The City Where We Once Lived

I'm deeply conflicted about this book and if I'd recommend it to someone else or not.

Beneath the surface here, there's a story about a man deeply conflicted after the death of his family. Our unnamed protagonist, or, “the writer,” confines himself to a literal purgatory within a decaying city in an abandoned hotel overlooking this dead city.

When faced with signs of life and rebirth, he turns inward, although he's bound by his duty as the city's lone reporter to document what he sees. From a woman and child, a politician, a gardener and other signs of life in a place he'd confined himself to under the idea of withering away with it until his demise, it's difficult to not see glimmers of hope through the dried chaparral.

Whatever the catastrophe facing this city and the world at large are remain unexplained, vague and at times, eye-roll-worthy with how blunt they are, metaphorically. Even as someone who agrees humanity has irrevocably damaged the planet and we're cruising towards climate disaster while refusing to take our collective foot off the gas for long enough to consider the outcome, it felt clumsy and forced.

This was a world that couldn't see beyond what it knew and never considered anything else. An apocalypse in slow-motion that got close to saying something about how to deal with it, but seemed gun shy.

The changes and growth of the lead character are subtle, so subtle they can easily be missed, but they are there. The plot doesn't have insurmountable odds to overcome and there's no hero. That's okay. There's no great awakening in our writer, or change of heart, just, like I said, a glimmer of hope he might change while the people around him are the ones moving in the positive direction.