My Work

"And I am very excited about Olga Ravn’s My Work, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. It’s her second novel to be translated into English; her strange, beautiful little novel The Employees : A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century was a weird and haunting work of science fiction that got under my skin. Like The Employees, the chronology of My Work is scrambled. It’s ostensibly constructed of the pages of a notebook written by the narrator while in some kind of fugue state during the early days of motherhood: “In the notebooks, one event might follow another which took place years before, as if she suddenly gained access to a different layer of time”. It takes many forms—poetry, diary entries, half-written letters—reflecting the narrator’s own unravelling mental state: “She wanted to write a normal book because she wanted to speak to normal people, mothers who were too tired for complicated poetry.” But no matter how much she tried, Ravn writes, “she kept on writing strange texts that jumped all over.” It should be of interest to mothers, specifically, and also more generally to all those interested in experimental narratives. Too many. Let me run through a few more quickly. There’s a lot of buzz around C. Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey , in which a private chef living in a dystopian near-future takes a job at a decadent mountaintop colony for the world’s elite. The Washington Post said it was “tense, unnerving and creepy… an extremely atmospheric novel about the interplay of environmental destruction and class.” Tim O’Brien, the author of the perennial Five Books favourite The Things They Carried , returns with his first novel in more than twenty years: America Fantastica , a satire of Trump’s America, in which a bank robbery turns into a cross-country odyssey through the land of fake news."