| Personal Days is amusingly spare, yet soon becomes something darker, aspiring perhaps to the unblinking horror of Joseph Heller’s corporate schlub epic Something Happened
The List
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Ever wondered what your boss does all day?Or if there is a higher – perhaps an existential – significance to Microsoft Word malfunctions?
This astonishing debut is a scathingly funny look at a group of office workers who have no idea what the unnamed corporation they work for actually does.When it looks like the company may be taken over, fear of redundancy unleashes a deliciously Kafkaesque plot full of the tedium and mistrust of corporate life and the backstabbing bitchiness of our survival-of-the-fittest instincts.
We meet Pru, the ex–grad student–turned–spreadsheet drone; Laars, the hysteric whose work anxiety follows him into his tooth-grinding dreams; and Jonah, the secret striver who must pick his allegiance. Assailed from all sides, Park's idiosyncratic cast of characters battle paranoia, boredom and the complexities of the lunch break as each struggles to figure out who among them is trying to bring the company down - and why.
Rich with Orwellian doublespeak, filled with sabotage and romance and capturing the relentless monotony and paranoia of office life with uncanny precision, Personal Days is a novel for anyone who's ever worked in an office and wondered, 'Where does the time go? Where does life go? And whose banana is in the fridge?'
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| A comic and creepy debut novel…Park transforms the banal into the eerie
New Yorker
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| Anyone missing Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came To The End should pick up this novel
Esquire
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| As much a novel of pitch-perfect comic vignettes of working life, Personal Days is the ideal book to read under the table during the next staff training seminar. Park has strayed into Ricky Gervais’ territory and may soon be its king
Observer
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| Chilling, compulsive, and hilarious
Elle, 'Read of the Month'
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| Park’s wry look at lives ruled by unreliable computers and bad coffee speaks volumes about the choices we make in the name of ambition
The Times
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| Probably the funniest novel of office life since Joseph’s Heller’s Something Happened…a lot more fun than Franz (Kafka) ever was…a must-read
Daily Mail
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| The narrative, a DeLillo-like, pellet - sized series of vignettes, rings true in its evocation of the paranoid weirdness of office life
Arena
More
Information
Vintage • Modern fiction • Previous
ISBN: 0099520583
Publication date: 07/05/2009 • 256 pages • B format • EAN: 9780099520580 |
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