Reviews with content warning for Death - The Employees

Reviews tagging 'Death'

The Employees by Olga Ravn

21 reviews

displacedcactus's review against another edition

dark emotional mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

This is a short book told in a sort of epistolary format -- everything is excerpts from employee interviews. It does a good job of being unsettling without being really graphic, so it could be a great read if you're looking for something Halloween-season-appropriate that probably won't give you nightmares. It's kind of like if Annihilation and Finna/Defekt had a baby. Each excerpt is short, most are only a paragraph and the longest were barely over a page long on my tablet, so it's really easy to read if you only have a little time, too. That said, the format means that while you get multiple snippets from some employees interspersed throughout, there's no real way to latch on to the characters. If it had been any longer, it would have been difficult to go along for the ride with the format, in my opinion.

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stardustdreamer's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

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netthauser's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character

4.0

Poetic and fragmented. I love the disjointed and unreliable statements and piecing things together was a thought exercise. The book has some thoughts about humanity and posthumanism.

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vessel's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

It's very clear from early on that the author is a poet. The book is built from interviews with a number of anonymous characters, and these interviews very much read like prose poems.
With a purposely murky and unclear timeline outlined by unreliable narrator after unreliable narrator, the story leaves the reader to fill in the gaps left out by the characters' confessions. It could be a frustrating reading experience for those looking for clearly defined characters and a classic plot arc with clearly delineated beats, but The Employees is more of a poetic exploration of the meaning of "humanity", and definitely more of a mood piece. It left me with a profound sense of sadness, and many lines I still think about regularly.

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