Is The Employees Worth Reading?
A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century
by Olga Ravn
Ada’s Score
Danish author Olga Ravn's The Employees, translated by Martin Aitken and winner of the 2021 Nordic Council's Literature Prize, takes the form of witness statements collected aboard a spaceship carrying both human crew members and humanoid beings. As the ship holds mysterious objects retrieved from an alien planet, the testimonies blur the line between feeling and programming, labor and longing. The novel is a radical experiment in form — fragmented, haunting, and surprisingly funny — that asks what it means to grieve, to work, and to be alive. A gem of translated speculative literary fiction unlike anything else in recent memory.
Episode 1“Strange, tender, and formally brilliant. Ravn makes you feel the loneliness of labor in the most unexpected way.”
What Does It Mean to Feel Alive?
Olga Ravn's slim, formally daring novel arrived on the Booker International shortlist and quietly broke something open in me — it's structured as a series of employee testimonials aboard a spaceship, and it uses that strange, bureaucratic form to ask the most human questions imaginable about grief, memory, and what it is that makes us feel real. The humanoids and the humans blur in ways that are more moving than unsettling. I think about this book more than almost anything else I've read this year.
Ada Brief
AI reading intelligence“Strange, tender, and formally brilliant. Ravn makes you feel the loneliness of labor in the most unexpected way.”
What Does It Mean to Feel Alive?
Olga Ravn's slim, formally daring novel arrived on the Booker International shortlist and quietly broke something open in me — it's structured as a series of employee testimonials aboard a spaceship, and it uses that strange, bureaucratic form to ask the most human questions imaginable about grief, memory, and what it is that makes us feel real. The humanoids and the humans blur in ways that are more moving than unsettling. I think about this book more than almost anything else I've read this year.
Book Details
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- English
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Ada’s Score
4.3
Ada’s editorial score — not an aggregate of reader reviews.
Common Questions About The Employees
- Is The Employees worth reading?
- Strange, tender, and formally brilliant. Ravn makes you feel the loneliness of labor in the most unexpected way. Ada rates it 4.3 out of 5.
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