CBR18 BINGO: Craft for The Employees (unconventional/fragmented/experimental approach) and Summer for The City and Its Uncertain Walls
The Employees by Olga Ravn
So, I read this. Uh . . . And then I did some of this:
It’s hard to know what to make of this. It’s confusing, although I do think I understood the general gist of it. To be honest, though, for a while I only knew what was happening because the book blurb tells you, and it felt like the book blurb made some of the connections for me, which I’m not sure how I feel about.
This is a science fiction novella set sometime in the future, when humans and human-created humanoid beings are working together on a spaceship and interacting with objects that have been obtained from a planet that the spaceship is orbiting. The book is told almost entirely through brief, partial statements from the crew about their experiences as they are interviewed by a committee to determine how the objects have affected them. The statements are out of order, you mostly can’t tell which ones are by the same person, and you can’t always tell which ones are by humans vs humanoids.
Still, I was able to come away with a couple of themes, the main one seeming to be about humanity: who is a human? What makes someone human, and what does it take to be considered a human?
- “Is it a question of name? Could I be a human if you called me one?” (pg 38)
- “I may have been made, but now I’m making myself.” (pg 76)
Secondary to that, although possibly also subsuming it, is that institutions don’t really care if you’re human, only whether and how you do your job. Hurray for capitalism.
This was a very short book. About 126 pages in my Kindle, and nearly all of the statements from the employees are well under a page. But I still felt like it could have been cut down a bit and occasionally got a little bored.
I have no idea what to rate this. I neither liked nor really disliked it, but I can’t say I didn’t care about it. It did make me think, and I liked some of what it had to say about humanity. But ultimately, I don’t think it’s going to stick with me beyond a feeling of “well, that was a weird book I read.”
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami
Full disclosure: I DNF’d this at 61%.
This was a buddy read with a friend, and we’re now 2 for 2 for books that promise something in the book blurb and don’t deliver (the first being Palaver.) The nameless narrator starts off as teenager in love with a girl. She tells him about an unnamed city where her “real” self is, the self that is with the narrator being kind of a shadow self. They partially co-create this world. Then one day the girl just disappears. The book blurb makes it sound like the narrator spends his life trying to find her. That’s not really what happens, and it’s broken into two parts (or maybe three; I don’t know what happened after I stopped reading) that are loosely related to each other.
I got bored. I was interested in the beginning, reading about the relationship and a little bit about the city. Then I started to lose interest at the beginning of part 2. My interest picked up when I realized something weird seemed to be going on, but eventually the weirdness was answered and I lost interest. A large part of the problem was that although the book is from a first person POV, we don’t get enough interiority of the narrator. He’s mostly recounting events, and we know relatively little about him. If you’re going to give me a character-driven book, you need to give me more character work. The plot had to do the work of maintaining my interest and didn’t succeed at that enough to keep me going. I DNF’d because I had started skimming, waiting for it to pull me back in, and I didn’t like that. If I’m going to read a book, I want to read the book.
