Olga Ravn - The Employees (Penguin Books, 2020) ****

"The Employees" is a relatively unique novel. It describes a future situation, in which a few hundred statements from employees, both human and humanoid, are collected to assess the problems of production, the efficiency of workflows, and the possible remedies in the context of objects they are observing on a planet far away from ours. Through these statements, some very short, and some more extensive, we are introduced to a strange science-fiction of a dystopian future. Danish author Olga Ravn said she was inspired by the exhibition "Consumed Future Spewed Up as Present" by visual artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund. 

"STATEMENT 054  

It's easy talking to you. It feels like whatever I say is right. I speak and you write down what I say. You smile at me. I think you all look really good. I get the feeling that while you're noting things down you're also drawing me. The bio-draperies are stringy: the third and the sixth are wet, the first and fourth are shades of blue, while those from 10 to 14 are all the same colour, which changes with the ship's cycle. The second and ninth bio-draperies are red, and a wind blows through them. Some days they sway gently, other times they flap like mad. These fluc­tuations in the wind follow neither the ship's cycle nor, as far as I can make out, any other logic, at least none that we know of as yet. The fifth bio-drapery is silver, not silver silver, but a kind of transparent, glimmering chiffon, though of course it's not chiffon at all, but bio-tissue. This one, the fifth bio-drapery, is definitely the friendliest of the draperies, whereas the one next to it, the sixth bio-drapery, can't be said to express any form of personality at all and yet is the one the workers touch the least, it seems to be made out of the deepest darkness and has very little materiality at all. The eighth bio-drapery bears the closest resemblance to something  that could be familiar to us, having the same quality and appearance, even the same smell, as chocolate-coloured corduroy, a pleasant and at the same time faintly con­templative bio-drapery. We call it the Grandfather Drape. Although hardly anyone in our section ever had a grand­father, we still know the concept. It's not a difficult concept to grasp" (p.45)

Reading all these "statements" one after the other - without sequence or logic - becomes a kind of hypnotic reading experience, with lots of repetitions - obviously all statements are about the same topic - and new angles of approach. The statements all seem to assume a common knowledge of the context and the objects, which only gradually unfold for the mystified reader, and mostly they don't, resulting in uncanny feeling of total alienation. That is one of the main qualities of Ravn's writing: the coherent language of familiar words that obfuscate the world described instead of illuminating it.