#59 The Employees, by Olga Ravn
Booker Prize : Shortlisted for the International Booker 2021 Plot Time and Place : Distant future, aboard a spaceship Opening sentence : "It's not hard to clean them." Plot summary : The crew of the Six-Thousand Ship consists of humans and humanoids. When the ship takes on board a number of objects from a strange new planet, the crew find themselves becoming deeply attached to them. The book consists of a series of short testimonies from the spaceship's employees. Review : This was very original, with beautiful, almost poetic, writing. The descriptions are very visual and sensory (the author writes a lot about what you can hear, smell, touch and taste). Interesting food for thought: what can be classified as human, what it means to be human, critique of a life governed by work, corporativism, capitalism. This book contains a number of different voices, and it's hard to distinguish which are human and which are humanoid, which makes unde...