Waterstones The Employees
77 ratings
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Price: £12.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021. The near-distant future. Millions of kilometres from Earth. The crew of the Six-Thousand Ship consists of those who were born, and those who were made. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike start aching for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Shopping and child-rearing. Our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory. Gradually, the crew members come to see their work in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether they can carry on as before and what it means to be truly living. Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, Ravn s crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving, as exhilarating as it is foreboding. Wracked by all kinds of longing, The Employees probes into what it means to be human, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9781999992880
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9781999992880
Author: Ed Harris
Rating: 5
Review: Cracking book. Thoughtful, contemplative, soulful, elegant and unexpected. Beautiful.
Author: Barry Mulvany
Rating: 2
Review: The basic premise is that of a series of employee interviews after an incident aboard a spaceship set sometime in the next century. You gradually learn that there are human and humanoid interviews though it can be very difficult to tell the difference in some cases. Honestly I'm not sure what the point of this was, if there was one. Apparently it was based on a modern art installation that the writer was involved in. Half the 'interviews' were only a couple of lines long and I'm not sure what purpose they served. The story was basically non existent. Yes there is some commentary on what makes us human, the rise of corporations, and how people are treated as objects within them, but I didn't come across anything new here. There was supposed to be some dark humour involved here but if there was it passed me by in my daze of non-interest. This is a translated novella so fair play to the translator on what must have been a difficult job. The writing is good but just not my sort of thing. If you're going to write a 'literary' novel there must be some sort of story to keep me interested. Some people love language for language's sake and that's fair enough but it's not for me.
