This morning I finished Olga Ravn's The Employees, which I had just picked up a couple days earlier. Partially, this is because it's a very short novel, but also it's a testament to how good it is. Janet and I are members of this local unofficial book club, and I've chosen The Employees for my first turn for heading up the discussion. Our first two novels were by Ursula Le Guin, so we're sort of stuck in this science fiction theme, but even considering that I'd happily have chose Ravn's novel. It oddly reads like Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, which is probably one reason why I was organically drawn to it. I told a couple of friends of mine that it was one part science fiction, one part commentary on corporate culture and productivity, and one part reflection on what it means to be human. It's a series of anonymous "reports" from humans and humanoids on this spaceship carrying strange objects. It's obvious that the spaceship is being shutdown, and everything starts to awry pretty dramatically, although you really need to fill it all in yourself. Here are three examples, in order, from late in the book:
STATEMENT 172
There are people outside in the corridor waiting their turn. We don't car eif you've got ulterior motives now, it no longer seems relevant. We want to confess, and you're going to be our confessional. We want to write our testament, and you're going to be our notaries. We want to say goodbye, and you're going to be our next of kin. It's all happened so quickly. I sleep all the time. I was there in the lab at January 01, one of the first ceremonies. I saw them hatch out of the pods. It filled me with wonder and joy, I applauded vigorously, and my coworkers around me did the same. I don't think they can be blamed for anything. They're trying to shape their own destinies, just as any human would. Everyone's fighting for their own survival, you can't old that against them. It's the way of nature. I'm wondering what you're feeling? How are you coping? Are you going to be all right? Do you know what's going to happen to the objects after we're gone?
STATEMENT 174
You can't say I absconded from the lab, because at that time we were allowed to go out on our own. I came out of one of the first pods, but certainly I may have gone further than I knew they were comfortable with. I couldn't stop myself. I'd reached an area I hadn't seen before, a woodland stretching out in one direction, gentle hills rolling beneath a brilliant white sky in the other. I was walking at such a pace that I was sweating. There wasn't a person or anything similar in sight for miles around, and as I climbed one of the hills and looked out over the woods, the ducks suddenly came flying in arrow formation from beyond the trees and passed above my head. They were quacking loudly as they flew, and I breathed in deeply. I stored that landscape inside me forever. The only thing I think about now is that day. The day I experienced something that wasn't part of the program. The day when everything was mine alone.
STATEMENT 175
it felt good to kill a human. I regret that it's caused such an uproar among the crew, and I'm sorry too for the dismayed looks on your faces, however much you're trying to hide them. I'm a pomegranate ripe with moist seeds, each seed a killing I'm going to carry out at some future time. When I have no more seeds inside me, when there's nothing left but flesh, I want to meet the man who made me. These are my conditions.
All of these reports are told to some vague bureaucracy, sort of like the HR that we've all grown to accept and hate. Highly recommended.
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