Fotografía de autor

Sean Adams (4)

Autor de The Heap: A Novel

Para otros autores llamados Sean Adams, ver la página de desambiguación.

2+ Obras 237 Miembros 26 Reseñas 1 Preferidas

Obras de Sean Adams

The Heap: A Novel (2020) 150 copias

Obras relacionadas

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 25 (2008) — Contribuidor — 9 copias

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Género
male
Educación
Bennington College

Miembros

Reseñas

A modest tongue-in-cheek comedy that satirizes dead end jobs, officious supervisors clinging to their scrap of authority, insular scientific research communities, and perhaps, it can be said, the literature of unnamable and ancient existential dread embodied in my consciousness by HP Lovecraft.

A large research institute in a polar region has been abandoned and its scientists extricated - save for one mysterious presence. Sent in by the corporate board is a three person team of caretakers who are given weekly tasks, communicated by helicopter drop. These tasks include: opening all the doors to check for appropriate door opening volume. Sitting in all the chairs and making reasonable movements in them to check for stability. Placing golf balls on all tables to check for levelness. Etc.

Hart, the supervisor, treats these tasks with the utmost seriousness and conscientiousness. He is also quite keen to assert his small amount of authority over the other two. A source of humor, but: people generally want to find meaning in their work and avoid the feeling of alienation from their labor, as difficult as this may be in many categories of employment in modern society. It is hard not to feel empathy with him, with each of them, when his construction of meaning is punctured by seeing it through the eyes of an outsider (the remaining scientist):
I feel suddenly embarrassed. The efficiency with which we’ve arranged the chairs, sat upon the chairs, and shifted our weight upon the chairs - a system of which, moments ago, I’d felt exceedingly proud - suddenly seems so stupid, so trivial. These tasks feel crucial, because all involved treat them as such. But Gilroy is not a part of that system, and his continued presence recasts everything. They’re just chairs, and we’re just sitting in them. That is my job this week: I sit, professionally.


The caretaking team has been warned to never leave the building, as strange effects have been discovered to happen to people who do. Outside is a flat landscape of pure white snow in all directions. But then something is seen from a window, that had not been there before. What is it? Where did it come from? Is it stationary or moving? Is it interfering with the building’s electricity? Is it affecting their minds and their sanity?

Well, the answer here is definitively not Lovecraftian. Alas! The book winds up its humorous satire of modern work through use of an extraordinary setting that, in the end, is just another example of corporate interest at work. No ancient horror, just a Board of Directors. Best treated by modern lampoon.
… (más)
 
Denunciada
lelandleslie | 4 reseñas más. | Feb 24, 2024 |
This is a weird little novel. Three workers at the Northern Institute, a fictional research institution set in a snowbound, cold region, carry out a series of apparently endless, monotonous maintenance tasks. Hart, the seniormost, agonizes about his lack of management skills, taking refuge in a series of corporate superhero novels, in which the hero solves dramatic conflicts through personnel management techniques. Cline, a significantly more competent worker, is tormented by a mysterious object that appears in the snow outside, one day, and tries unsuccessfully to get everyone else to care about it, even while Hart feels threatened by her competence. Gibbs does as he's told. Every week, their boss, Kay, sends a series of tasks - open and close all the doors to check them, place golf balls on tables to make sure they are flat, and so on. As the thing in the snow slowly consumes their attention, they fall behind on their tasks.

The book is clearly intended to be a satire of the workplace, with Beckettian undertones (as Beckett said in Waiting for Godot, "Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful."). As satires go, it's heavy-handed and unsubtle. The author could have chosen to make the point, instead of dropping it on the reader's head like an anvil, but we increasingly live in the sort of world where the obvious is valorised, and the complex regarded as necessarily elitist. And so here we are.
… (más)
½
 
Denunciada
rv1988 | 4 reseñas más. | Dec 12, 2023 |
 
Denunciada
DDtheV | 4 reseñas más. | Jul 31, 2023 |
Esta reseña ha sido escrita por los Primeros Reseñadores de LibraryThing.
So not my book, stopped reading. Could not get access to the story, or the writing.
 
Denunciada
andreas.wpv | 20 reseñas más. | Mar 15, 2023 |

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Obras
2
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1
Miembros
237
Popularidad
#95,614
Valoración
½ 3.5
Reseñas
26
ISBNs
46
Idiomas
1
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