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The Beautiful BureaucratIntroduction of the ebook: The Beautiful Bureaucrat
Đánh giá : 3.23 /5 (sao)
A young wife’s new job in an enigmatic organization pits her against the unfeeling machinations of the universe in this inventive and compulsively page-turning first novel
In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database. After a long period of joblessness, she’s not A young wife’s new job in an enigmatic organization pits her against the unfeeling machinations of the universe in this inventive and compulsively page-turning first novel
In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database. After a long period of joblessness, she’s not inclined to question her fortune, but as the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings – the office’s scarred pinkish walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread.
As other strange events build to a crescendo, the haunting truth about Josephine’s work begins to take shape in her mind, even as something powerful is gathering its own form within her. She realizes that in order to save those she holds most dear, she must penetrate an institution whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond. Both chilling and poignant, The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a novel of rare restraint and imagination. With it, Helen Phillips enters the company of Murakami, Bender, and Atwood as she twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder-luminous and new. …more
Review ebook The Beautiful Bureaucrat
to pull off a book like this successfully, it needs to either be very strong in concept or very strong in character, and i don’t think this book did either particularly well. it’s not that you can’t hang a book on a series of striking images, but you can’t do that and also make me like it.
as far as the concept goes; i’ve read variations of this theme in many different works from kafka and orwell and melville in the “work is soul-killing and bureaucracy surreal” aspect to jonathan carroll in thi to pull off a book like this successfully, it needs to either be very strong in concept or very strong in character, and i don’t think this book did either particularly well. it’s not that you can’t hang a book on a series of striking images, but you can’t do that and also make me like it.
as far as the concept goes; i’ve read variations of this theme in many different works from kafka and orwell and melville in the “work is soul-killing and bureaucracy surreal” aspect to jonathan carroll in this book’s big reveal. if i hadn’t encountered it before, maybe my mind would have been more blown, but one does not listen to leonard cohen and then get super-impressed by ryan adams.
and the characters – i don’t need to like the characters, but i need them to have character. this was too slippery. joseph has no defining characteristics to speak of, which makes the love story element between joseph and josephine hard to care about, even if you aren’t already annoyed with their matchy names.
i was enjoying the wordplay element of this book, because i am someone whose brain naturally anagrams words like i’m constantly playing a solo round of boggle. but THEN i got irritated when it became clear that the only reason it existed at all in the book was to pull of this clunky little fizzle of a zinger that made me wince.
How had she never noticed?
how indeed, schindler??
this review is much crankier than i’d intended going into it. i did not hate this book. i liked bunches of the writing while i was reading it, but flipping through it again now, months later, all i’m seeing is the stuff i didn’t like. maybe because i’m older now, and so naturally more cranky, or maybe it is because i am myself now unemployed, and so am resentful of the workplace novel in general.
who can say??
luckily for you, this got a starred review in kirkus, called out in huffpost’s most anticipated books of summer, and it’s one of the “big” books at BEA.
so i am definitely the one who is wrong here. which is super. rupes. purse. reups. persu. usper.
come to my blog! …more
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