About the Book
If the job market hadn't been so bleak during that long, humid summer, Josephine might have been discouraged from taking the administrative position in a windowless building in a remote part of town.
As the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings - the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls, her boss has terrible breath, and there are cockroaches in the bath of her sublet. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread.
Both chilling and poignant, this novel asks the biggest questions about marriage and fidelity, birth and death. Helen Phillips twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder - luminous and new.
About the Author :
Helen Phillips is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, the Italo Calvino Prize and more. She is the author of the widely acclaimed The Beautiful Bureaucrat. Her debut collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a notable book by The Story Prize. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, and The New York Times. An assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.
Review :
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
There is a grim power to this novel... A fascinating and gruelling portrait of extreme capitalism and the degradation of ordinary lives
Irresistible...breathtaking and wondrous
Atmospheric... claustrophobic... enjoyably absurdist
Assured and ingenious
Brilliantly weird and wonderful dystopian book
Poignant, witty and surreal by turns
Riveting... thrillerlike... Ultimately, The Beautiful Bureaucrat succeeds because it isn't afraid to ask the deepest questions
A satisfying parable of love and life, death and birth, and the travails of transposed numbers. The Beautiful Bureaucrat reads like a thriller
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
The Beautiful Bureaucrat has the compulsive quality of a mystery and the furious urgency of a fever dream. I picked it up and read it everywhere: on the subway, over breakfast, in bed when I should have been sleeping, at work when I should have been working. It will coax you into its world with the crystalline precision of its prose, so full of heart and strangeness it might even crawl into your own dreams and find you there
In the bleak hallways of bureaucracy, Helen Phillips explores what it means to make a life one's own. The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a page-turning mystery, a love story and a revelation
This debut novel will have the power and readability to stay in the mind a mighty long time
Strange, compelling novella in which Phillips manages to out-Kafka Kafka
The Beautiful Bureaucrat very much reminded me of Angela Carter's gothic fairy tales... Darkly ambiguous, it's hard not to find yourself sucked into Helen Phillips' dystopian world and, less than 200 pages long, I challenge you not to devour it in one sitting
Deliberately blends the unsettling with the mundane... Gripping and well-executed
A short fabulist novel that takes the mundane reality of being a twenty-something pencil pusher in a post-crash economy and tuns it into an eerie, unpredictable parallel reality with an element of playing God... absolutely brilliant ending
I thoroughly enjoyed this dystopian read and it keeps playing over in my mind, just who pulls the strings in our lives and how much self-control do we have over our days? The book won't give you all the answers, but where would the fun be in that?!
A perfect "off the beaten track" holiday book, both readable and entertaining
For those looking for something a bit different to spice their summer reading
Wholly original and utterly preposterous and entirely compelling
Chilling... the perfect summer page-turner
Kafka would love The Beautiful Bureaucrat... It's a surprising revelation of a book from an uncompromising author as unique as she is talented
A joyride... a very weird, very beautiful, very honest book about the surreal business of working in a city, living in a fertile and dying body, and loving another mortal...While it may have DNA in common with other urban work and life and love stories, with Kafka and Shirley Jackson and Haruki Murakami and the Coen brothers, it really is a new species of tale... Readers follow Josephine on a tightrope walk over the abyss, where the stakes are total, and the prose is exuberant and taut, dire and playful
Equal parts mystery, thriller, and existential inquiry... The Beautiful Bureaucrat asks uneasy questions about work and life, love and power, and where the whole enterprise of one's own small life is swiftly headed
Part dystopian fantasy, part thriller, part giddy literary-nerd wordplay, Helen Phillips' The Beautiful Bureaucrat is both a page-turner and a novel rich in evocative, starkly philosophical language... eerie, stomach-dropping... this novel ultimately proves both clever and impossible to put down
A bewitching parable
An addictive, uncanny experience... Her prose is exact, at once ominous and droll, and her pacing is perfect. As she probes the mysteries of marriage and mortality, choice and chance, freedom and fate, her pages command close focus - and fly by very fast
Mesmerizing... the perfect kind of strange to keep your brain twisted into knots during a flight (think Kafka or Calvino), and the kind of thrilling that'll have you on edge until you've run out of pages to turn. You'll devour this one before wheels-down on the tarmac
Uncanny and Kafkaesque... By turns, the novel is goofily funny, creepy and unsettling, life-affirming and sweet, deeply thoughtful and pointedly critical of modern workplace culture...A strange, yet unsettlingly resonant, fable that melds mystery, sci-fi, romance and satire to chillingly skewer the modern workplace yet somehow leave us reaffirmed in our humanity
