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Book Reviewed by:A young wife's new job in an enigmatic organization pits her against the unfeeling machinations of the universe in this inventive and compulsively page-turning first novel
In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database. After a long period of joblessness, she's not inclined to question her fortune, but as the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings - the office's scarred pinkish walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread.
As other strange events build to a crescendo, the haunting truth about Josephine's work begins to take shape in her mind, even as something powerful is gathering its own form within her. She realizes that in order to save those she holds most dear, she must penetrate an institution whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond. Both chilling and poignant, The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a novel of rare restraint and imagination. With it, Helen Phillips enters the company of Murakami, Bender, and Atwood as she twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder-luminous and new.
Author Helen Phillips introduces her book, The Beautiful Bureaucrat in the video below:
ONE
The person who interviewed her had no face. Under other circumstances—if the job market hadn't been so bleak for so long, if the summer hadn't been so glum and muggy—this might have discouraged Josephine from stepping through the door of that office in the first place. But as things were, her initial thought was: Oh, perfect, the interviewer's appearance probably deterred other applicants!
The illusion of facelessness was, of course, almost immediately explicable: The interviewer's skin bore the same grayish tint as the wall behind, the eyes were obscured by a pair of highly reflective glasses, the fluorescence flattened the features assembled above the genderless gray suit.
Still, the impression lingered.
Josephine placed her résumé on the oversize metal desk and smoothed the skirt of her humble but tidy brown suit. The interviewer held a bottle of Wite-Out, with which he (or she?) gestured her toward a plastic chair.
The lips, dry and ...
Overall, my impression was that Phillips wants us to begin reading The Beautiful Bureaucrat with a glimmer of hope, but she then moves us through various levels of quiet desperation with splashes of optimism, all as the action becomes increasingly unsettling. To do this, Phillips builds the stress and increases the pace of the narrative throughout this short novel, until it reaches a perfectly formed climax at the end of the book. This makes for a very exciting, page-turning read, with a surprisingly inscrutable conclusion, which I'm still pondering!..continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Davida Chazan).
Jenny Offill
The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a thrillingly original debut, formally inventive and emotionally complex. Helen Phillips is one of the most exciting young writers working today, and I envy those who get to discover her work here for the first time. Joshua Ferris
A satisfying parable of love and life, death and birth, and the travails of transposed numbers. The Beautiful Bureaucrat reads like a thriller. Ursula K. Le Guin
Told with the light touch of a Calvino and the warm heart of a Saramago, this brief fable-novel is funny, sad, scary, and beautiful. I love it.
Because I was not familiar with Helen Phillips, I did a little research. One review of The Beautiful Bureaucrat pointed me to the Huffington Post's 18 Brilliant Books You Won't Want To Miss This Summer. The early review there said "A little bit of Kafka, a little bit of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' – intriguing." I didn't know "The Yellow Wallpaper", so I searched and found the late-19th century short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. After reading this powerful story, which I highly recommend, my immediate conclusion was that while there are some similarities between the two stories, there are large differences that shouldn't be overlooked.
The most obvious overlap is that both Josephine (one of the main characters in The Beautiful ...
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