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Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. I keep telling my friends to read this book when they complain about their jobs. It made me laugh and I got a kick out the first person plural narration (which, NERD ALERT, made me think of the Borg). But this is not a LOLs book, it's a first novel by an ambitious guy with an MFA. It tries to get deep, which I thought made it more interesting than it would've been if it'd just been jokey. Still the first part, "You don't know what's in my heart," was hilarious. Here's what I wrote about this read in 2009: "Life in the office during the dot.com bust economic downtown; almost surreal to read in 2009 in the midst of the Great Recession. A lot a pettiness and silliness in that ad agency, and a little humanity as the featured partner declines with breast cancer." Second reading: I'm feeling that achy-love feeling that comes when you've turned the last page of a really good book. What really struck me this time around was the quality of the writing, how everything is so well said and purposeful and just right. It's something that I notice a lot more as I get older, an author's use of language and style, and I have no tolerance for flabby meandering writing. Reader, this book is sharp and on point. Highly recommend. First reading: Feels kind of like the movie "Office Space", but better. Seriously. The book starts off less like a novel and more like a collection of great anecdotes your friend is sharing during happy hour. This was a little unexpected for me, but it only took about a chapter to get into the flow. About halfway through the story structure becomes more linear and plot-focused. I have to share the following passage because my office just went through the exact same thing with our second floor, and the author totally nailed the feeling: "[Floor:] Fifty-nine was a ghost town. We needed to gather up the payroll staff still occupying a quarter of that floor and find room for them among the rest of us and close down fifty-nine, seal it off like a contamination site. Odds were we were contractually bound to pay rent on that floor through the year, shelling out cash we didn't have for real estate we didn't need. But who knows - maybe we were keeping those abandoned cubicles and offices in hopes of a turnaround. It wasn't always about ledger work at the corporate level. Sometimes, like with real people, it was about faith, hope, and delusion." I really struggled to give this book a rating, but I settled on 4 stars because the narrative voice is so unique and intriguing. It is written in first person, but the collective, so that the story is about Us, but never Me. We never actually meet the narrator, but only the group of personalities he works with at a failing ad agency. The timeline is also interesting, because the narrative is not linear, but sort of zigzags back and forth between daily motions and bigger events and interactions, but I actually managed to keep it all straight, although it could have been a muddle. One review on the cover of the book invokes Office Space, and before I even read that, that was in my mind. A cross between Office Space and The Wolf of Wall Street, without all the decadent debauchery of the latter, and shades of a real-life job hunt situation that is going on close to me right now. It took me about halfway into the book to realize that I hadn't met the narrator, and about the same length of time to decide to finish the book, because it really isn't until about that point that anything really happens. The people and the life depicted here are so excruciatingly ordinary that I found myself wondering again and again why I was reading it, since it is sort of a busman's holiday for any reader who has ever had an office job, or really any job where you spend the day with coworkers. But somehow I got sucked in and kept reading to the end, which is a coda that ties up what storylines did emerge in the second half of the book. On the cover, Stephen King calls this book "hilarious," and to that I say that either Mr. King and I read totally different books or we have totally different senses of humour, because nothing about this book was hilarious. I'm not even sure how I feel right now, but definitely not amused.
It is a brave author who embeds the rationale for writing his novel into the novel itself. But 70 pages into Joshua Ferris’s first novel, set in a white-collar office, we meet Hank Neary, an advertising copywriter writing his first novel, set in a white-collar office. Ferris has the good sense to make Neary’s earnest project seem slightly ridiculous. Neary describes his book as “small and angry.” His co-workers tactfully suggest more appealing topics. He rejects them. “The fact that we spend most of our lives at work, that interests me,” he says. “A small, angry book about work,” his colleagues think. “There was a fun read on the beach.” “Then We Came to the End,” it turns out, is neither small nor angry, but expansive, great-hearted and acidly funny. It is set at the turn of the current century, when the implosion of the dot-com economy is claiming collateral victims down the fluorescent-paneled halls of a Chicago advertising firm. Clients are fleeing, projects are drying up and management is chucking human ballast from the listing corporate balloon. The layoffs come piecemeal, without warning and — in keeping with good, brutal, heinie-covering legal practice — with no rationale as to why any person was let go. . . . AuszeichnungenPrestigeträchtige AuswahlenBemerkenswerte Listen
Fiction.
Literature.
Humor (Fiction.)
HTML:This wickedly funny, big-hearted novel about life in the office signals the arrival of a gloriously talented writer. The characters in Then We Came to the End cope with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, secret romance, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. By day they compete for the best office furniture left behind and try to make sense of the mysterious pro-bono ad campaign that is their only remaining "work.". Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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This is a fun little story that is extremely character driven. There wasn’t much of a point to the story, but I think the point was that there is no point to office stories. ( )