Book Review: The Employees: a workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn

Posted on December 24, 2024 at 6:30 am by Gene Ambaum

The Employees: a workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn. Translated by Martin Aitken. New Directions, 2023. 9780811234825. 144pp.

I love short novels by poets, and I saw this one on many Staff Picks shelves in independent bookstores before finally picking it up. The cover is striking, the book is unapologetically full of white space, and every statement in it made me feel like I was working to solve a well-thought-out puzzle.

The book is a series of numbered statements, most a page or shorter, that are not always presented in order. Some are missing. Each is one side of an interview with unnamed human and humanoid (manufactured human) crew members of a spacecraft named Six Thousand Ship, which has arrived at another planet, New Discovery. The crew brought aboard several objects that have strange properties, which have become the center of attention of many of the crew. Tensions rise between the humans and non-humans, and it feels like conflict is coming. It’s hard to accept that all of the statements are factual, or that they’re intended to be taken as such; as a whole, they create a sense of what’s happening on the ship and to the crew.

It’s a brilliant way to put together the story. I found I wasn’t able to read more than six pages a night because I had to sit with them and think about their implications; the book took much longer to read than it otherwise would have based on its relatively short page count.