Release Date: June 2003
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 122 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A world so familiar and yet like no other

In The City is a fantastic read. I never wanted to put it down and the few times when I did, the book immediately beckoned me back. Brooks' visions and ponderings are haunting and thought-provoking. With a language and structure that is incredibly unique and exquisitely poetic, she pulls the reader into the heart and soul of the city- a world so familiar and yet like no other. Any reader will quickly see that this is one of those ever so rare times when a writer will bring a brand new perspective to the world, and let us all look at the same old city for the very first time.

A very strong debut

This first book from Colette Brooks is the carefully constructed product of a lifetime of reflection. This genre-stretching work should appeal to any city-dweller who's ever spent a half hour on the subway looking around at his or her fellow passengers and wondering what it all means.

A classic!

Colette Brooks has joined the ranks of writers like E.B. White and Jane Jacobs with her beautiful new book, IN THE CITY. Brooks' subtly poetic prose, gentle humor, and eye for the telling detail open the city to the reader, revealing its soul. Anyone who has ever lived in, or dreamed of living in, a city will find this book resonating with echoes of their own feelings and dreams. It is impossible to put it down and impossible to leave it behind. One returns to the book again and again relishing special moments, phrases and insights. Ms. Brooks writes beautifully, sparely and with a unique voice.

This changes everything.

Colette Brooks blew my mind with this book. Everyone these days is so caught up in classifying literature, of putting people in their little boxes, of being able to say "It's like Gatsby meets Eggers on a road trip with Kerouac!" and then along comes Colette and proves that it IS possible to completely reinvent the form... or to invent A form. IN THE CITY is part short story collection, part prose poem, part historical novel, part autobiography. The text itself evades specifics-- every time you think you've got her pinned, know exactly what news item or neighborhood she's talking about, she spirits it away again and takes you someplace new. People talk about reading until they get to "a good stopping point". IN THE CITY has no good stopping point. You jump into the river of Brooks's prose and you're carried to the end, released back into the ocean of your life-- no matter where you live-- looking at it a little differently, a little more closely, and with a lot more affection for the lives around you.